Sunday, September 04, 2005

Labor Day Sermon 2005, Wellington United Church of Christ in Chicago
Ross Hyman

Ezekiel 33:7-11

So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “O wicked ones, you shall surely die,” and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life.

Now you, mortal, say to the house of Israel, Thus you have said: “Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?” Say to them, As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?

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When the Assyrian empire had conquered Israel and exiled its ruling class, the elites of Judah were able to retain some of their power by becoming puppet rulers of Judah subject to the Assyrian empire. But they were dissatisfied, resentful of the tribute they were required to pay to Assyria, and they pined after the ultimate power that they held when Judah was autonomous. When Babylonia conquered the Assyrian empire, the Judean elite saw there chance to regain their power through a military alliance with Egypt against Babylonia. This is all described in Ezekiel chapter 23 where the sins of the Judean elite are graphically described in terms of idolatry and adultery.

It was at this time that the prophetic tradition drew out of Israel’s ancient memory the core salvation message that pervades the Hebrew Bible. When Pharos’s army was at our back, God was the warrior and saved us without us resorting to the methods of our enemies. We are not saved when we fight with swords and chariots and war horses and military alliances. When we do that we are committing idolatry and adultery says Ezekiel. We are idolaters because we expect salvation from the products of our own hands, and we our adulterers because we break our covenant with God and seek our salvation elsewhere. The covenant community is only sustained and saved by God when we renounce all claims to royalty or dominion over others. It is our calling to do justice, to care for the orphans and the widows, to listen to the grieving mothers of the war dead, to build up the levies before the storm. When the elites join with the poor to form a community of faith, love, and solidarity, where Judah’s resources are used to benefit the needy and the community as a whole, instead of wasted in tax cuts for the rich and military adventures, when we do this and only when we do this, God will fight for us and we will be saved.

But the elites of Judah were not interested in sharing with the poor. They had dreams of greater power for themselves and they had war lust. Buoyed by false prophets they formed a military alliance with the Egyptians. And the Babylonians came on them like a flood. Thousands were killed and Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. The elites were taken into exile into Babylonia, and the poor were left in the wreckage of Judah to care for the grieving and the wounded, suffering servants experiencing torment and tragedy due to the sins of others.

It was with the Judean exiled elite in Babylonia that Ezekiel, the priest, an elite himself, spoke the message from God that is the lectionary passage we heard today.

Just as the horrors of Judah’s subjugation to Babylonia were greatly magnified by the idolatry and adultery of the Judean elite, the horrors of Hurricane Katrina have been magnified by the iniquities of our rulers who continued on their doomed course despite prophetic warnings. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes that New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward flood control dropped to a trickle, with at least $250 million in crucial projects remaining. The Army Corps of Engineers never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security, coming at the same time as federal tax cuts, was the reason for the funding dry-up. At least nine articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane and flood control dollars. And in early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain.

The theft of money meant for flood control and its transfer to war and homeland security and tax cuts for the rich is only one of the ways that our iniquities magnified the horrors of Katrina. Another is the inequity in our society where an emergency evacuation plan assumes that people have cars, whereas many of the poor in New Orleans do not. Poverty exacerbates the effects of all disasters: the dust bowl, hurricanes, extreme heat in Chicago, all hurt the poor the most.

Although tourism is the major industry in New Orleans and one in six workers holds a hospitality job, New Orleans has only two unionized hotels

Union hotel workers make on average over 25% more than their non-union counterparts so it should not be surprising that hotels in New Orleans have traditionally fought very hard against worker organizing. The campaign to unionize New Orleans hotels in the 1990s was viciously fought by employers in the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association and was defeated.

The Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association also has long opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage. In New Orleans 42% of African Americans live below the poverty line. As we all know, the poverty line is too low to measure poverty accurately so a far greater percentage than 42% live in poverty.

What would have happened had the New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association supported the rights of workers to organize and had supported a living wage? Should we believe Ezekiel and the prophets, and expect that in those choices laid the salvation of the people of New Orleans? Certainly more of the poor would have had cars to escape the city. And who’s to say that had economic justice been present to a greater degree in the city, that workers would not have been able to organize for more funding for the levees, or with others across the US couldn’t have built a movement that would have so changed the climate of the country that the national government wouldn’t have gone to war and would have invested our resources where it was needed?

But that did not happen. We are where we are. What should we tell the Bush administration and the New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association today, while the effects of the storm still rage? Are we called to tell them at this moment that their salvation can be found only through the liberation of those that they oppress?

At the rivers of Babylon, Ezeikiel amidst the elites of Judah, who, motivated by greed for riches and power, had denied God and God’s covenant and launched Judah on a disastrous course resulting in its destruction, the loss of their loved ones, their homes, their country, everything, weeping over their fate, Ezeikiel still called the wicked to account.

There will be those today who will claim that telling how the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina was magnified by the iniquities of those with power is exploiting the victims of the tragedy. But by speaking the truth we uphold the victims, and hope to lessen the devastation of the next tragedy. And it is only through confrontation and conflict that we can expect change.

