A Concrete Example

A couple of days ago one of the Guys told us that when he is given a room for the night he has to invite the others to stay there too, lest he be "an accessory to murder."

Then today in the Morning Office we heard that "like one who kills a son before his father's eyes is the man who offers a sacrifice from the property of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood. To take away a neighbors living is to murder him; to deprive an employee of his wages is to shed blood." (Ecclus. 34.21-22)

Things don't get much more concrete than that.

C

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Book Summary: The Persistence of Poverty

To treat the issue of the poor we have a variety of perspectives from which to begin. The central starting point for our purposes is, of course, the church. Along the way, though, in order to be the church we also have to know the positions that are not of the church. That means digesting a wide ranging diet of thought on the poor. My first contribution to this diversity is a summary of a recent book (2007) by Charles Karelis entitled The Persistence of Poverty.



Karelis's book seeks to address the rationality that underlies the persistence of poverty, or why poor people seem to do things repeatedly that will logically prolong their poverty (e.g., neglecting to save a portion of their small income). When the homeless spend a day's panhandling returns on a glut of alcohol rather than, say, a bus ticket to look for a job, or perhaps saving it toward a rent deposit on an apartment, their actions seem to thwart their own best interests. It just seems irrational. This, in essence, is one of the central puzzles of poverty. Are poor people generally less rational people as their behavior seems to suggest? If so, do irrational people wind up poor, or do poor people wind up irrational?

The standard theoretical accounts of this behavior fall into two categories, according to Karelis. There are those theories which explicitly label the behavior irrational, arising from psychological dysfunction, and there are those theories that claim that the behavior is rational by citing external opportunity constraints (there just aren't any available jobs), atypical preferences (the poor aren't dysfunctional, just atypical), or perverse consequences of public policy. In contrast, Karelis argues that all of these theories rely on a common mistake accepted from classical economic theory: the law of diminishing marginal utility.

The law of diminishing marginal utility states that as consumption of a good increases by constant amounts, the consumer's positive experience that the consumer receives from the consumption increases at a slower rate than the consumption. That is to say that if you sit down to eat a delicious looking chocolate cake, the first bite of cake gives you more satisfaction than the last bite, say the one that finishes off the entire cake at that one sitting. Or, for perhaps a more intuitive example, the luck of finding $10 will be significant to a homeless man (who has no dollars) and perhaps not worth the trouble of bending over to pick up the bill off the street for a millionaire.

By this same logic, the increase in utility afforded by earning the first few dollars by employment should be so great for the impoverished that very little could deter their seeking a job. You can see how the theory suggests that poor people are irrational. That minimum wage job could so drastically alter their basic quality of life, and yet they can't be bothered to look for a job, or even perhaps show up on time once they have one. Strange.

Karelis answer to this conundrum is three-part. First, he explicitly defines poverty in a subjective manner, "The essence of poverty is lacking the material resources to meet basic needs." The "basic needs" may be relativized based on culture, and even perhaps class. That is, someone attempting to live among upper-class circles may feel that they lack basic needs in order to be a part of the group if they do not have access to certain goods that would be seen as luxury items by those of a lower class. In this way Karelis definition of poverty is strongly psychological, and it is debatable whether it is specific enough to be useful in the end.

Having defined poverty based on the perceived lack of resources to meet basic needs, the second part of his argument is that the theory of diminishing marginal utility represents an equivocation on "utility". Karelis makes the point that nearly all economic theorists have been members of the well-to-do classes. The result is that they failed to distinguish between goods that are pleasers and goods that are relievers. For Karelis it matters whether you are seeking relief from a lack of resources or whether you are consuming to increase pleasure. His central image is that of having multiple painful bee stings on one's arm and desiring the use of a powerful salve that relieves the pain of individual stings. The salve comes in units of "a dab" which is enough to relieve exactly one sting. Karelis points out that the psychological benefit of having one dab applied when one has, say, 10 stings on the arm is tiny since one will still be in a great deal of pain. Contrast this with the psychological effect (for one not in any pain) of eating one bite of a 10-bite piece of cake. The utility of the first unit of salve for the man with 10 bee stings is clearly less than the utility gained by the first bite of cake.

