A week ago, our church hosted its annual Vacation Bible School. This year on Monday, the middle schoolers made sandwiches for the First Presbyterian Church Soup Kitchen and prepared hygiene kits for Family Promise (formerly the Memphis Interfaith Hospitality Network or “MIHN”). Tuesday, they sorted food at the Food Bank. Thursday they led a VBS for an inner city Hispanic church. Friday, we sang for a local retirement home.

Every week, a certain number of people come to use our food pantry. We have people we help our regular occasion, and some of them were helped last week. Saturday morning, we discovered a young couple sleeping outside the Christian Life Center. Don and Cindy spent time helping that couple. Sunday afternoon, Kathy talk to me about a man she noticed sleeping in the bus stop near our church. Apparently, he’s been there on and off for several weeks.
On Sunday, Judge Potter continued the discussion with me about housing conditions we have in Memphis. On Monday, Cindy was still helping the young couple, and Daniel spent a couple of hours with me talking about the local mission initiative to help the poor.
Our church has always been involved in helping people. Next week, we will be hosting Family Promise, a program in which we help the transitionally homeless with shelter. Family Promise is unique in that it is the only program that allows husbands, wives, and children to stay together while they are transitionally homeless.

Christians have always cared about the less fortunate. Jesus indicates that we will be judged by how we treat those in need (Matthew 25). In Acts, the Apostles are already caring for the widows in the church (Acts 6). Paul and his fellow workers took up a collection for the poor in Jerusalem (see, 2 Cor. 8). The early church was known for its care of the poor.

In this blog we are looking at Nehemiah’s care for the unfortunate and  thinking about our Christian responsibility for the less fortunate and about fairness for common people.

Text and Prayer.

Nehemiah is one of the most interesting and important characters in Biblical history. He was soft hearted, compassionate, prayerful, thoughtful, and a fine administrator. Today, we are looking at his compassion for ordinary people and the poor, as well as his fundamental fairness and simplicity of character. Here is how Nehemiah 5 begins:

Now the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their fellow Jews. Some were saying, “We and our sons and daughters are numerous; in order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain.”
Others were saying, “We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.”
Still others were saying, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards. Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our fellow Jews and though our children are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.” (Nehemiah 5:1-5, edited for length).

Prayer: God of Justice: Only you are completely fair and completely compassionate. Today, help us to learn from this passage what we can do to promote fairness and compassion for the poor in our own community.

Inequality in Israel.

A constant feature of human society is economic inequality. In today’s lesson, we learn that the burden of rebuilding the Jerusalem wall fell disproportionately on the poor and common people. Some people were hungry because they did not own any property and were poor (Neh. 5:2). Some people who owned property had been required to mortgage the property for food (v. 3). Some people became financially strapped and could not pay their taxes (v. 4). Some Jews even had to sell their children into slavery to get money (v. 5)! Some of these people were what we call poor; however, some were we might call common people having trouble making ends meet.

On the other hand, there were the wealthy landowners and nobles. These people owned sufficient land that they could be absentee landlords. They were not required to work daily in the fields to earn a living. These people had excess funds they could loan at interest. This is exactly what they did. In the process, they become even more wealthy at the expense of the common people and the poor. They even foreclosed on the property of the common people in need.

Years ago, I had a friend who had been an attorney during the Great Depression in a small town in Texas. I asked him how life had been. He looked kind of sad and said, “Well for me it wasn’t so bad—if you didn’t mind taking other people’s wedding rings and farms.” In hard times, in ancient Israel and today the economic burden of hard times falls hardest on those least able to bear that burden.

Nehemiah was not the kind of person to just shrug his shoulders and go on about his business. When he heard the complaints of the common people, he was deeply moved and thought about the problem, perhaps for a long time (Neh. 5:6). Do you remember chapter 1? In that chapter, when Nehemiah heard about the suffering of the Jews, he mourned and prayed (1:4). In this case, he mourned and thought about the problem.

Nehemiah had a good heart. He was the governor of Jerusalem. He lived in a fine house. He had plenty of food. He could easily have turned his back on the plight of the common people and been friends with the rich and powerful. Instead, Nehemiah cared about the common people and the poor. Nehemiah was a leader of compassion and fairness towards all people.

Economic Unfairness Today.

We will never take action to help the common people or the poor until we have compassion on their plight. Nearly a decade ago, the United States and all the developed economies of the world experienced the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. In the United States, economic growth had become overly-dependent on the construction and sale of new homes. Congress and the banking system made it increasingly possible for people to buy homes who lacked the economic ability to repay them. These loans were packaged and sold to banks and financial institutions all over the world. In addition, an enormous market was created trading financial instruments that amounted to bets concerning the repayment of those loans.

