In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer. Another excels in making the frames and covers of their little huts or moveable houses. He is accustomed to be of use in this way to his neighbours, who reward him in the same manner with cattle and with venison, till at last he finds it his interest to dedicate himself entirely to this employment, and to become a sort of house-carpenter. In the same manner a third becomes a smith or a brazier; a fourth, a tanner or dresser of hides or skins, the principal part of the clothing of savages. And thus the certainty of being able to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he may have occasion for, encourages every man to apply himself to a particular occupation, and to cultivate and bring to perfection whatever talent of genius he may possess for that particular species of business (Wealth of Nations I.2.2).

For Smith, this perfectly “natural” process is both the origin of the division of labour and reveals the natural propensity for human beings to “truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” (I.2.1). This distinguishes us from the animals, for who ever saw a dog offer a bone as a fair and deliberate exchange with another dog? Smith goes on:

When the division of labour has been once thoroughly established, it is but a very small part of a man’s wants which the produce of his own labour can supply. He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society (I.4.2).

We’re all capitalists at heart, it seems, for we are natural merchants, constantly exchanging things with one another. Smith can be a little long-winded, so let me summarise the remainder of this myth. Once our primitives have all busied themselves with their natural propensity to produce and “truck”, they soon find that others may have enough of whatever is on offer. I might have made plenty of toe ticklers, but now that the tribe or village is full of toe ticklers, I have nowhere to hawk my wares and get what I want. The solution: stockpile items that I am sure everyone will want – salt, sugar, dried cod, dressed leather, sex toys …. So when I want something, I can simply use these items in exchange. At last, one of us happens upon the idea of using precious metals, weighed, then standardized, minted and so on. Eventually, in our wisdom, we come up with credit, or virtual money.

In various forms, this myth has been repeated countless times in economics textbooks, in online forums and in classes on economics. For economists, it is “the most important story ever told” (Graeber, Debt, p. 24). Its narrative from a natural division of labour, through to barter, money and then, in our sophisticated modern era, banking and credit, has become so pervasive that it is regarded as common sense. The problem, as David Graeber points out, is that it is pure fantasy-land (pp. 21-41). Where is this mythical village? Among North American Indians? Asian pastoral nomads? African tribes, Pacific Islanders, Australian aborigines? A small Scottish town of shopkeepers? Often in the same myth it moves from one place to the other. But the simple fact is that it never existed. No such village has ever been found, nor will it be. As Graeber shows in some detail, contrary to the barter-money-credit sequence of the myth, credit would seem to have preceded money, and barter is a side product, happening only in places that have already come to know money. On that last point, the common “return to barter” account during economically difficult times – in the early Middle Ages or in Russia and eastern Europe in the 1990s or today in Greece and other countries severely affected by the rolling economic crisis that began in 2008 – takes place only within the framework of monetarized economies.

Graeber expresses some frustration at the sheer pervasiveness of Adam Smith’s myth, working overtime to show that it is not original to Smith and that the evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against it. One source of his frustration is that a crucial founding myth is not empirically falsifiable. No amounts of “facts” will dent the power of the myth, as Sorel showed so well many years ago (Reflections on Violence). Instead, it is more worthwhile to ask what truth the myth expresses, given that a myth is always split between fiction and a deeper and not always pleasant truth (part of its mixed heritage).

That truth is that Smith, in resuscitating and refining the myth, had a distinct agenda: he wanted to create a new being, “the economy.” The definite article is crucial, for “the” economy was to be distinct entity, with its own rules, its own dynamic that is distinct from politics, the state, and above all religion. What better way to do so than reconstruct a myth in which “the” economy arose as a natural expression of human nature? But why did he wish to create such a being? A new field of study needed an object to study, the discipline of economics. And in order to ensure that this discipline was not bereft of an object of study, “the economy” was created.

It is worth noting that Smith was really completing a process that began with the earlier work of Hobbes and Locke from the seventeenth century. They provide an explicit but incomplete path from the Bible and theology to economics, at times seeking continuities and at others offering a narrative of movement beyond the Bible. Smith’s achievement was to bring to process to a definitive break: economics as both discipline and reality was no longer tied to theology. Or rather, it was sublimated as a moral tension between compassion and self-interest.