Karelis uses this image to argue that for those people perceiving a lack of resources to meet basic needs (enough salve to stop the pain), the marginal utility actually increases with consumption. Returning to the salve example, while the first dab of salve produces very little relief, the relief offered by the 10th dab of salve (the one that relieves the final sting) is tremendous by comparison. Thus, from the first dab to the 10th the marginal utility actually increases. From that point on the marginal utility of additional dabs must decrease rapidly.

So, for the math savvy out there, Karelis argues that the utility curve has an inflection point that is determined by the level of consumption at which the agent perceives that he/she is meeting basic needs. Below this point marginal utility increases with consumption, while above this point marginal utility decreases with consumption.

What does this mean for behavior? Remember that we are still operating within conventional economic theory. We have just tweaked the theory a bit. So, rational behavior should still be that which maximizes utility. First, consider the case of pleasing goods, i.e., the case of a relatively wealthy consumer. Since marginal utility decreases with consumption for the wealthy it makes sense to try to keep consumption as smooth as possible. Why is this? The fundamental insight is that if marginal utility decreases with consumption, then the utility you gained from spending the next to last dollar was more satisfying than spending the last dollar. The net result is that it is more painful to lose 50% of your consumptive potential than it is satisfying to gain 50% more. This is essentially the rationale behind saving. It allows one to consume at a consistent level without, say, being quite poor every once in a while. The decreases in utility caused by being quite poor (say in a transition between jobs) would outweigh the utility gained from a larger consumption during the well-off periods. Balancing these out results in the optimal saving strategy.

Now consider the case of a poor person who, on Karelis's theory, is not meeting basic needs and thus experiences increasing marginal utility with consumption. The result is that smooth consumption does not maximize utility. Because marginal utility increases, one has every incentive to splurge one day and be very poor the next. To again use the salve analogy. If I am "earning" 7 dabs of salve on odd days and 3 dabs on even days which are used to treat my 10 stings, it is more rational to save dabs every odd day and splurge by using all 10 dabs available on the even days so that half the time I am in no pain and half the time I have 10 painful stings. The idea is that the pain caused by the 10th sting relative to the other nine is very small, and similarly that the psychological difference in pain between 5 stings and 10 stings is less than the difference between five stings and no stings. The result is that it is irrational to consume a constant rate of dabs, say 5 dabs per day, since that results in a relatively low utility since I am in pain every day.

It is hopefully becoming clear how this starts to make sense of the behavior of the poor. In the case of job hunting, if the difficulties of job hunting, or even having a job, are likely to smooth out the pain of being poor, so that I am not ever destitute but am not meeting basic needs either, then the rational thing to do is to break the smoothness of the consumption to produce high highs and low lows. The unfortunate result is rather erratic behavior, often involving narcotics, failure to show up to work on time, etc. In short, the uneven consumption that maximizes utility also makes it difficult to keep a job, save for the future, etc.

This is Karelis argument in significantly abbreviated form. He goes into much more detail to show how this theory fits the actual data concerning the behavior of the poor, as well as avoiding some rather silly pathologies of other accounts (such as suggesting that all poor people are irrational).

In the last two chapters he applies this theory to specific policies addressing poverty such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC has been a success despite what appear to be competing incentives put in place by the policy. The two counteracting effects are called the Income Effect and the Substitution Effect. The Income Effect states that if you offer a higher hourly wage, the worker will have less incentive to work an additional hour since his needs are being met by fewer hours. The result is as incentive to work fewer hours and take more leisure time. The substitution effect states that if you offer a higher hourly wage the cost of leisure time then also increases (because each leisure hour is an hour you could have been working for this higher wage), and one may decide that it costs too much to take leisure time and thus decide to work additional hours. On the conventional theory, these two effects work against each other. However, on Karelis account the increasing marginal utility reverses the income effect since the marginal utility of those extra hours is actually larger than the marginal utility of the previous hours worked (at least up to the point that the worker is meeting basic needs). The result is that what are competing economic incentives for the well-off are actually reinforcing effects for the impoverished. Karelis therefore endorses the EITC as a doubly good policy for combating poverty.

That is enough to get across the premise of Karelis book. The question is whether it has any implications that are of use for us. It likely at least helps understand the behavior of the poor by putting it into a framework that may show us what sorts of responses to expect from the poor. In addition, I think that it suggests that large gifts to the poor are in order. That is, while small gifts of money here and there are likely to be used for alcoholic escapism, to voluntarily raise the standard of living of a poor person to a level that meets basic needs through a simple gift might be enough to get that person "back on their feet" by altering the incentives (as diminishing marginal utility takes effect and encourages consumptive smoothing). In effect, the poor person has more to lose by engaging in erratic consumption than before.

So, my first suggestion is that Karelis argument results in a justification for much more radical generosity to the poor if one is to discourage self-destructive behavior.

Secondly, Karelis makes the off-handed remark that the perception of basic needs being met may also include non-material needs, such as inclusion in society. For obvious reasons he does not dwell on this remark. For our purposes, however, it is significant. It suggests, in the same way as the first point above, that a radical inclusion into a community may be integral to breaking the persistence of poverty.

Finally, Karelis does not explore in depth the communal aspect of utility maximization. There is an argument embedded in his picture for maximizing the collective utility, whereby clearly if I am meeting my basic needs then a marginal increase in my own consumption would produce far less community utility than would my gift to an impoverished person to use that marginal resource (since their marginal utility is increasing with consumption). The result is that in a resource-scarce environment it is inefficient/irrational for any one to use more than is necessary to meet basic needs. It also means that it is more efficient for nearly everyone to be provided basic needs with a few who are truly destitute than for everyone to be just short of meeting basic needs.

In summary, Karelis gives us a psychological framework based on conventional microeconomic theorizing for understanding what behavior to expect from the poor and how it is rational. His aim is to understand the rationale for the behaviors of the impoverished that seem to promote the persistence of poverty. His recasting of the conventional framework also suggests, on my reading, that in order to combat the self-destructive tendencies of poverty our gift giving should be more generous rather than less --such that we should provide for the basic needs of our neighbors (this is not, apparently, to "enable" as, ironically, the giving of lesser gifts would be)-- and that the gifts we give should include membership in a community where social needs may be provided. These conclusions are not explicitly the ones that he was looking for (he is more concerned with evaluating government policy), but it suggests that a Christian anthropology, and the economics it requires, is rational even by social scientific standards (as one would expect since the behaviors of real people are the data).

JR

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William James on Poverty

When we bravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime (war) be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. What we need to discover in social realm is the moral equivalent of war; I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking... May not voluntarily accepted poverty be the strenuous life without the need of crushing weaker peoples? One wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage and the spiritual reforms which our time stands as most in need of. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with moneymaking street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not what we have, the right to casting away our life at any moment irresponsibly. In short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were clever scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and of doing manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes…our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our face; yet while we lived we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help us to set free our generation.

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Dorothy Day on Peter Maurin

Time-worthy passages from PETER MAURIN: Apostle to the World
By Dorothy Day.

[Peter] used to say that when he appeared before God, God would say to him, "Where are the others?” So the problem was how to reach them, how to influence them. "By being what you wanted the other fellow to be,” Peter said simply in one of his little essays. (48)

"By the feast of our baptism we are partakers of divine life," he would remind us. "Grace is like the blood of Christ in our veins. Our relationship with each other is closer than that of blood." The Christ life was in us, yes, but not as it was in Peter. (48) To be partakers of the divine life is not enough. We must grow in it. Those of us who have worked with Peter these past fifteen years [ed. note, 1932-1947] feel that Peter is one of those who have grown in divine life, while we have been but babes. (48-9) ...



The Catholic Worker believes in creating a new society within the shell of the old...with a philosophy that is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that if looks like new. (50)

We were to reach them by doing the works of mercy which meant feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, sheltering the harborless, and so on. We were to do this by being poor ourselves, giving everything we had; then others would give, too. Voluntary poverty and the works of mercy were the things [Peter] stressed above all. This was the core of his message. It had such appeal that it inspired us to action-action which certainly kept us busy and got us into all kinds of trouble besides. (50)

As Marx and Engels put it: "Each man works according to his ability and receives according to his need." Or as Paul put it, "Let your abundance supply their want." Men are beginning to think of the annual wages in the unions, but not the family wage. Usually it is "equal pay for equal work."