When the debt pyramid that had been created collapsed, several investment banking firms went bankrupt and the world’s banking system was threatened with collapse. In response, United States and other governments nationalized most of that debt, rescuing the banks, their shareholders, and other financial institutions. None of this was without cost: the world’s taxpayers picked up the tab. The result was a deep recession we call “Great Recession” and the slowest recovery in modern economic history.

The result of the slow recovery has been rising inequality, with the wealthiest one percent of Americans controlling more of the wealth that in the past, hollowing out of the Middle Class (meaning that that the middle class never recovered from the recession), an increase in poverty, and a loss of faith in our way of life, particularly among young people. The result of the inequality, economic stagnation, and loss of faith is political instability.

There is more to the story than you can say in a sermon. The reasons for our problems are more complex than can be explained in twenty minutes. The problem was not caused entirely by the Great Recession. The Great Recession has just made the problem worse. For example, the changing world economy also plays a role in our economic problems as does the fact that we are not educating many of our young people for the jobs our economy is creating. Nevertheless, the basic conclusion remains: As in the days of Nehemiah, we are faced with a good deal of economic unfairness in our society. (See, International Monetary Fund, Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective (June 2015)).

 A Response Today.

In past weeks, I have focused on rebuilding American culture. The problems of our society are primarily spiritual, moral, and cultural. Nevertheless, spiritual, moral, and cultural decline have economic consequences. In order to rebuild our culture, we have to rebuild the confidence of people in the basic economic fairness of our society.

Nehemiah responded to the economic unfairness of his day by confronting the problem directly. He confronted the wealthy who were abusing their economic power. He confronted those who were taking advantage of the poor. He appealed to their conscience and to the law of Moses (Ex. 22:12-27; Lev. 25:35-54; Deut. 23:19-20). He demanded that they stop doing what they were doing (Neh. 5:11-13) He pointed to himself as an example of someone who was behaving fairly under the circumstances (vv. 14-18). In other words, Nehemiah both addressed the problem and set a good example for the people.

If we are going to rebuild our culture, we must confront the fact that our economic system has become unbalanced. In particular, the poor and Middle Class have lost purchasing power and are having difficulty sustaining their way of life. The economic stagnation caused by the Great Recession hurt those without jobs and new members of the job force more than it hurts those of us who been employed for a long time.

A sense of justice and cultural solidarity among all Americans should motivate all of us to seek to find ways to restore a kind of economic balance that will give people, and especially young people, economic opportunities and hope for the future. We are all related to one another, and if the young, the middle class, and the poor do not have adequate economic opportunity, then the rest of us will eventually suffer.

Nehemiah doesn’t show us exactly what we should do. However, Nehemiah does show us the kind of leadership that we need. We need a leadership that is compassionate and cares for the common people. We need leadership that understands the problem and is willing to confront that problem. We need leadership that can motivate all of us, and especially the wealthy, to do the kinds of things that will make our society better for everyone.

Something We Can Do.

Memphis is a great city. It’s a great place to live. However, Memphis is not without its problems. A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend a day in the Environmental Court of Shelby County. Last week, I was given more information about the housing problem in Shelby County. Did you know that about twenty-two percent, or almost a quarter, of the homes in Shelby County are blighted in some way?

Many of the people who occupy these homes are what we might call the “working poor.” These are people that have jobs and a little income. They do not, however, make enough money to get a bank loan to repair their homes. Therefore, they just do minor repairs as they have funds. Over time, they often can’t keep up with the decay of the home. It is a big problem in our city! Dave always felt that housing is something in which our church should have an interest. We are involved in Family Promise (where we house the homeless), the Memphis Family Shelter, The Memphis Union Mission, and other housing-related ministries. Perhaps now is the time for us to take another look at what we can do to help with the housing problem in Memphis.

When our church built its last series of buildings, we put away about $200,000 for local missions. We have spent a part of that money, but we have a good bit left. One thing we’ve been trying figure out is a way to make a difference in Cordova and Arlington. Recently, Dan Eubanks, who leads up our Christian Life Center,  made a trip to Joplin, Missouri to look at one ministry that could help the Cordova area. This project would give us a way of sharing information about what can be done to help today certain kinds of people. It would enable all the congregations in our ministry area to do a better job of administering the help that we give out to the needy.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us that he will judge us by whether we helped the poor, the hungry, the homeless, those in prison. He asks us not to pass by and ignore their problems. Nehemiah was the kind of person who did not ignore or pass by the suffering of others. Instead, he helped them as best he could and set a good example of what it means to be a compassionate leader. Perhaps we can do the same.

Amen.

Copyright 2016, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved.