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The Prophet Isaiah was a Priest of the temple in Jerusalem. In our scripture today, Isaiah was remembering the occasion, when he first felt the call to become God’s messenger. It was in the year that King Uzziah died, about 742 B.C., and the geo-political situation in the Near East was changing dangerously.
As a result of his "call" Isaiah began admonishing the leaders of Judah to renew their faithfulness to Yaweh as the source of national strength. He also joined with the prophet Amos, who was preaching in the Northern Kingdom of Samaria, to beware of the widening gap between rich and poor. The fabric of the nation he warned was weakened by economic injustice. In 722 B.C. the preaching of Amos was fulfilled, when the Northern Kingdom of Samaria was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire.
I believe the prophetic career of Isaiah is relevant to the United States today. We live in a dangerous geo-political situation. There are terrorists who are irrationally motivated to do harm to any and all Americans regardless of race, class, or religion. A determined defense of our people is important. As a nation we also need to renew our faith in the God of justice, freedom and love, and stop chasing after our cultural idols of wealth, sexuality and military superiority. We also need to renew our faith in a way that is not offensive to our brothers and sisters of other faiths. We don’t need granite monuments in our court houses and state houses, but rather we need renewed hearts within our people, and a renewed commitment to justice for all people. The challenge, of Isaiah and the prophet Amos, I want to speak to this morning is the issue of economic justice. When Pastor McDuffie and I met to talk about this pulpit exchange, I told him that in the United Church of Christ Calendar, not only is this Black History month but February 8th is Race Relations Sunday. We talked for a while about the changes in race relations we have witnessed in our life times. Looking back 50 years in many ways 1954 and 2004 are two different worlds. But as Pastor McDuffie and I visited we also agreed that as much progress as we have seen in the past 50 years, there is still work to be done. Our society has become more egalitarian in voting rights, public accommodations, less overt discrimination in the work place. But in recent years we have actually gone backwards in the quest for social justice as the gap between rich and poor has widened rather than narrowed. For the sake of corporate profits we send jobs overseas, and then cut out health benefits for the poor and unemployed. Corporations loot the pension funds of average workers and maintain golden parachutes for top executives. Companies cut wages for ordinary workers with the threat they will have no job at all, if they object. The cost of medical care and medications sky rocket, while more and more employers drop health benefits. Economists working in the field of health care now predict that within twenty years there will be no company sponsored health benefits for retired workers anywhere in America. And the current policy of cutting income taxes while using the social security wage earners tax to fund those tax cuts is short sighted and places an unfair burden on wage earners.
We have to be mindful that the social security tax is a flat percentage tax
rather than a graduated tax. Whether a person makes $25,000 or $100,000 they are
taxed at the same percentage rate. Further, any income over $117,000 is not
subject to social security tax at all. So corporate executives making millions
of dollars are only being taxed by social security on the first $117,000. And
the tax cuts, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are receiving on
their income taxes are being financed by the tax revenues being raised by the
social security taxes on the wage earners of their companies. You people crush those in need and wipe out the poor. You say to yourselves, "How long before the holiday is over, so we can corner the grain market? When will the Sabbath be over? Our wheat is ready, and we want to sell it now. We can’t wait to cheat and charge high prices for the grain we sell. We will use dishonest scales and mix the grain dust with the grain. Those who are needy and poor don’t have any money. We will turn them into wage slaves for the price of a pair of shoes. Greed in the United States is rampant, and it threatens to unravel the fabric of community in our nation. Much of Dr. King’s dream of equality and justice has been achieved, but the unfinished part of his dream, the truly difficult vision is the dream of economic justice. We are rapidly becoming a nation that is less segregated by race and more segregated by class. If you have the money, you can buy a house in any neighborhood you want. But right now ordinary wage earners are losing their buying power as companies send their jobs to China, where people will work for a dollar an hour. Ordinary wage earners are having their salaries eroded by increased health care costs, and company demands to work longer hours for the same or even less pay. Retirees are losing their ability to remain in their homes as their pensions are squeezed and health care costs rise. We are increasingly a nation segregated by class. Economic justice is the unfinished dream. As I look back at Isaiah’s call there is one other issue I want to raise, and that is his cry: Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. . .
We as a people have become entirely too tolerant of lying. Years ago I made up a
curriculum about ethics for 9th graders. In that curriculum was a
case study. Suppose you had a new lap top computer, and you were climbing a
flight of stair and dropped it 10 feet to the ground. Part of the case of the
computer came off, but after working with it for a few minutes, you got the case
back together again, but the computer did not work right after that. So, you
take the computer in for repair under the warranty. The repair person looks at
the computer and says, these machines usually don’t malfunction this way. Are
you sure you didn’t drop it or something? What do you say? Friends, the reformation of America begins with us. We are a nation of unclean lips and we need to hold ourselves to higher standards of the truth. And then we need to hold our government and corporations to higher standards of the truth. And finally we need to insist that our leaders tell the truth. We cannot govern this nation with lies. We have to insist on the truth.
As Jesus said, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." The
dream of economic justice will only be realized, when the truth sets us free.
The unfinished dream of Dr. King is economic justice for all. He died demanding
justice for sanitation workers in Memphis. Today in Southern California there
are grocery workers trying to hang onto their health benefits. There are airline
workers who promised wage concessions to keep their airline out of bankruptcy
only to find out that the executives had given themselves bonuses. Just this
week in the news, retired steel workers have lost their health benefits. Down in
Montgomery, the Alpha Insurance Company, the 800 pound gorilla of Alabama
politics, has proposed raiding the State Teacher Retirement Fund to balance the
state budget. And one of the reasons the State Budget is in trouble is because
Federal grants to the states have been cut to provide Federal Income tax cuts. Let us once again become a free people, a people of the truth, and a nation with economic justice for all. |