Peter used to say, “John Smith puts on his hat and goes to church on Sunday, and John Smith goes to hell for what he does on Monday.” We participate in the sin of others; we are all helping to make the kind of world that makes for war. (58)

When we talk of the works of mercy, we usually think of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. Some grow disillusioned with this less romantic work. But we have had to do them all, even burying dead. One does not necessarily have to establish, run, or live in a House of Hospitality, as Peter named the hospices we have running around the country, in order to practice the works of mercy. The early Fathers of the Church said that every house should have a Christ room. A college graduate hitchhiking across the country during the Depression said that the only place he found hospitality was among the Negroes the Mexicans. Every house should have a Christ room. The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. If your brother comes to you hungry you say, "Go, be thou filled," what kind of hospitality is that? It is no use turning people away to an agency, to the city or the state or Catholic Charities. It is you yourself who must perform the works of mercy. Perhaps you can only give she price of a meal, or a bed…and often you can only hope that it will be spent for that. Often you can literally take off a garment, if it only be a scarf, and warm your shivering brother. But personally, at a personal sacrifice, these were the ways, Peter used to insist, to combat the growing tendency on the part of the state to take over. This is the job that Our Lord
gave us to do. "Inasmuch as yon have done it unto one of the least of brethren, you have done it unto me." (59-60)

We do not understand ourselves. (60)

Peter said, "The men of action don't think, and the men who think, don't act." “Workers should be scholars and scholars workers."

Peter loved to fling out catchy slogans, and then watch the fur fly. "It makes for clarification of thought," said Peter happily. “The truth must be restated every twenty years," Peter kept quoting Ibsen.

Peter was always getting back to St. Francis of Assisi.

There are those who spoke of his anarchistic nature, because of his refusal to enter into political controversy, his refusal to use worldly means to change the social order. He does not refuse to use material means, physical means, secular means. But the means of expediency that men have turned to for so many ages, he disdains. He is no diplomat, no politician. He has so thoroughly discouraged in his followers the use of political means that he has been termed an anarchist by many (79).

To give up superfluous possession! Peter had no income so he did not worry about income taxes. He used those things he needed, in the realm of clothing and food, "as though he used them not." He had no worries about style, fit, or fashion. He ate what was put before him, and if he preferred anything he preferred vegetable sews to meat, a hot drink to a cold, olive oil to butter.

Saint Francis desired that men should work with their hands. Peter enjoyed manual labor. We must use the whole man,” says Peter, "so that we may be holy men." (80)

If [Christianity] fails, it is glorious in its failure, the failure of the cross. Peter was patient. Looking at things as he did in the light of history, taking the long view, he was content to play his part, to live by his principles and wait. As Pascal said, "It is not ours to see the triumph of the truth but to fight in its behalf." Peter has emphasized most steadily that famous quote of Chesterton, "Christianity has not failed, it has been found difficult and left untried."

Peter talked about asceticism as a neglected study. To him, religion and asceticism go together. It is inconceivable for instance that one can truly be "religious" and not embrace voluntary poverty (94).

"Some will tell me it is not in the encyclicals. They don't know the encyclicals. The one on St. Francis, for instance. Ours is Franciscan and Benedictine stuff. They have abandoned Franciscanism and so we will show them the way by proving it can be done.” (108)

People are reluctant to shelter the poor, for fear they will have this burden on their backs forever. They are afraid of "pauperizing" the poor. They are afraid of contributing to their delinquency. They want to move them along, to take care of the greatest number in the shortest possible time, to have something to show for their efforts. "How long do you let your people stay?" is one of the questions I am asked. Sometimes the poor are called "cases" or 'clients." One social worker wanted to know what our "caseload" was. And our answer is we let them stay forever. They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they were always members of our family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ." To make such a statement to public authority is to ran the risk being committed to a psychiatric ward. (111)

Of course, as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, in many times of crisis the state must intervene to take care of the common good. In times of depression, in times of national catastrophe, the state has the duty to take care of the homeless, the poverty-stricken. But even in those times it is to be understood that all Christians, and men of good will, must do their share first in order to relieve the state of much of the burden. It is only after we have used all our own resources that we should call upon the state. It is only when our insurance, our bank savings, our own families, our own Church can no longer care for us that we should look to the state. (112)