In other words, the myth of origin is crucial to the very formation of the discipline of what we would now call classical economics. To dump the myth would mean to dismantle the discipline as now understood. I would prefer another formulation: economics would turn out to be inseparable from social relations, politics, and religion.

I have lost track of the number of people in the more than 25 years of ordained ministry who have declared to me that they don’t believe that there should be politics in the church.  Sometimes they mean by this that current cultural issues should not be discussed, while at other times they mean that administering the church should be accomplished without taking sides on issues like the color of the carpet or whether or not the church will do contemporary worship, which people somehow think magically take care of themselves.

The first chapter of Acts is always the text I use to reply to such complaints, because it contains an account of the first congregational meeting in church history, which has both elements of secular and ecclesial politics.  As for the former, the late Judas Iscariot was a paid informant of the occupying government, which used the information he provided them to bring about the execution of Jesus on charges of sedition.  You can’t get any more political than that–his name stirs the passions just like the name Jeremiah Wright does in today’s politics.  As for the latter, because Judas is now dead, there’s an opening on the church board which they proceed to address, the early church not being able to avoid administering itself any more than could any other group, ancient or modern.

What is most notable, however, about this episode is what is NOT present in it rather than what is.  For one thing, there is no manual or handbook of instructions telling the new community what to do. I am a Presbyterian, and we can’t get along without our Constitution in two volumes that together are three inches thick. To think of not having such a guide of the collected wisdom or best practices of the tradition seems daunting.

Moreover, the early community didn’t even have any instruction from Jesus as to doing the first thing they did, which was to fill the open slot on the board. The symbolism of there needing to be twelve apostles to mirror the twelve tribes of Israel so as to create continuity between the old and new seems clear NOW, with the benefit of hindsight, but who told he community that they needed this symmetry or at what point did these bumblers make such a profound theological assessment?

Lastly, where are the ballots, and the tellers needed to count them?  Shouldn’t that be the way things ought to be decided in the church, fair and square, democratically?  Isn’t it a bit strange, that before there was Tuesday night parish bingo that they were using a game of chance to pick a board member?

The point of this text, as well as with many other texts in Acts, such as the selection of deacons and the acceptance of gentiles is that the community is given the capacity of discernment to chart its course and that there isn’t any way to guarantee the success of it’s life together other than these given means. Notice even the absence of the Bible, the reliance on which is so scrupulously followed in my own Reformed tradition, as the final authority for faith and life, yet is here not even invoked, no doubt partly due to the fact that it doesn’t exist yet as we know it. This is not an argument against the scripture, but rather a reminder that everything the church needs to know or decide about has not always been mentioned in the Bible. This observation is helpful, I believe, in a situation like we have today surrounding the issue of gay marriage, which has been in the press daily for weeks. The Bible neither advocates nor prohibits it. But the church, because it lives in a world where it is being discussed must think about it nonetheless, even in the absence of much biblical direction as to how we should proceed. I raise this, not because I think the lack of discussion in the scripture decides the issue one way or the other, but again, because we need to recall that not every political matter, whether secular or ecclesial, which comes before the church as it struggles to her God’s voice, is going to be answered by citing a Bible verse. But we must, nonetheless, strive as best we can, to listen for God’s call and to follow wherever it takes us.  In this sense Acts, which is called the first “church history” represents more of a paradigm of how to engage in discernment about “what comes next” than it is anything else.

Timothy F. Simpson is an editor of Political Theology. He is a board member of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and is Minister for Worship at the Lake Shore Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, FL, where he also teaches Religious Studies at the University of North Florida.

