Proclaim Freedom

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 

Decades ago, at our previous church, a new parish priest invited the congregation to join him in memorizing the passage above, Luke 4:18-19.

It was his way of announcing that our role, as Christains, was to follow Christ in enacting that anointing: proclaiming good news to the poor and freedom for prisoners, aiding in recovery of sight, actively, courageously, setting the oppressed free.

Freedom is mentioned twice there: freedom for prisoner. Freedom for the oppressed.

As we give thanks this Memorial Day weekend for those who have sacrificed to further the cause of freedom, I find myself wondering: what does it mean, now, today, to proclaim freedom for prisoners, to set the oppressed free?

During our travels to Greece, we spent a day in Corinth, one of the wealthiest commercial cities during the time of Christ.

We visited the the diolkos,  the paved passageway that allowed a five mile portage of ships across the Isthmian strait from the Aegean to Ionian Sea, and we stopped by the ruins at Kenchreai , the Corinthian port that served the trade routes heading west to Rome and other European ports.

Periodic earthquakes (most recently in 1858) prompted a population shift to an area several miles northeast of the original city, allowing more extensive archaeological investigation of ancient site than in cities like Thessaloniki, or even Athens, where new building has continually taken place on top of old.

Our group walked through the agora, often translated “marketplace” in the New Testament but, as our guide Costos Tsevas explained, more accurately “assembly” or “gathering place,” the center of political, philosophical, civil discourse. 

We gathered on the bema, the stone platform where citizens came to receive awards, face punishment, or take their allotted three minutes to present their point of view.

We saw the broken stone pillar, strangely worn and etched, reputed to be the post where prisoners, including the Apostle Paul, were beaten.

And we stared up at the Acrocorinth, the imposing castle high on the monolithic rock where the wealthy of the city lived in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite. 

Ancient Corinth and Acrocorinth

Costos described the role of the pornai and heterais who plied their trade through the city streets, offering mystical union with the goddess through sexual encounter, and wearily carrying their profits up the steep road to the Acrocorinth.

The pornai were among the lowest tier of slaves, sent out by their owners to collect what they could of the currency flowing through the city. The heterai were more elite sex workers, in Corinth most often owned by the temple of Aprhrodite. Around 2 BC, an observer, Strabo, wrote: 

 “The temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it employed more than a thousand hetairas, whom both men and women had given to the goddess. Many people visited the town on account of them, and thus these hetairas contributed to the riches of the town: for the ship captains frivolously spent their money there, hence the saying: ‘The voyage to Corinth is not for every man’. 

Standing among the rocky ruins of Corinth, I could feel the weight of oppression: worship of a goddess who ensnared both men and women, physical enslavement enforced through force, sex used to further commerce, a sharp divide between wealthy owners and the miserable underclass, living only to serve the whim of the rich.

Paul, and those who joined him, proclaimed freedom: freedom from bondage to gods and goddesses who offered nothing and demanded constant sacrifice of wealth, wine, animals, captives, slaves, maybe even children (as when King Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia).

Freedom, as well, from a culture that used sex as currency and considered trade a value far higher than compassion or human dignity.

Freedom from participation in evil and the resulting condemnation.

Freedom from unrestrained self-indulgence.

Freedom for slaves?

Paul didn’t advocate immediate freeing of every slave, an impossibility in an economy where more than half the population was held in slavery and a large percent of non-slaves lived on the edge of starvation. He did, though, hold up a vision in which slave and free would be treated as equal, where generosity and kindness took priority over profit. In the short book of Philemon, he asked that the runaway slave Onesimus be treated as his own son, embraced as slave-owner Philemon’s brother, be given whatever privilege or hospitality Paul himself would receive. 

Costos led our group to an inscription set in stone near the ancient theater of Corinth:

"Erastus in return for his aedileship laid the pavement at his own expense.” 

The tradition was for wealthy citizens in prominent political positions to underwrite capital improvements during their time in office. This Erastus, as an “aedile,” would have been responsible for public buildings, festivals, and enforcement of public order, and the pavement would have been evidence of his time in office, his commitment to Corinth, as well as of his wealth.