What a strange point of view, the Christian! What an upside-down point of view. What an unusual point of view. But it is the supernatural point of view. To rejoice in tribulation, to love your enemy, to turn the other cheek - is it natural? "No," is the response. “And it is not manly, and surely Christ did not mean all that, and we are not to take him literally. No, if anyone insults me, I’ll let him have it. If anyone spits at me, I’ll knock him down. If anyone encroaches on my rights, I will sick up for them. After all, it is my family, my home, my county. You cannot take these things literally. This is the time for more militant virtues." (114)

And people have their objections: "But we might be murdered in our beds. " The thing to do then is take in half a dozen people. Take in a family. There is safety in numbers; ~they will take care of each other. "But we haven't the means." God would not send the poor to you and not provide the means. If you show enough faith by seeing Christ in those who come to you, receiving the Holy Family when there is no room at the inn, then God will reward that faith. We have proved this over and over again in our Houses of Hospitality throughout the country. “But we must consider the family." We concede that objection. A husband must recognize his wife's limitations, and the wife her husband's. To each perhaps is not given the same measure of faith. And they are one flesh, But the ideal marriage would be that in which each vied with the other in charity. "But we haven't enough for ourselves. Our houses are not large enough. But we could have done without so many things in order to help our brothers-car, radios, even the overheating of our houses.

"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compares to love in dreams Yes, it is no easy thing to ask. It is no light burden to place on others, this burden of Christianity. But we are not the ones who place this burden on others. Christ, who said, "Take up your cross and follow roe," placed it there, and that cross is very often our brother. (116)

It is because we can only show our love for God by our love for the poor (because how can we love God who we have not seen, if we do not love our neighbor whom we do see?) that we talk so much of this love.

We think in terms of the Mystical Body of Christ. We are all members, one of another, and Christ is our head. We share in each other's sins just as we share in each other's virtues. When the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered. An injury to one is an injury to all. War, whether it is international or class war, and even when it is enmity between brothers, is a rending of the Mystical Body of Christ. When my brother sins, it is my sin. And our Houses of Hospitality, which Peter Maurin inspired, are battlegrounds where gigantic forces are at war with one another, forces of good and evil, and we war not against flesh blood but against principalities and powers.

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Electronic Gifting

This is interesting:

Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?

The computer tech world has long been a testing bed for "gift" type transactions, as evidenced by the open source movement (Linux, Firefox, etc.). Giving away hardware specs and declining the financial opportunity of patents is a significant increase of the ante.

And why do we have patents? To incentivize innovation? If so, why do we need to decouple innovation and necessity (i.e., "Necessity is the mother of invention") by offering liquid profits? Does this imply a market driven by greed, and perhaps also resulting in excess innovation? Are patents not also a handmaiden to market branding, a way of creating apparent exclusivity, thereby driving up demand. It seems to be about the appearance of scarcity.

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Presence

So, first I should say that I pray twice a day, or at least that's how it looks to most people. That's to say that I go through a set liturgy of common prayer twice a day (these are not necessarily the only instances of prayer, if "instance" is even appropriate): morning and evening prayer of the Episcopal Daily Office as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, 8am and 5:30pm respectively. We do it five days a week at the church and in the privacy of home (or wherever) on the weekends.

Why?

Well, there are as many answers to this as there are individuals who find it worth asking. One answer is that we are Episcopalian and the Book of Common Prayer is only common if we actually use it and that it provides the Daily Office as a daily commitment to prayer. Once upon a time it was a requirement that priests observe the Office every day, and at the church whenever possible. That has been relaxed, and in fact you might be challenged to find priests who do so. I know of a couple. When, under the guidance of a great priest, I began to learn of the importance of the Office, I found that there was only one church within reasonable distance (for daily attendance) that even said the Office more than twice a week. It just happened that said church was only about a ten minute walk from my house.