The strength of the blurred analogy is that it reflects the state of confusion and uncertainty that is often encountered once one takes the risk of entering unknown and unfamiliar territory. Crossing the boundary into other cultures, disciplines, faiths and ways of being creates that sort of “cloud of unknowing” characteristic of the liminal or in-between space, the threshold into a different world. The weakness is that it says nothing about the specifics of the new relationships which then develop. I have in my mind instead the picture of a thicket, a thorny and enveloping growth in which one finds oneself entangled, and from which it is not easy to extract oneself and stand outside. The blurredness may quickly be displaced by a sharp discomfort as one begins to penetrate more deeply into the complex structure of an organic entanglement where one is caught up, but by no means in control. This imagery I derive from such  thinkers as Deleuze and Guattari (in “AThousand Plateaus” amongst other publications); Bruno Latour (“Reassembling the Social”) and Tim Ingold (“Being Alive”). The point of this (and “the point” itself suggests the sharp-edged and uncomfortable nature of this engagement), is that one is then forced into examining the exact nature of the different strands and “lines of flight”, and then to face the challenge of working out or reassembling, how they fit together in this particular situation. So one gets well beyond the generality and therefore the weakness of just saying “it is blurred” and into the specifics and the detail of each individual context.

I could give examples, and I hope that the one I will offer, which is itself very specific to a UK context, will give a “feel” for what I mean. Education in the UK has either been provided by the state or obtained privately by those with the means to do so. The public provision has been seen as the commitment to a welfare state where there should be – in theory- equality of access to a high standard of education and thus some level of equal opportunity. Under successive governments, both New Labour and now the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, there has been a move towards less state-dependent provision of education through what is being called Academy status. Formerly state schools at both Secondary and Primary level are being encouraged to enter this new world and to leave behind the former relationship with Local Authorities who have provided the support services and funding for much that has happened before. This is complicated by the fact that, in the UK, the Church of England in particular, still has a large stake in some of these schools, through their supposedly Christian ethos and the appointment of suitable staff and governors.

What is happening now through the Academy process is effectively a privatisation of a former public service, opening up the education system to businesses and other interested parties to engage with and take over either individual schools or federations of schools. In my context, which is that of small rural schools feeding into a larger Secondary school, it is obvious that no one small school is large enough to become an Academy, hence it is some version of the federation option that is the most viable. This raises a host of difficult challenges and issues for those of us directly involved – I am on the governing body of two of these schools by virtue of being the priest in the area and the fact that they are Voluntary Aided i.e. Church Schools. This is indeed a thicket, a sharp and uncomfortable entanglement that we are now entering, difficult to unravel and see from the outside. I note from within the US context a critique of the influence of commercial values in education in Michael Sandel’s new book “What money can’t buy: the Moral limits of Markets” (Allen Lane, 2012).

Amongst the issues we have to address are the following: the role of the Diocese which appears to be supporting the Academy process (although it claims to be neutral) and appears to see this as an opportunity to strengthen church control or influence in the developing system; the concern that a federation in this area would put together schools from both a church and non-church background and also with very different cultures and clientele, but without any thought as to how this is to work in practice or differences to be contained or resolved; another concern that a commercial or business model of operation could well lead to the closure of the less viable schools (financially or educationally unviable) but which play an important role within their own locality; a governance system which appears to wrest control from the local level and place it in the hands of a more remote and unrepresentative unelected body. There is more, but this is just to offer some sense of the entanglements we now find ourselves in by virtue of a central government policy over which we have no control and which we fear may steamroller us into a situation that nobody locally appears to want. What price for democracy?

It is because we need to engage in the specific detail of each “matter of concern” as Latour would describe it, that we need the language of entanglement to do greater justice to the challenges we face. Where do ethical values, let alone faith-based ones, impinge on these entanglements? Sandel calls for an open debate on which services, goods and social practices are appropriately determined by the market (P202), and whilst this would indeed be an advance, I am not sure it does justice to the complexity of the issue. Latour would argue that critique is not a matter of standing back and taking a critical distance from matters of concern, but rather of becoming more closely entangled with the various strands and issues that are involved. What we need to understand and articulate is that each strand or thorn itself contains certain values or ethical commitments, so ethics is not something to be brought into the discussion “after the event”, but is always already embedded in every matter of concern we encounter. We need to get closer to the “facts of the matter” in order to fully understand what is happening. Therein lies a further development of this approach. It is the language of entanglement that more accurately reflects the complexity of individual situations or matters of concern. What still remains though is the question of how and where particular groups express and take forward their own values within this process. On that issue I prefer to turn to the work of others such as the philosopher Badiou, who has interesting insights into the nature of fidelity, and these resonate, for me, with a faith-based contribution to so many of our public concerns. What I am pursuing then is the notion of entangled fidelities.

In our text today Peter embraces the Gentiles as fellow Christians after he observes them being filled with the Holy Spirit. Earlier Peter had received a vision in which he was commanded to eat things that he considered unclean. Perplexed by the vision, Peter realized its meaning after he was led by the Lord to the house of Cornelius, a Gentile who believed in God. Peter never would have gone inside Cornelius’ home since Jews did not visit with Gentiles, nor enter into their homes. Because of his vision, however, he realized that God was doing a new thing, and he received the Gentiles into the household of faith as brethren.

Sadly, many churches still are estranged from people that they consider “unclean.” While much is made of multiculturalism and racial diversity, the problem of classcism within churches—the discrimination against the lower class at the expense of the upper and middle class—continues to plague American congregations of all cultures. In American society, a society that exalts wealth and individuality above almost all else, the poor and indigent are frowned upon for bad choices and an inconsistent work ethic. Although sociological data may say otherwise, many feel that the poor are to blame for their own condition. Even if others do not blame the poor for their compromised economic position, they seldom desire to be in relationship with the underclass, preferring instead to approach them from a distance through food programs, clothing drives, and other subsidies that keep the barriers between the classes intact. Perhaps the greatest offenders may be the attendees of megachurches who comprise a middle and upper class constituency that exalts wealth, charisma, and success over undesirable traits such as poverty, physical or mental disability, and old age.

While there are several different types of megachurches, the contemporary megachurch is the institution most commonly associated with extensive religious broadcasting, faith based, or prosperity gospel religious teaching, and the iconic celebrity status of their pastors. One of their most distinctive characteristics is that these congregations lionize their pastors as emblems of health, wealth, and charisma, and members identify themselves with the success, fame, and status of their particular pastor. So what becomes of the impoverished members of a congregation? Who has an affinity for them?

In reflecting on the common good of human communities, Alasdair MacIntyre asks, “what difference to moral philosophy would it make, if we were to treat the facts of vulnerability and affliction and the related facts of dependence as central to the human condition?” To extend the scope of MacIntyre’s question, I further add, what difference would it make to our conceptions of and attempts to secure the church’s common good if the church community was to treat vulnerability, poverty, and affliction in this way?

What is needed if we are to be present to the very poor? Beyond food programs, shelters, and clothing drives, members of the community have to learn to enter into meaningful relationships with the poor. This requires what Aquinas calls misericordia, the virtue of taking pity. However, in English, pity is associated with condescension, which does not do this term justice. Rather, the term refers to grief or sorrow over someone else’s distress just insofar as one understands the other’s distress as one’s own. Misericordia is what reorders our desires to meet the needs of the poor for the sake of their need alone, and not because we are engaged in some interminable form of imitation. Misericordia is like the compassion of Jesus, which does not simply heal and restore, but is bodily present in its healing and restoration.

Insofar as many megachurch members do not have intimate and meaningful relationships with other church members, let alone the poor and indigent, expecting the vast majority of these church attendees to develop the virtues of presence and misericordia seems extremely utopian. However, foregrounding this issue accedes to Hauerwas’ proclamation that, “Theology and theologians do little to make the world better. Rather, our craft involves the slow and painful steps of trying to understand better what it means to be a people formed by the story of God.” Hopefully, focusing our attention on the poor will remind us of the dimensions of Christian life which have been hidden by our culture’s preference for such things as power, strength, and intellectual prowess. If the acquisitive desire fostered by capitalism and expressed within the parameters of the megachurch experience is to be reclaimed, it must first be reordered away from our personal desires, and it must be redirected toward others who are destitute and very poor, which realizes the common good. In this way, we can truly experience the joy and unity of Pentecost.

Why is it that people who call themselves Christian may find it next to impossible to talk to other people who call themselves Christian?

Why is it that people who love this country and are grateful for the many freedoms we enjoy may find little common ground with other Americans who likewise love their country and cherish freedom?

And where does this divisiveness, cited by Maine’s Republican senator Olympia Snowe and other retiring senators and members of Congress as their reason for getting out of politics, even come from in a nation some like to call “Christian”?

