Generation Trust
Exodus 17:1-7
March 23, 2014
Back in the 90s when the X
Files was the trendy thing on TV, I suggested that Generation X-Files would
be a decent name for the cohort coming of age at that point because it seemed
like their motto was, “trust no one.” It turns out I was one cohort too soon on
that, as the recent Pew Research Center’s polling of the so-called millennial
generation shows. They really don’t trust anyone.
If you think about it for even a moment their lack of trust
makes perfect sense. After all, every single major social institution has
failed them: the schools are broken, and they know if first hand; the economy
has utterly failed them; the church is a mess; prior generations have
completely befouled the environment and now the climate, itself, is failing
them; and as for politics – well, that is an obvious complete and utter
failure.
The result of such widespread, systemic failure? Trust no
one.
In a piece headed, “In No One We Trust,”[1]
Joseph Steiglitz wrote last week in the New
York Times, “We do not
measure trust in our national income accounts, but investments in trust are no
less important than those in human capital or machines.” As he notes, “Without trust, there can
be no harmony, nor can there be a strong economy.”
Lack of trust is certainly no way to build a commonwealth or
a community, and it’s also exactly what Moses faced in the wilderness of Sin.
The people are complaining because they’re thirsty, tired, lost and feeling
betrayed by their leader.
“Why did you bring us out here to the wilderness of Sin to
let us die? We were better off in Egypt!”
Moses, for his part, is afraid the people are going to stone
him, so he feels betrayed by God who called him into leadership, and he
complains to God: “what am I going to do with these people?” Later on in the
saga, in fact, Moses will say to God, “what I am supposed to do with YOUR
people, the ones YOU brought out of bondage” – as if Moses had nothing at all
to do with the whole situation.
I find that back and forth amusing, but I do not find it at
all surprising. After all, when trust is absent responsibility will be hard to
find as well.
You don’t have to look very far to see that this is exactly
what’s going on in our own culture. We have a deep and growing mistrust of
leaders, and even more than that, a broad and general mistrust of the
institutions they lead.
And no one wants to take any responsibility for the
situation. In fact, it seems that we mostly just want to blame the entire
situation – persistent high unemployment, massive and growing inequality,
widespread institutional dysfunction – on the “invisible hand of the market,”
as if none of the all-too-visible hands in the various cookie jars of wealth
and power on Wall Street or Capital Hill had anything to do with any of it.
Well, I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.
The Exodus saga describes not only the liberation of an
oppressed people, but also their emergence as a distinctive people in their own
right. That they emerged from bondage, from oppression, from massive social and
economic inequality is never far from the consciousness of those who framed
their founding principles as a people. Thus the legal framework for their
emerging society as described in Exodus and the subsequent books of the Torah
insists throughout on particular care and concern for foreigners, aliens and
the poor, not only in their equal standing before the law but also in specific
economic policies. These concerns are not afterthoughts, but are always front
and center.
Oh, to be sure, there is certainly stuff in these ancient
texts that makes absolutely no sense to us, nor does it pertain to our time and
situation. Ignoring the instruction to kill the witches will not make us
unbiblical. The challenge, in all times and situations, for a people of faith
whose roots sink deep into ancient soil, is to do well the work of discerning
the vast difference between eternal truth and ancient Middle East world view.
That work is hard, but it is not impossible. Look for the
through-lines. Interpret according to the rule of love. Or, as Jesus put it in
Luke, “be compassionate as your holy father is compassionate.”
One of the consistent through-lines of Judeo-Christian
scripture is concern for the poor, and condemnation of unjust and unequal
social and economic situations.
I like to believe that’s because the people who – inspired
by the Holy Spirit – led God’s people and crafted these ancient texts were
faithful and compassionate folks. On the other hand, scripture is pretty honest
about them. They were a mixed lot that included scoundrels, harlots, thieves,
and murderers along with liberators, leaders, prophets, and priests. Oh, and
some of them lived on both sides of that grey line.
Still, I like to believe that they were mostly faithful and
compassionate, that they found the capacity to trust God and build trust among
God’s people. Moses was faithful and compassionate, to be sure, but he was also
utterly practical.
In the next phase of the story that follows immediately
after our text for today, Moses seeks his father-in-law’s advice to develop a
practical system for the administration of justice. Seems he’s figured out that
the people are going to keep complaining, so he needs a system to hear the
complaints, judge them, and respond.
In other words, he takes concrete personal and systemic
actions designed to build and maintain trust.
Alas, as Stieglitz observed last week in the Times:
Unfortunately, however, trust is becoming yet another casualty
of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens,
the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people
lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1
percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our
institutions and our way of life is eroding.
Pitting people’s relative interests against each other in a
zero-sum game is no way to build a commonwealth or a community. In fact, the
growing gap between the haves and have nots is an affront to God. It is sinful.
When we did a Bible study that included this passage back in
January, someone asked the quite logical 20th-century,
English-speaking reader’s question about the Wilderness of Sin from which the
whole congregation of Israelites journeyed by stages. “Is it,” the reader asks,
“a wilderness of separation from God, a place of moral failing, a desert of
sinfulness?
Well, no. It’s just an ancient place name with a fairly
uninteresting etymology related to lunar gods worshipped by some ancients in
the area.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but the Wilderness of
Sin is just the name of a place the Israelites found themselves in, not the
naming of any mark of shame or sinfulness that might have put them there.
No, the only connection to us that question might have is
this: like the Wilderness of Sin, poverty is also just the name of a situation
that people find themselves in, it is not sinfulness, it is not another name
for moral failure.
The most distressing aspect of what passes these days for
current national conversation about poverty is how easily political and
economic and media elites embrace the rhetoric of attaching moral failure to
poverty. Such rhetoric has the wonderful advantage of getting the well-off off
the hook for any responsibility for those who are less well-off.
After all, if it’s their own damn fault, their laziness,
their lack of work ethic that put them in poverty, then why should the rest of
us help … or even care?
Well, to begin with, the causal relationship between moral
failure and poverty is just about exactly like the relationship between the
Wilderness of Sin and sinfulness. It’s simply way more complicated than that.
But even if that were not the case – even if there were a
direct, causal relationship between moral choice and economic circumstance –
the only way we can respond to the poor if we want to keep calling ourselves
followers of Jesus is with concern, care, and compassion. Not only that, but we
must also, if we want to keep calling ourselves followers of Jesus, push in the
public square for policies that put the needs of the poor at the top of the
agenda rather than out of the picture altogether.
Oh, we don’t have to do this, as citizens of the commonwealth
or of these United States. We can promote and pursue policies that protect the
economic elites with the conviction that a rising tide lifts all boats, with a
firm belief in the free market, and with trust that wealth of the nation
ensures the security of all her citizens no matter how that wealth winds up
being distributed.
We can believe all that – and promote and pursue policies
that flow logically from such beliefs. But we cannot believe all that, and
believe this, too. We cannot believe all that, and call ourselves followers of
Jesus.
Or, as Stephen Colbert put it so succinctly:
“If this is going to be a
Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that
Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He
commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then
admit that we just don't want to do it.”
A bit later on in the great saga of the birth of Israel as
God’s covenant people, Joshua will succeed Moses as leader of the people. He will
be faced with similar choices, and will ultimately declare: “as for me and my
house, we will serve the Lord.”
I pray for the wisdom and the courage to be able to make the
same declaration, for it is only when we can do so, that we will be able to
restore a generation of trust. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
1:04 PM
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