It gets better. The only reason that this particular church said the Office twice a day for 5 days per week is because this loony grad student got it into his head that common prayer was important. So he volunteered to his vicar to lead the Office with said frequency. In fact, he did so alone for about a year before anyone started joining him. And about a year after that I showed up on his church step and thereafter reappeared daily. He admitted being a little freaked out that this guy (me) kept coming every day, twice a day. Surely there must be something wrong with such a person (don't miss the reflexivity of that statement!). In fact, C entertained the thought that something was wrong with him for showing up to lead the office everyday.

A word about C. He's not what you might picture a guy who prays a lot. True, he's a New Testament Ph.D. student... but he's also orthodox in his beliefs (more surprising than you might think). And one of the more orthodox things that he thinks is that you can't be orthodox in belief without being orthodox in practice. So, I think he'd agree that the first indication that he's a Trinitarian Christian might be that he walks to the church twice a day for common prayer, often to pray by himself (the Trinity is present in the strangeness of that statement). But he's also a former college athlete, a self-professed jock who didn't start thinking until late in college. He's a big guy, for whom basketball and tennis are the default setting. The only thing that would make him happier than crushing me in each of those sports were if I was much better at those sports and he still crushed me. As it is, he must enjoy it, because we do it a lot and I almost never win. Anyway, C is most likely to show up for prayer wearing athletic shorts and a "Beefcake" t-shirt riding a bike that's much too small for his 230 lbs frame (until I gave him a bigger bike). He has little patience with people, although he's not confrontational. He'd just prefer to avoid people with whom he shares little in viewpoint. He's very focused on three things: the church, theology/NT, and sports (sometimes in that order). But if you saw him, and maybe if you chatted with him for a few moments, you'd swear that his natural setting is in a bar watching ESPN after having spent a few hours at some sports practice.

Not long after I started showing up I learned a group of homeless fellows lived in the church parking lot. When the police came to rid the parking lot of the nuisance the church decided to make an open declaration to both the police and the homeless that the homeless were under no circumstances to be run off the property: they were welcome so long as they obeyed the law. Score one for the church. It's never so simple though. The police still harass the guys because the church is near a strip of retail stores whose business is ostensibly hurt by the presence of the homeless.I guess people don't buy as much crap when they see homeless people.And that's a problem.Anyway, we've gotten to know these guys pretty well. They have their problems, and some have gotten help (rehab, housing, etc.), but the important thing is presence. Our presence with them and their presence with us.

There is a great myth in society that we can apply a label to a group of people and thereby explain the situation, that "homeless" means lazy, addicted, aggressive, and/or deviant. The myth is that somehow this group is inherently different from professionals or middle-class or the rich. So, by being present we haven't really done anything positive, we've just declined to perform a negative action by relegating them, or us, to some defining group. We've just declined the offer to dissolve community. The next step, of course, is to find some community.

C and and I agree on these topics, but we have also struggled to understand how we can be a community with these guys, especially amidst all the anxiety and fears that accompany modern life, especially with a family. Let's face it, inviting a guy in off the street is a completely different action when you have a wife and maybe also a child.Enter M. M has a life story that is too unbelievable to post. Let's just say he has a unique testimony. He's also now a regular fixture at the Office and has cultivated friendships with the homeless guys. M has two advantages over myself and C: 1.) he's single and 2.) he's fearless. His presence has done more than either of us, and it is developing every day. My only caveat is that we have to keep his presence with the guys from becoming a singularity. Certainly M has the ability to be present with them more often simply because he has no responsibility to a wife, but we have to figure out how this all works toward community rather than M's mission to the homeless or as a competitive model where M is better at being among the homeless.

The diversity of our interactions with these guys is a boon.So, to wrap up, the Office is about transformation. It's daily training, daily practice, and daily petition. For some, it is even more important that it is a daily presence. The Office has been forgotten just enough that its observance is almost radical, but the radical-ness only makes the transformative powers more apparent, not more efficacious. So far, at this little church down the street, the Office has done much to transform the lives of a few middle-class Christians along with their homeless friends. It has even begun to have more widespread effects in the community as the transformation of the Office influences community discussions about how to view and interact with its poorer members.These widespread effects are a blessing, and may even be inevitable, but they can never be said to be a goal of the Office. Christians don't see things so linearly. Anamnesis is a better model. The effects are experienced in the liturgy itself, as a presence. Time is compressed into a celebratory moment, and thus causality is indistinguishable in the atemporal moment. In the Office, as an extension of the Eucharist, we have no goals.

