Quotable: Give or Take

"Foreign Aid is the process by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries."

- Peter Bauer

Found on Blessed Economist, a blog to which my mom alerted me this afternoon. Worth reading.

However, regarding today's post on said blog: I'm not sure I entirely agree with his theology of work and vocation, as Kingdom is a matter of citizenship and we are never off-duty for that. We don't punch out of our identity as children of God when we go on the clock for our paying gigs. Christians would do well to remember that. Too often we allow The Economy to be the primary gauge of the worth of our work and the worth of our personhood. We evaluate ourselves and our neighbors by its idolatrous standards of success and failure. We denigrate and underpay the most wholesome and necessary of labor - growing and preparing food, child-raising, keeping a home, caring for the sick, making clothes - while glorifying activities of questionable usefulness and integrity.

I would argue that how one conducts one's paid employment always has Kingdom implications. Seldom do profitability and competitiveness coexist peaceably with truth, wisdom, and compassion. As long as we live in a broken world, compromise is inevitable and there is always need for grace. Grace, however, is not license to carelessness. With due acknowledgement of systemic evil and the pervasiveness of moral ambiguity involved in 'just doing my job' and 'just getting by,' "The Invisible Hand Made Me Do It" does not make for a very good ethic. What we sell (our time and talent, the 'information' we propagate, the upstream and downstream physical effects of our 'products') and what we buy (where it came from, who made it, what was done to them, what was done to the earth that is ours on loan from our children) are matters of love and justice.

"Eternal significance" is a meaningless abstraction if spiritual work has no impact on our conduct in 'temporary' things. Incarnation happened for a reason. Word made Flesh is what Christianity is all about. Eternal life starts now. Creation is the medium through which God chose (and still chooses) to manifest God's love. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving the thirsty something to drink, visiting the sick and the prisoners, and caring for orphans and widows are all work of the highest "eternal significance." Kingdom ethics is not a matter of "permanent difference." It's a matter of compassion, integrity, and embodied witness. The Resurrection is the permanent difference. The world is already saved. The vocation of every Christian is to live the reconciliation and restoration for which we wait in hope. Our treatment of the Creation reflects our attitude towards the Creator. Our treatment of 'the least of these' reflects our knowledge of Christ.

If our economic activity results in wasting food (and worse, wasting land--setting our neighbors and children up to be hungry), polluting or hoarding water, making ourselves and other people sick (through malnutrition, poisoning, and stress), orphaning children and widowing women, reducing the fullness of the earth to disposable 'raw materials' (thereby making refugees of all nations and depriving millions of the opportunity for dignified wholesome work to provide for themselves and their families), how can we say that what we are doing is just a job that pays the bills and has little to no "eternal significance"?

I do second Blessed Economist's observations that vocation need not equal employment and that parish ministry is not the only 'calling'. The church is called to be the Body of Christ and to minister to the world as such. Pastors should be there to instruct and encourage us in our collective and particular vocations. Churchgoers abuse pastors when they outsource all of the church's (Body's!) functions to the paid clergy and demand that a handful of appointed leaders minister to them. Religion as such is just one more lifeless consumer commodity. Church, properly understood, is not merely a set of programs we attend and (sometimes) financially underwrite. It is who we are.