Was he the same Erastus mentioned by Paul as a city treasurer (Romans 16:23), then coworker in the early church? (Actrs 19:22, 2 Timoty 4:20).  Costos quietly pointed out that if some of the church in Corinth were former temple prostitutes, now set free to pursue a new life, someone must have provided the funds to free them. Erastus, as a prominent citizen, would be a likely candidate to make that happen.

Certainly, the evidence trail on that possibility iscontested, yet it raises the question: in a society so deeply divided, with wealthy merchants living like kings, and others crowded into hovels, this good news Paul proclaimed would demand a radical shift on the part of the wealthy: to open their homes to the poor and enslaved, to sit beside those they had been trained to consider “andrapodon,” “one with the feet of a man,” as opposed to “tetrapodon” or "quadruped", the term used to designate animal livestock.

In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul made clear that a genuine understanding of the new "way" Jesus offered would require followers of Christ to become servants of each other, putting the needs of others first, choosing to do what would ensure the health and growth of the weakest, poorest member. Paul repeatedly asked the Corinthians to consider themselves slaves to each other: even to the least shonored. The one of no reputation.

As I track through the history of the church and of slavery, it seems to me that one gauge of the church’s health and witness is it’s willingness to embrace the cause of the slave and to stand against whatabolitionist William Wilberforce called “the mortal disease of all political communities”: the innate self-centeredness “that clouds our moral vision and blunts our moral sensitivity.”    

This week’s Time magazine (May 26, 2014) carries an article titled “Bring Back All Girls: What the 276 Girls Abducted from a Nigerian School Tell Us about Human Trafficking.”

What the article tells us: nearly 30 million people worldwide are exploited and treated like property.

4.5 million of those are subject to sexual exploitation.

A thriving market in prostitution and forced marriage enjoys enormous profits from the misery of uneducated, unprotected girls.

Human trafficking is now the second largest global criminal activity, second only to the drug trade.

I’ve written before about modern day slavery: Chocolate Dreams, Freedom is Indivisible, Seeking Justice. 

And yes, I buy fair trade chocolate, sign petitions, look for ways to support a more equitable economy.

But I’m haunted by a scene I watched in a rest stop outside New York City one evening. I was traveling home on I-95, the road that connects the northeastern cities, and saw a young teen girl and woman in the rest room. 

Something didn’t seem right: the girl’s clothes not quite what a girl traveling with her family would wear on a Saturday night, the woman watching a little too closely. As I headed out toward my parked car, they exited in the opposite direction, toward the lines and lines of trucks.

Sometimes we see but don’t see.

Know but choose not to know.

Double-guess ourselves.

Explain it away.

The Polaris Project, a national non-profit committed to ending human trafficking in the United States, offers a 24-7 hotline, for anonymous tips, calls for help, questions about how to spot traffickers.

Polaris Project Hotline Map

I’ve put the number on my cell phone: 1-888-373-7888.

The project publishes an interactive map showing trafficking hotspots.

That rest area?

In the heart of the biggest US hotspot.

It’s easy to grieve the slavery of Corinth, lament the evil of the cross-Atlantic slave trade.

Harder to acknowledge that more people are in slavery today that at any previous time in history. Some not far from my home, along the routes I travel.

Jesus said “proclaim freedom.”

I still wonder: How?

for more about the US hotline and anti-trafficking networks 

for international trafficking information 

This is the third in a series, Texts in Context, revisiting two weeks spent in Greece.
Earlier posts: 

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Mysteries

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

An Alternative Narrative

In the liturgical year of our secular religion, last Sunday was a high feast day, maybe the highest.

The Superbowl was the largest mass media event of the year, and the biggest social media event ever, generating over 30 million public tweets. Thirty second ads cost  $3.8 million each, and over 108 million people tuned in to watch the game, the ads, and the halftime show.

A new movement, MissRepresentation’s #NotBuyingIt, called attention to the extent that Superbowl ads objectify women and use women’s bodies in ways that demean and dehumanize women. 

Anti trafficking groups called attention to the sex trafficking that attends the Superbowl, which has been called  "the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States." 