It's about presence.

JR

(Written May 31, 2008 and posted at jaxetal.blogspot.com)

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Render to Caesar

A Sermon at St Joe's
23rd Sunday after Pentecost 2008
Matthew 22:15-22

We pay taxes. That’s important to say since the Rev.'s one request when giving me the Gospel reading for this morning was that I not say anything to get us audited by the IRS. But it is also important to say that we pay taxes because paying taxes is one of the practices by which weinterpret the Bible.
And that practice is particularly relevant to today’s Gospel reading. Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Because we have heard this so much, and because we grow up being trained to champion something called “the separation of church and state”, we are sure we know exactly what this means. So we keep God and Caesar in their appropriate and separate spheres. We go to church on Sunday, give our tithe, and say our prayers at night. Render to God. We fly our flags, pay our taxes, register for the draft, and cast our ballots. Render to Caesar. We try to give to Jesus all of our soul and spiritual life and we trust the state and its economy with taking care of our material needs and our economic and ecological future. We think the government should not get involved in our religion. Render to God. And when the church steps out of its proper bounds and tries to regulate politics or economics or business or our means of gain we call a spade a spade and name it authoritarian, or legalistic, or lacking grace. After all, we have to think out our careers here, our families. Render to Caesar. The state should not impinge on our religious freedom, and the church should not impinge on our secular freedom. After all, it was Saint Augustine who said “Love God and do as you please.”
But. Why do we assume that this way of splitting our lives between God and Caesar is the faithful way of living under Jesus’ command? After all, in the first few centuries the church does not seem to have divided its life in anything like this manner. St John Chrysostom said about this passage that our service to men need not conflict with our service to God, but he meant by this not that one was able to lead a comfortable middle class life as long as we do not neglect the “spiritual”, but that whatever his congregants’ worldly involvement might be it could not detract from the Christian life of prayer, poverty and the cultivation of virtue. If you were rich enough to own a house, Chrysostom told his parishioners, the very least that was required was that you devote one room as the Christ room, for the housing of the local homeless. Moreover, St. Hippolytus, at about the turn of the second century, composed a list of the requirements for entrance to the church in Rome. Those who sought this baptism had their lives completely examined. These probes examined one’s entire lifestyle and especially one’s profession. Those rejected by the church until they gave up their profession included prostitutes, brothel owners, idol makers, and pagan priests, but also theatre actors, athletes and their trainers, soldiers, magicians, city officials and civic administrators.
I am not suggesting these probes as a workable model for the church today, but what these examples do point out is that we all too easily see a distinction between politics and religion, or between the secular and the sacred, which the fathers of the church never knew. We usually assume, again without the support of the fathers, that the things we do in the secular realm are morally neutral, since these are the things we just have to do to get by. But such an easy division is impossible to maintain. Indeed, as Anglican theologian John Milbank has taught us in his book Theology and Social Theory, “once there was no secular.” A “neutral” secular realm had first to be created and enacted over the last three hundred years in order to clear the space for the modern nation state to tread unimpeded. Whatever our evaluation of Milbank’s thesis, at the very least we can say that St. Hippolytus’ church in Rome does not seem to have considered baptizing active soldiers and civic magistrates on the grounds that Jesus said we were to render to Caesar what was rightfully his.
But now the temptation, especially for us Anglicans, once we have seen that there is no way of separating politics from religion, is to assume that, well, Christians will just have to rule the world. Politics and government will just have to be Christianized. But, in the end, this is the same fateful move that the Emperor Constantine made, and so this is the sort of politics that, taken to its logical conclusion can lead to a perversion like the crusades, or at least to the possibility of thinking it possible to go to war in the name of the God of Jesus. And we Episcopalians have a long history of thinking like this. But before we eschew such a charge, we had better think about our voting habits. Each time we cast a ballot because we are just sure that being a Christian demands we vote pro-choice or pro-life, for or against universal health care, for or against this plan for Iraq, for this bailout plan or that, or whatever out pet issue is, we tacitly agree with Constantine that the practices of the church ought to be the law of the land. Rather than ruling the world, God calls the church to live as a community that is an alternative to the world. And the church is able to live this way because it knows that it is not its job to make sure America is on the right side of history.
