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blue bits. red rocks.
Thursday 12 November 2009

When we buy our coffee from “Juan Valdez”, who is in reality a poor South American living in a shack with a sick wife and six underfed children and is paid pennies to harvest coffee beans by a U.S. multinational corporation, instead of producing edible food for his own country, but is exploited for an enormous profit, which is passed on to us, then… we are involved in the social sin of economic institutions. Social sin happens when we pass budgets that support the military-industrial complex by allocating billions to building stealth bombers and advanced nuclear weapon technology, while we cut Social Security for widows and the elderly, and reduce medicaid and medicare benefits for the poor, the fatherless, and those on fixed incomes. The institutional sins that plagued the poor widow with only two mites to her name, still plague the church today. Like Jesus and the disciples, who watched it happening in the temple, we can see it happening in the church. And it is a cause to lament the sorry state of religious institutions. We must lament what happened in countries in South America in the 80’s, and even today, where the official church supported the wealthy and turned a blind eye toward their US backed military, which supported the oligarchy of elite landowners, who exploited the poor campesinos. And when the poor sought land reform or tried to improve their situation, they were terrorized and murdered by the military’s death squads. EI Salvador has been a country full of poor widows. Yet, the majority of US churches remained silent or oblivious to this exploitation of the poor that was in our own back door. We may look and lament when we see, in our own wealthy country, the treasuries of large churches spent on expensive church buildings, padded pews, stained glass windows, and extravagant musical productions, but find it hard to cough up a few dollars to help house the homeless or pay the light bill of a single mother. But even small churches need to take a hard look and lament how their budgets and personal energies are spent on their own agenda to the point that the needs of others are forgotten. the Jesus Manifesto

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