Other groups discussed additional forms of slavery represented by the Superbowl: in the cheaply produced commemorative jerseys, the food, the materials used to produce our large-screen tvs. 

The Superbowl was both celebration and enactment of our prevailing religion of consumption, competition, violence, power. Some of the victims were painfully visible: the women objectified and dehumanized in demeaning ads, the players courting concussion-induced dementia.

Not My Life: 2012 documentary

But many of the victims are invisible, so far from sight we imagine they aren’t there: child slaves harvesting chocolate for our sweet valentines, adults and children trapped in systems of exploitation, trafficked illegally to harvest our tomatoes, cotton, coffee, sugar cane, or working long hours, six or seven days a week, to produce cheap goods for companies that drive the prices ever lower. 

We enjoy our convenience and comfort, working hard to ignore the mounting evidence that our current systems are unjust, unhealthy, unsustainable, and contribute to an industry of human suffering that dwarfs the slave trade of earlier centuries. 

In thinking and praying about where we are and where we’re headed, I came across Walter Brueggemann’s "Nineteen Counterscript Theses", presented at the 2004 Emergent Conference and published in The Christian Century in 2004. 

Points one to six:

1. "Everybody has a script. People live their lives by a script that is sometimes explicit but often implicit.

2. "We are scripted by a process of nurture, formation and socialization that might go under the rubric of liturgy. Some of the liturgy is intentional work, much of it is incidental; but all of it, especially for the young and especially for the family, involves modeling the way the world "really is." The script is inhaled along with every utterance and every gesture, because the script-bestowing community is engaged in the social construction of a distinct reality.

3. "The dominant script of both selves and communities in our society, for both liberals and conservatives, is the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life. §         I use the term therapeutic to refer to the assumption that there is a product or a treatment or a process to counteract every ache and pain and discomfort and trouble, so that life may be lived without inconvenience.

•  I use the term technological, following Jacques Ellul, to refer to the assumption that everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity; there is no issue so complex or so remote that it cannot he solved.
•  I say consumerist, because we live in a culture that believes that the whole world and all its resources are available to us without regard to the neighbor, that assumes more is better and that "if you want it, you need it." Thus there is now an advertisement that says: "It is not something you don’t need; it is just that you haven’t thought of it."
•  The militarism that pervades our society exists to protect and maintain the system and to deliver and guarantee all that is needed for therapeutic technological consumerism. This militarism occupies much of the church, much of the national budget and much of the research program of universities.
• It is difficult to imagine life in our society outside the reach of this script; it is everywhere reiterated and legitimated.

4.  "This script—enacted through advertising, propaganda and ideology, especially in the several liturgies of television—promises to make us safe and happy. . .

5.  "That script has failed. . . . We are not safe, and we are not happy. . .

6.  "Health depends, for society and for its members, on disengaging from and relinquishing the failed script.

The script Brueggemann describes is disturbingly visible in events like the Superbowl extravaganza. 

Sociology professor Michael Vos, exploring the theology of women, the body, consumption, violence, and control expressed in the Superbowl, asks:

"I wonder how we, as the people of God, might counternarrate the Super Bowl—this iconic event so disturbingly representative of what counts as sacred in our culture. In a way, our collective witness in the midst of this nation-defining event—the story we tell outside of church—is so much more important than the story we tell inside of church. For this outside story bears witness to our inside story. Will we imagine women in the way Doritos does? Will we pretend that we can simply mentally dismiss particular components of the Super Bowl "package" and in this way resist its hegemonic control? Or will we provide a compelling and alternative story about what it means to be image-bearers, in physical bodies, who live for a different sort of world." 

I just spent two days at a conference run by PASA, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Surprisingly, the theme of narrative and counternarrative surfaced repeatedly in the main sessions, seminars, even side conversations: are we all commodities, or something more? Is land a resource to be consumed, or a gift to be renewed, a regenerative treasure? Is value measured best by dollars, or by moments of beauty, rich relationship, generous community?

Even more, the conversation turned, again and again, to this: our systems are broken. It all needs to change. And until it all changes, nothing changes. 