And this is clear from our Gospel text for this morning. The first thing to notice is that, however Jesus responds to the question, someone is going to be pissed off. The Pharisees might think him a supporter of Roman occupation if he says to pay taxes, but if not the Herodians might think him a subversive revolutionary. The question is posed to find out what sort of agenda this candidate for public acclaim has.
The trap is set, but Jesus walks right by. And, like everything in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus shows us the way that we should follow. His first move is to ask to be shown a denarius, about a day’s wage. But note that Jesus doesn’t have one. He has to ask for one, and his opponents do have one. And at that, Jesus has already turned the debate around. Jesus is a poor beggar who is completely dependent upon the hospitality of others. He has no money or property on which to pay taxes. So he is not particularly interested in this question. But, because of their possessions, the Pharisees and Herodians cannot but have an interest in this question.
But there is a further twist. The coin has an image on it, by their owners admission the image of Tiberius Caesar. The Jews, of course, debated long and hard about the propriety of carrying money that had an image on it. After all, the second commandment says to “make no graven image.” This is the second way that Jesus turns the question around. He was asked a theoretical question about taxation. But he immediately turns attention to the fact that not only his opponents have money while he doesn’t, and so should really be the ones questioned about taxes, but that by the same token they are also idolaters in some people’s eyes. It is no wonder that Matthew tells us that Jesus perceived their hypocrisy.
Finally comes his pronouncement. The first clause, render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, taken by itself, is from Jesus’ social and economic position a sort of personally uncommitted acceptance of others’ paying taxes. Jesus’ followers are eating hand to mouth and so what is it to them if Caesar gets his coins back?
But then Jesus adds a jab, which ends up being the knock out. “…and render to God what is God’s.” You see, over Caesar’s head on the coin were the words “son of the divine Augustus.” The coins claimed that Caesar was the son of a god, giving the present emperor himself a certain claim to be a god. In so distinguishing Caesar from the title “god” Jesus mocks the very coins he permits to be paid.
But, if this were not enough, with this final phrase Jesus has blown the entire exchange wide open. For, in one way, all things are God’s. But on the other hand, it appears that there are some things that God doesn’t want, like idolatrous money. That can go back to its maker. But all of ourselves, as Dorothy Day said, belongs to God and none to Caesar.
What would it be like to render ourselves to God? Well, it would be like living the practices the church. Not a separation of Church and state that relegates the church to a private sphere separate from the rest of life. And not on the other hand a Christian state where the church’s biggest goal is to influence the government to make sure the world is more nearly just and history comes out right. Neither of these two options, but Jesus’ path, and this path is the life of the church. For Jesus’ statement about paying taxes is not disconnected from the political platform he outlines for the church elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel. The society of Jesus campaigns for, by standing among, the poor, the hungry, the persecuted. Its members do not fight against evildoers, in fact, they do not even resist them. When they are struck, they do not retaliate, but turn the other cheek. The church’s political agenda is to give to all freely, especially those who are unworthy of the gift, for to each of these it touches it knows it is touching Jesus in his distressing disguise. The church’s members claim no “rights”, they claim no rights!, since they forgive everything they are owed. The church does not worry about the economy or plan for retirement, since God gives even the flowers and the birds food and clothing.
This is the politics of the church. It is not for the upwardly mobile. It asks us all why we are in such a hurry to be first, when we are told that the first will be last. And indeed that Jesus and his church strive to be downwardly mobile actually what makes possible Jesus’ reply about God and Caesar. Peter Maurin, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, used to say that “the sermon on the mount will be seen as practical when people start practicing it.” And here our Lord gives a tiny glimpse of the utter practicality of the political party called church. Jesus does not pay taxes because he has nothing on which to pay, and he is able to have nothing because he lives entirely by the hospitality of others. We are each called to follow our radical, but eminently practical, vagabond Lord, striving with all our might, and rejoicing at each little baby step we are given.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Colin

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