As a Reformed Christian, I receive God’s message through God’s Written Word. God through the re-birthing Holy Spirit has called me to this warning proclaimed by the Prophet Amos. This warning is the ethical foundation of my new blogging ministry, “Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon.”
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.” –Amos 2:6 (NIV)
“...selling even the sweepings with the wheat.” Amos 8.6
Such is God's concern with how economics impacts the poor. In Amos's denunciation, I believe silver is the Imperial commodity (coinage) mobilized by the elite to bring injustice against the innocent, the poor and needy who have special intrinsic value in God's eyes. The needy are commodified when they are exchanged for shoes. In Amos 8.6, the people are denounced for not leaving the sweepings of the wheat for the poor to glean. It is a people who support the trading of human need for silver that is denounced. The monarch and the people are united in this act. I shudder for all of us implicated in this accelerating and inhumane exclusion from life of our current political economy.
The application of this passage seems clearly to me to denounce unregulated market systems that leave nothing for the poor. Neo-liberalism as a political economy that creates an idol of GDP growth measured not in welfare or in goods, but increasingly in pure financial engineering, proposes that no public resource may go unprivatized and no act of human relationship goes unmonetized, while no opponent to this creation of demonic mammon goes unpunished.
As an example, the lives of Central American peasants are impoverished by agri-business which claims yearly rents for the seeds of plants which they have modified, perhaps minimally. Notwithstanding that these seeds are part of the natural gift of God to humankind prior to the advent of markets. Neo-liberal property rights regimes have privatized the genome of traditional peasant crops and turned them into rent-producing properties for the politically powerful. These agribusinesses seek even to evade legal and Constitutional oversight of their activities for the public health:
"The [legislation signed into law by President Obama] provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation suits over health risks posed by the crops' consumption." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57576835/critics-slam-obama-for-protecting-monsanto/ accessed on April 4, 2013.
The needy are having their natural usufruct rights stolen from them by corporations aided by lawmakers in Brazil. Note the grief in the photo of this report. Is the pornography in the grief we witness? Or is it hidden and off camera? That is a stark moral choice I believe we must make, whether what is shameful is being dispossessed or being the dis-possessors. For the maintenance of life as we know it depends on our choices. The alternative is expansion of monetary relations into every community, ecosystem, and act of love that surely would signal a quickened death of the earth and neighbor.
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