Reflecting on the Economic Dignity Campaign in Missouri – Jennifer Thomas
Read Eva Schulte’s Essay, “The Modern Civil Rights Movement”
Read Donna Simon’s Essay, “McJustice”
Read Emily Ewing’s Essay, “Immigration and the Children of God”
Read Emily Ewing’s Essay, “The Importance of Taking Back the Night”
A year ago, I proudly stood outside a local grocery store in our community with other leaders for a press conference. The speakers included Representative Emmanuel Cleaver and a working mom. We held the press coverage as community organizations and religious leaders to draw attention to the economic disparity between those who make living wages and those who don’t.
This July and August of 2013 my colleagues in Jobs with Justice and Communities Creating Opportunity have been rallying again for low-wage workers and their rights to make living wages.
I’m excited about the relationships and the momentum that is being built in our cities across Missouri and across the nation to bring living wages to working families.
A year before, on October 18, 2012, Communities Creating Opportunity gathered 1,100 people at Union Station to address the metropolitan economic and racial disparities among our communities and to provide ecumenical metropolitan solutions. Our work continues and remains. I am deeply grateful for the local religious and clergy members who are working in the trenches on this issue.
In Missouri, the ballot initiative campaigns, even though we failed, were important to me. As a baptized person, I understand my own calling from God to strive for peace and justice in the whole earth including my own community and state. Congregation-based organizing creates the vehicles for transformation and begins tilling the ground for God’s justice to grow. In addition to my identity as a baptized Christian, as an ordained Lutheran clergy person, I am grateful that I share this role of standing in the gap between those who have and those who don’t with other religious leaders across Missouri. I’m grateful to stand with other grass roots communities like Missouri Jobs with Justice and others to address the breaches in our social fabric.
Economic dignity is an imperative. I fully support the work of CCO and Missouri Faith Voices and Jobs with Justice in partnering with others across the state to work toward economic dignity for all families. Our tradition, scriptures, and faith lead us to stand in solidarity together to make a way for sufficient, sustainable livelihood for all. The ELCA as a denomination has a variety of social statements pertinent to our work and ministry. We offer as a church a particular stance on economic dignity:
Economic life pervades our lives the work we do, the income we receive, how much we consume and save, what we value, and how we view one another. An economy (from the Greek word oikonomia or “management of the household”) is meant to meet people’s material needs. The current market-based economy does that to an amazing degree; many are prospering as never before. At the same time, others continue to lack what they need for basic subsistence. Out of deep concern for those affected adversely, we of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America here assess economic life today in light of the moral imperative to seek sufficient, sustainable livelihood for all.
Outrage over the plight of people living in poverty is a theme throughout the Bible. At the heart of Jesus’ ministry and central to the message of the Old Testament prophets was God’s partiality toward the poor and powerless. The poor are those who live precariously between subsistence and utter deprivation. It is not poor people themselves who are the problem, but their lack of access to the basic necessities of life. Without such, they cannot maintain their human dignity. Strong themes in Scripture indicate that people are poor because of circumstances that have afflicted them (such as “aliens, orphans, widows”), or because of the greed and unjust practices of those who “trample on the poor” (Amos 5:11). The basic contrast is between the weak and the greedy. The psalmist decries that “the wicked draw the sword and bend their bows to bring down the poor and needy” (Psalm 37:14). The prophet rails against those “who write oppressive statutes to turn aside the needy from justice” (Isaiah 10:1-2). Their moral problem is that they have followed greed rather than God. As a result, the poor lose their basic productive resource (their land), and fall into cycles of indebtedness. Poverty is a problem of the whole human community, not only of those who are poor or vulnerable.
In relation to those who are poor, Martin Luther’s insights into the meaning of the commandments against killing, stealing, and coveting are sobering. We violate “you shall not kill” when we do not help and support others to meet their basic needs. As Luther explained, “If you see anyone suffer hunger and do not feed [them], you have let [them] starve.” “To steal” can include “taking advantage of our neighbor in any sort of dealing that results in loss to him [or her] . . . wherever business is transacted and money is exchanged for goods or labor.” “You shall not covet” means “God does not wish you to deprive your neighbor of anything that is [theirs], letting [them] suffer loss while you gratify your greed.” Related Hebraic laws called for leaving produce in the fields for the poor (Deuteronomy 24:21), a periodic cancellation of debts (Deuteronomy 15:1), and a jubilee year in which property was to be redistributed or restored to those who had lost it, so that they might again have a means of livelihood (Leviticus 25).[1]
The problem in Missouri and our nation is that some have followed greed rather than God and others turn aside the needy from justice. It is time that we liberate those trapped in the cycles of indebtedness. Means of livelihood should be made available to all, and tools of congregation based organizing and the democratic process in our state and in our land provide opportunities for justice to prevail and for the dignity of each person to be lifted up.
[1] Economic Life : Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All (Adopted by a more than two-thirds majority vote (872-124) as a social statement of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America by its sixth Churchwide Assembly on August 20, 1999, in Denver, Colorado. ) All Martin Luther quotes are including in the social statement.
The Reverend Jennifer J. Thomas serves as Pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church, Kansas City, MO. She is a graduate of Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. She received the 2008 Distinguished Alumna Award for the First Decade of Service Award. She is a native of South Dakota and previously served Lake Park Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1998-2007). She and her husband Vance have two children, Peder and Solveig . She enjoys church administration, yoga, swimming, reading mysteries, baking, and playing with her family. She is also Dean of Area Ministry 7, the Kansas City metropolitan congregations of the Central States Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Thomas is Vice President of Missouri Faith Voices, a state-wide interfaith congregation-based organization working on social justice from a faith perspective.