Pastor John Wright

Saturday night I listened to the story of a man from Cambodia speak of his experience with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Rounded up at midnight, he hid his identity as it would have led to his execution. Rightfully suspected of ties to the earlier government, soldiers chained him by foot with other suspect persons. They undertook days of forced march into the countryside and then forced labor to clear ground for an agricultural commune, fed thin rice porridge twice a day. Under interrogation, one member of his chain gain died in chains; others' pasts were confirmed and they were executed. My friend kept consistent with the same story -- he was merely a poor peasant, one of those for whom the Khmer Rouge undertook their revolution. Authorities eventually took off the chains after six months; he eventually escaped to the Phlippines through Thailand.

I share this story because we have to understand that the care for the poor, the care to stop the ravages of global capitalism, stood behind the Khmer Rouge. It was a revolution to establish an agrarian, egalitarian community that would eliminate poverty and class distinctions. Yet the revolutionaries were not nearly revolutionary enough. The mirrored the same commitment of life that upholds capitalism: the material realm is the ultimate realm of life. There is no thing outside our life now. Life becomes expendable to establish a more "just" realm of history now. The person becomes unimportant in light of the distribution of wealth in society. As our society treats the life death of the poor without significance, providing programs of incineration with ashes delivered to the land fill for the poor deceased, the Khmer Rouge treated the life of the "rich" without significance for the sake of the poor. All there is is the material remains of this world. Therefore there really is nothing -- just disposable material objects that must be moved around for the economic advancement of the nation-state's chosen clients. There is no end to life outside itself; therefore life itself does not matter.

Our Scripture readings this weekend remind us the irony that to save the material realm, to be for the material realm, we must understand that we have a supernatural end that is outside history, beyond the material realm in God through Christ. Material reality, wealth bears signficance only when its use finds its end beyond itself in God. We see this most fully in the truest human, Jesus Christ, who was also fully divine in one person.

Ecclesiastes 1:12-14;2:1-7,11, 18-23

The Eccelesiastes passages aren't exactly the stuff that that Prayer of Jabez is made out of. What does the Teacher find in this realm of life considered in and of itself? What is it about life and its struggles considered strictly within the material realm that find it as vanity? What good does the accumulation of wealth, wisdom, and prestige in itself do for the "Teacher"?

Colossians 3:5--17

The Colossians passages seems to differentiate between "earthly" desires versus found in Christ as members of specific and catholic (universal) congregations. What is the difference between them? What must the earthly be put to death? The passage presupposes a massive shift of life as a result of baptism -- the references to stripping, and being clothed with a new self is baptismal language -- check out Galatians 3:26-29. What changes when we realize that "Christ is all and in all"? What is the process that we must undergo from the earthly to the life as Israel, God's chosen ones. How do we sustain the harmony within the congregation that the passage requires? What role does "whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" play in this? Why?

Luke 12:13-21

How does Jesus respond to the cry from the crowd to establish justice to settle a familial conflict over material goods? Why? Why does life not consist in the abundance of possessions? How do the previous passages, with this one, help us to understand what it is to be rich toward God?

Maybe it might be good to discuss what it is to be "rich toward God" as persons and as a congregation, how we can move beyond the "left"/"right" nihilism of our age as we life with and for the poor in Christ. I'm appending a letter to the editor that I wrote to the San Diego Union Tribune in response to a "Just Fix It" Column that they ran last Friday to try and show how the poor gets practically treated as nothing in our capitalistic society. How as persons and a congregation can we show that there is an alternative to the way persons are treated in our culture? What sort of inner transformation must we each undergo?

Friday July 27's "Just Fix It" column deeply saddened me. Those most endangered by a threat of fire in the canyon were the inhabitants of the canyon themselves. They are not "homeless people," for they had a home in the canyon. They are human beings forced into a ravine by lack of an available home elsewhere. Your "fix it" turned them into exactly what you saw -- homeless people. Rather than talk with them, listen to their story, seek a genuine fix for all concerned, you dismissed them as participants in the situation. The language used in the article reduced these persons to a "problem" that the mayor's office could "clean up" like dog excrement on a sidewalk in the Gas Lamp District.

What much of San Diego calls homeless people are persons without access to what the law calls "real property" because of their lack of economic resources. Without "real property" to store their personal goods, Cal Trans and others wait for persons to leave their personal property upon public land and then "clean up" -- a euphenism for governmental theft of personal property. Those without access to "real property" face constant harrassment from city, state, and federal officials for their "crime" of lack of access to "real property." It becomes criminal to be poor and visible, and now even poor and invisible, hidden off in a canyon or to the side of an off-ramp.

The poor, those without real property, are not "a problem" -- the problem is the wealthy, those who have resources, but use them for luxurious comfort rather than giving alms to the poor. If the Union Tribune wished to fix something, perhaps it could begin by reminding its readers that the poor, even those without real property, are human beings, created in the image of God. Any "fix" must acknowledge that one's humanity is not based upon one's real property, but by the gift of life itself.

Rev. Dr. John W. Wright
Senior Pastor, English Speaking Congregation
Church of the Nazarene in San Diego

Professor of Theology and Christian Scripture
Point Loma Nazarene University