Well, the answer is that Americans don’t always act Christian when it comes time to make their political decisions. That’s why I wrote Faithful Citizenship, my new book from Patheos Press. If its true that Christians may come to different conclusions about political issues, what can we agree on? I suggest a step back from the precipice, back to Christian first principles. One possibility is Augustine’s Two-Fold Commandment of Love, what Augustine described as the heart of the Christian faith: Love God, Love Your Neighbor. Faithful Citizenship asks, What would a Christian ethic look like that took the Two-Fold Commandment seriously?

It also asks each reader, What would it look like to make our political decisions out of our religious beliefs—instead of attempting to reconcile our faith and decisions we’ve actually made for secular reasons?

To read the book’s first chapter at Patheos and introduce yourself to my thoughts on faithful citizenship, click here.

Emma Goldman once said “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Goldman was speaking of the bourgeoisie democracy that upholds the status quo of US society. Her words have rung true for many of us progressives who voted for President Obama. We have and grown increasingly frustrated as his administration has leaned toward the status quo rather than the oppressed and poor. This week’s lectionary reading tells of a man who was part of the status quo in his society, high in power and authority in Ethiopia, yet God’s Spirit had something else in mind for him, an apostle named Philip.

The narrative in the center of Acts 8 introduces an Ethiopian eunuch who was in charge of the entire treasury of Queen Candace. He traveled to Jerusalem with his slaves to worship at the Temple of YHWH. The text omits any reference to the festival or event he attended. It was traveling back from Jerusalem that Philip meets him, the eunuch is reading a selection from Isaiah 53. Now a few things should catch our attention. First the man is a eunuch, a man who had chopped off his testicles, possibly for an ascetic lifestyle or to have sexual intercourse without getting anyone pregnant. The fascinating thing about the eunuch reading from Isaiah 53 is that if he would have read in a few more chapters, he would have seen that:

“For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”(NRSV Isaiah 56:4-5)

The lyrical symmetry in the text is outstanding. God desires that the eunuchs be brought back into the land of Judah, out of the Exile. These verses come from second Isaiah which was written around 538 BCE calling the people to go back into Judah. In the following verses (6-7) of the same chapter God also desires for the foreigners to be included in Judah. The Ethiopian eunuch meets both of these requirements and is able to travel to Jerusalem to worship God in that holy city for these reasons. The last thing about the unnamed eunuch is his wealth. One gains authority over a treasury for several reasons: one must already be from a rich family, must have connections to power in different sects, and must always abide by the interest of the person’s monies that is being watched. Thus, the Ethiopian eunuch was interested in keeping the status quo in control.

On the flip side, as one reads from the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, the early apostles “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”(NRSV 2:44-45). The Apostle Philip was living in these conditions and God’s Spirit lead him to a person who was economically wealthy. In socio-economic terms, Philip uses a communal proletariat hermeneutic to explain the Scripture about Jesus to the privileged eunuch.  It was then the eunuch who saw the communal water to be washed in.

The story ends with Philip disappearing after they come up out of the water. The eunuch, it says “went along his way rejoicing.” It is up to Christian imagination to picture how the eunuch’s life and practices changed. Did he find Philip’s hermeneutic more convincing than his own? Had stress been emptied from his life and now he can get back to Ethiopia to work for the Queen again? Or did the eunuch give up his privileged life to be a disciple of Jesus living with a community of believers?

Timothy Wotring is a senior Theology Major at Eastern University in Saint David’s, PA. He lives in West Philadelphia and is a member of the Episcopal Church. He keeps a blog (blackflagtheology.com) and is interested in political, liberation, feminist, and post-colonial theologies.

The offer came because I am a commissioner to this summer’s 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA in Pittsburgh where we will be discussing the matter of divestment from particular companies, Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar and Motorola Solutions, who do business with the Israeli Defense Forces in their operations in the West Bank. (The United Methodists voted not to divest from the same three companies earlier today.)

This is the culmination of seven years of attempting to work with the companies and the Israelis to come up with a different solution. Unfortunately, the companies and the politicians seemed to dig in their heels, so ourCommittee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) has recommended that we take this action and add these companies to the list of those in which don’t invest, which already includes tobacco companies and those who make nuclear weapons.