In Babylon the elites, having reaped the whirlwind that they had soed, finally admitted their wickedness and cried out with fear that God would forsaken them. God tells Ezekiel “Say to them I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?” The lectionary passage ends here but God goes on to say “Though I say to the wicked ‘you shall surely die’ yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right – if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity, they shall surely live. They shall not die. None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right, they shall surely live.”

It is a great message of hope and redemption, and a reminder that our enemies of today can be our friends and benefactors of tomorrow. It is the repentant elite of Judah and their descendents that are responsible for compiling and writing the extraordinary indictments of domination and violence and the great visions of justice and peace that we find in the Bible.

And may it be so that the church will join with the labor movement and the people of New Orleans to demand that the reconstruction of the community of New Orleans be done with sufficient resources for it to be safe and secure and that reconstruction be placed at higher priority than tax cuts and military adventures. And that this reconstruction be performed by workers granted the freedom to organize unions free from fear and intimidation, and that the new city that will be built will approach closer to the beloved community. But this will not come about unless people organize together for this purpose, and at least some of the people in positions of power are made to experience a change of heart. But this won’t happen unless we refrain from silence, and unless we speak the Word with every fiber of our being, in all of our actions and all our structures. Let us also pray that this all can happen without our elites needing to first experience the wrath of their own whirlwind.

Ezekiel like all of the prophets calls the community of the covenant to be a prophet to the nations, and to speak the word of God not through words, or ritual sacrifices, or festivals, but through our walking in the statutes of life.

The church and the labor movement are both at their best when motivated by the belief that we should structure our institutions in ways that model the beloved community. The church and the labor movement are both at their worst when while calling for justice in other institutions, we adopt the same methods as our enemies internally.

The United Church of Christ has done great work to support the rights of workers to organize. The UCC was a strong supporter of the Taco Bell Boycott and continues its support of the farm workers in Florida. The UCC is also strongly supporting the campaign for justice for workers at Wal-Mart. It is an endorser of the Employee Free Choice Act that would forbid many anti-union practices.

The church also does essential work to call the labor movement to structure itself in ways that more closely model the beloved community and I encourage it to do more of this since all institutions rely on friends to help themselves see the log in their own eye. One example, to address the racist legacy of our unions and our society, is the Building Bridges program of Interfaith Worker Justice which brings poor minorities into the building trades. More needs to be done to extend Affirmative Action into the seniority system. This can only happen with the church and labor movement working together.

But it is important for the church not to neglect the log in our own eye. Perhaps the most important thing that the UCC can do to fight poverty and power inequity in our society, to lessen the impact of natural and human made disasters, is for the church to live up to its ideals in its own institutions.

Clement of Alexandria said "If your neighbor sins, you who count yourself chosen have sinned as well. For if you kept yourself as the Word demands, your neighbor would be so ashamed by your example that he himself would not sin."

One way it can do this is to insure that workers in our own church affiliated institutions are provided an enforceable guarantee of truly free and fair organizing and election campaigns. By ignoring and sometimes even supporting union busting in our own church institutions, churches have contributed to the grim anti-union climate in our society where union-busting is the norm and poverty is on the rise.

Churches have the unique calling in our society to abide by principles that go beyond what the law requires. Rather than just supporting reforms like the Employee Free Choice Act, churches should require their institutions to abide by the principles in those reforms today, regardless if the reforms are ever passed by congress. This would put the lie to companies that attempt to exude some kind of Christian aura, while intimidating and firing workers who try to organize. Sometimes I think the climate is so bad that one day the only place where people will have the freedom to unionize is in church institutions that have adopted guidelines that go beyond what the law requires.

Workers at our hospital system, Advocate Health Care, have been trying to organize unions in the face of harsh opposition for a couple of years now. The power difference between management and workers is such that pro-union workers experience constant fear and intimidation in their jobs. I have spoken with workers who broke down in tears over the fear and intimidation they are experiencing at work. And yet these workers keep fighting so that they and their co-workers will be able to work in an environment where they are treated with dignity. We can learn from these Advocate workers what it means to carry a cross.

And just as the labor movement will not move as fast to address our legacy of racism without the church’s involvement, the church would not have been made fully aware of the racial disparities in its hospital system if not for the workers and the union. Let us join with Advocate workers and community groups to transform Advocate Health Care into an institution that we can be proud of in all that it is and does.

In the back of the church you will find copies of a petition called the Protocol of Agreement. This document calls on Advocate Health Care to meet with the union, with faith sponsors, and with community groups to negotiate agreements for a free and fair union organizing climate, and for a community benefits agreement for charity care and a capital investment strategy that addresses racial disparity. The agreement would allow recipients of charity care to have some input into the policies that affect them. I encourage you to read the Protocol and sign it if you agree that the church and its institutions needs to be the change that we wish to see in the world.