Enter the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who is sponsoring the trip for commissioners. When I spoke to their representative after he extended the invitation via email through my presbytery, I was very clear about my background and commitments, but he assured me that this was no problem, that they welcomed the push back, that it was going to be a candid trip that would explore all sides of the issue and that all they asked was that I give them a chance to share their perspective.  I assured him that I was eager to do this and that if a way could be found that would avoid having to take this action at the GA I would be relieved. I told him, however,  that, as someone whose retirement funds are in these investments, I didn’t want to spend my “golden years” living off of “ill-gotten gain” which violated my conscience, a point which he said he respected. He told me that I would be hearing from the NY office the next day to firm up the arrangements.

But no one ever called to do this. Not the next day nor the next week. It was a full two weeks after the invitation was made, after daily emails and follow-up calls by me to them that I finally spoke to a woman in the NY office who told me that, unfortunately, they didn’t feel that I was the “right kind of person,” that I “didn’t meet criteria,” and that they feared I might “be a disruptive presence” on the trip. In other words, this was a trip designed for commissioners who were already opposed to divestment or who had not yet made up their minds but who might be wooed by being wined and dined on a  trip into a carefully scripted and stage-managed environment. In short, it’s  not going to be a trip on which disagreement is welcomed. So they disinvited me.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me much, given what people are saying to and about Peter Beinart, who is Jewish but whose popularity now approaches that of Yasser Arafat because of his calls for divestment from the West Bank. The American Jewish community seems to be unable to allow the kind of open manifestation of dissent that one sees all over the place in the state of Israel. You can disagree over there, but here, everyone has to stay inside the herd. So how much more difficult is it to talk to the American Jewish community  when one is an outsider, like me, the Presbyterian General Assembly commissioner?  They don’t want to have that conversation–it has to be a monologue. There is their way and that’s all there is to it.  And because of this, the commissioners who apparently ARE the “right kind of people” to go on the trip will not have any credibility when they come back and speak to the assembly about their experiences, given that, from the very outset, this will have been an exercise in indoctrination, not fact-finding.  By allowing people to go with whom they might disagree, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs would have shown strength by their openness and willingness to hear uncomfortable talk.  This is how I felt about them after that first phone call.  Instead, they now look weak, closed-minded and fearful.  I would have thought better of them.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that difference is not inherently liberative. To live alongside people whose faith or ethnicity is different from our own does not necessarily shape the way we think, believe or act. The ‘multi’ in multiculturalism can imply life lived in separate ‘camps’ or along parallel lines rather than in mutually affirming communities. In his ‘Rethinking Multiculturalism’ Bhiku Parekh suggests that communication and dialogue are centrally important if we are to forge genuinely inclusive communities. Perhaps, as Tariq Modood argues, we need to think more in terms of ‘interculturalism’ and less of ‘multiculturalism’, towards what the African-American public intellectual Cornel West calls a ‘cultural politics of difference’ which  he suggests can be, “a strengthening and nurturing endeavour that can forge more solid alliances and coalitions…[between]…people of colour and white progressives.” This multicultural politics of difference demands the kind of inter-faith coalitions exemplified by the emergence of inter-cultural and interreligious broad-based community organizing in Britain over the last twenty years. Such a movement can help to revitalize tired urban theologies that do not understand contemporary diversity. Paul Gilroy, however, cautions against undue optimism. “Multicultural society seems to have been abandoned at birth. Judged unviable and left to fend for itself, its death by neglect is being loudly proclaimed on all sides.” Nevertheless Gilroy describes multiculturalism as “an ethical principle” which can force “nationalisms and bio-social explanations of race and ethnicity into more defensive postures.” Gilroy believes that: “with hybrid culture on our side and postcolonial history at our disposal, antiracism should now move out of its defensive and apologetic postures.”

A cultural politics of difference contradicts government speak about homogenising community cohesion on the one hand and the cultural studies oriented indistinct soup of hybridity on the other. In the context of Christian activism in a diverse city such submergence of difference can appear to pose diversity as a problem to be resolved rather than a rich reflection of the will of a God who creates and rejoices in difference. For decades people from different ethnic backgrounds have loved each other and had children – not ‘mixed’ race but people of dual heritage. A Gospel that revolves around the diverse unity of humanity implicit in Robert Schreiter’s ideas about a ‘new catholicity’ implies dialogical and not hybrid identities. And so the question for people of faith in the 21^st century city is perhaps this – ‘How can our difference be liberative?’ As members of the one body, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 12, our diversity is our strength but only when it is focused on the conviction that we are all made in the image of God – as we are – In the Gospels Jesus enters into the ‘in between’ zone of the ‘third space’ as he is challenged as a result of his xenophobia and then opens himself to learn about love and faith from the Canaanite woman whose faith was so different from his own. Such a Gospel of hospitality and mutuality challenges us to move beyond the binary language of ‘host’ and ‘guest’, ‘stranger’ and ‘neighbour’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ on the one hand and attempts to smooth our diversity away on the other. An intercultural politics of liberative difference that sees our diversity as the in-breaking of the always dynamic and surprising Kingdom of God and offer us the tools to begin to build the ‘good society’ of which Martin Luther King dreamed so long ago…

He who does not work, neither shall he eat.

Let us compare the interpretations of Tony Abbott (a conservative, religious politician in Australia) and Lenin. In a speech from 1999, Abbott opines, ‘Disincentives to work have been recognised at least since the time of St Paul (who said that those who did not work should not eat)’. The speech itself concerned unemployment and the work-for-the-dole programme. For Abbott, of course, those who do not work are those who are at the bottom of the social heap, the unemployed, the riff-raff, the no-hopers. For conservatives like Abbott, they really don’t want to work and must therefore be given incentives to do so, such as cut their benefits or get them to engage in government-designated slave labour, euphemistically called ‘work-for-the-dole’. By contrast, the owners of capital, the multi-billionaires, work hardest of all, for otherwise how would they have become rich?

As for Lenin, it is precisely the rich capitalists, as well as the bourgeoisie who do no work, for they rely upon the labour of others for their obscene profits. During the famine of 1918, brought about not through a shortage of grain but through the destruction of the transport network by the First World War and the White Armies, Lenin addressed a crowd of workers in Petrograd as follows:

The bourgeoisie are disrupting the fixed prices, they are profiteering in grain, they are making a hundred, two hundred and more rubles’ profit on every pood of grain; they are disrupting the grain monopoly and the proper distribution of grain by resorting to bribery and corruption and by deliberately supporting everything tending to destroy the power of the workers, which is endeavouring to put into effect the prime, basic and root principle of socialism: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’. ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ – every toiler understands that. Every worker, every poor and even middle peasant, everybody who has suffered need in his lifetime, everybody who has ever lived by his own labour, is in agreement with this. Nine-tenths of the population of Russia are in agreement with this truth. In this simple, elementary and perfectly obvious truth lies the basis of socialism, the indefeasible source of its strength, the indestructible pledge of its final victory (Collected Works, volume 27, pp. 391-2).

It looks like this biblical text may well be a shibboleth between reactionary and revolutionary approaches to the Bible.

As an afterword: this slogan was plastered throughout cities, towns and villages during the dire situation of the ‘civil’ war (1917-23). The Metropolitan Vvedensky, a left-leaning priest and a leader of the Renovationist Church that sought to work with the communists, comments on this slogan in a debate with Anatoly Lunacharsky:

When you say you are for the principle of work, I remind you of the slogan, ‘he who does not work shall not eat’. I have seen this in a number of different cities on revolutionary posters. I am just upset that there was no reference to the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Thessalonians, from where the slogan is taken.

Roland Boer, on the road in Russia.

Easter 4.  Stones. Green pastures. Fields and shepherds. The texts this week run rich with the kind of pastoral images that challenge the memories or imaginations of an increasingly urban and suburban population. Jesus was not talking about lawn-service neighborhoods in leafy subdivisions and neither the psalmists nor the authors of Acts or the letters of John could have imagined the sprawling populations of huge metropolitan areas. If, as they say, all politics is local, then what can these images of good shepherds and green pastures have to say to us? Before allowing these texts to dislocate us, it is useful to revisit their social locations.

In Acts, the “rulers, elders, and scribes” along with the high priest and priestly family demand of the imprisoned Peter and John an accounting of their power to heal. They ask, in essence, “on whose authority are you doing this?”

Politics is the art of power, of exercising it, of distributing it, of clinging to it. In this text those in positions of power and authority demand an accounting of actions that have happened without the sanction of their power. Healing without a license threatens the power and legitimacy of those who license healers. Though the powerful will almost always claim to exercise their authority for the good of the people – “unlicensed healers are dangerous!” – if the people witness real healing from unauthorized sources the tables get turned.

Peter’s speech points beyond the established religious authorities to the grace of God in Jesus as the legitimating source of his healing power. For a disenfranchised people, Peter points to an alternative source of power. Shepherds were certainly not among the politically powerful of Jesus’ time. The image of the shepherd was likely a conflicted mix of associations some comforting and others threatening.

Virgil envisioned the pastoral scene of those who “lie beneath the spreading beech and practice country songs upon a slender pipe.” John’s Biblically literate community would have heard associations to David, the shepherd king and, no doubt, to the beautiful images of the 23rd Psalm. On the other hand, shepherds were often scruffy, unscrupulous characters who operated on the margins or outside them; literally out beyond the gates of the city and figuratively in so far as they were often accused of grazing their flocks in green pastures they did not actually own.

If the “good shepherd” was not exactly a contradiction in terms, it was certainly a complex and perhaps transgressive figure whose presence in a story could easily serve to call into question traditional patterns of power and authority.
For a disenfranchised people, the good shepherd points toward an alternative source of power.

1 John names the source of the power: the love of God, or, better, the God who is love. Moreover, in its insistence that we “love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action,” 1 John also invites us into the exercise of that power, or, in other words, into politics, and, in particular, into a politics of love.

Still, all of this is couched in terms that can ring distant like a faint echo of a bell rung in a faraway church tower, heard almost as a memory dwelling in the edge of imagination because we are so far away from green pastures, flocks of sheep and the small places called home by those who care for them.

I am particularly mindful of that distance this week having begun it with the incongruous experience of hearing Wendell Berry deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture on the Humanities at the Kennedy Center across the river in Washington. Hearing Berry tell the story of his grandfather’s rural economic hardship in 1907 while seated in the splendor of a great hall a century removed was as jarring and agitating as reading the 23rd Psalm.

Psalm 23 is famous as a song of comfort, and I have certainly read it at hospital bedsides and over graves to remind the sick and the grieving of the loving presence of God through the dark valleys of life and of death. Nevertheless, the psalm agitates me because it points to an alternative source of power, and it demands that I not only attend to that power but also recognize the ways that power seeks to transform those who attend to it.

Berry spoke this week cognizant of his proximity to the seat of the power of the American Empire, and, in particular to the military might through which that power is so often and decisively expressed. As he noted, almost in passing, the most striking success of the corporate industrialism that powers the empire has been “an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.”

But while corporate industrialism – the 20th-century face of so-called free enterprise – with its remarkable efficiencies, particularly in making war, is widely recognized as the source of the power of the American enterprise, the source of the power of that industrialism itself is not nearly so widely considered.

“Corporate industrialism has tended to be, and as its technological and financial power has grown it has tended increasingly to be, indifferent to its sources” Berry said, and he insisted on the reality of an alternative source of power expressed in and through an alternative economy – an economy based not on extractive technologies but, instead, on affection.

Berry acknowledged the risk of, in his words, “making affection the pivot of an argument about economy.”  It’s the same risk that Jesus ran, in his insistence on making love the pivot of an argument about the ordering of not only the household – that original meaning of “economy” – but also of the community, the polis – that original meaning of “politics.”

Berry was offering a lecture on the humanities not a sermon, much less a blog post on the lectionary, so he did not turn to the passages for this week. But he could have cited them well in concluding, as he did, that none of the paths taken by the great American industrial complex of the past one hundred years has been inevitable nor is the same path necessary for us now.

The life of the good shepherd, the assurance of the psalmist, the acts of the apostles and the ethical injunction of 1st John all point toward an alternative source of power and, therefore, to an alternative economic and politic possibility: the possibility that “we do not have to live as if we are alone.”

All scripture citations above are from the New Revised Standard Version.

The text of Wendell Berry’s lecture, “It All Turns On Affection,” is available on the web site of the National Endowment for the Humanities.