The season of Lent is an essential time for disengaging from the pervasive narrative we live in, and for envisioning an alternative narrative. The Israelites, unable to picture any world but Egypt, spent forty years in the wilderness, disengaging from the past, preparing for the future. Jesus, preparing for his ministry, spent forty days in the wilderness; confronted there with the narrative of power, comfort, and consumption, he affirmed an alternative, where power resides in God’s hands alone, where comfort is found in obedience, not self-protection, where spiritual nourishment precedes physical.

I’ve been feeling the need, more than ever, to find in Lent an occasion of examination, of disengagement from that "therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarist narrative" Brueggemann describes. My time at the PASA conference encouraged me further to undertake what Brueggemann suggests is the role of the church: "the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe and joyous."

My own church has been moving slowly through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' own articulation of that alternative script. While the Superbowl ads, game, half time show, insist that we will be happiest if we win, if we consume, if we look a certain way, drive a certain car, fulfill every need the moment we imagine it, the Beatitudes and passages following offer a stark alternative.

I want that alternative. 

I see, more and more clearly, where our current script leads: unhealthy food, unhealthy relationships, unhealthy environment, unhealthy minds, exploitation of child labor, of women’s bodies, of water and land, hardening of conscience as we excuse our own complicity in an abusive, immoral system.

My goal for Lent is to look for ways to extricate myself from the exploitative aspects of our economy and culture, to find out more about fair trade, fair farming, restorative justice, socially responsible investment

And to affirm that alternative script proclaimed and demonstrated by Jesus himself, a life-giving story in which the last become first, the leaders are servants, and those with least, those most burdened, most willing to face the brokenness around them, find themselves comforted, nourished, blessed.

Please join me in this exploration.  Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

This is the first in a series that will continue through Lent (February 13 to March 31). 

Chocolate Dreams

noukorama,Flickr Creative Commons

I love chocolate. Let me repeat – I LOVE chocolate. In all forms: candy bars, cocoa, cake, frosting.

Over the past fifty years I have bought a LOT of chocolate. I’m fairly sure my first personal purchase was a chocolate cupcake, at the bakery at Four Corners, our neighborhood shopping mecca. Every postcard I sent home from camp was smeared in chocolate – most likely the chocolate coating from the ice cream bars I bought every afternoon in the little camp canteen. My first gift from a boy was a whole box of Reeses miniature peanut butter cups –bought in that same camp store.

In all my purchases of chocolate – bagfuls to throw at youth retreats, bowlfuls to pass at planning seminars or youth group leaders’ meetings – I missed the memo about cocoa sourcing. I didn’t realize – until just last week – that most of our US chocolate is sourced from West African plantations where child labor is the norm, and child slavery is common.

I’m still a little stunned, I confess. I’ve been aware of human trafficking. I’ve been a strong supporter of Fair Trade. I’ve been buying my coffee from farmer’s cooperatives for years – and somehow missed the chocolate story.

In 2001, news reports in the US and UK called attention to child slavery on cocoa farms in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire . Downward pressure on cocoa prices had made it impossible for cocoa farmers to pay their employees; as a result, desperate farmers were using children to harvest crops. Children as young as six were being kidnapped, or sold, or lured into service with the unfulfilled promise that they would be given money at the end of their time of service.

Dark Side of Chocolate 2010

Under pressure from consumers, the major chocolate manufacturers agreed to the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a non-binding document that acknowledged the problem and outlined a plan to address it. The companies agreed that by 2002 they would create enforceable international standards and an independent monitoring system, and would provide funds for a foundation to research and share best practices. They also agreed that by 2005 there would be industry-wide standards of certification ensuring an end to child slavery and abuse of child labor.

A decade later, the protocol deadlines have passed, the cocoa producing regions of the world are even poorer than before, and child slavery has expanded. Last spring, ten years after the signing of the protocol, a study by Tulane University found that more than 1.8 million children in West Africa are involved in cultivating and harvesting cocoa. Estimates are that at a significant percentage of those are actual slaves – numbers range from 100 to 200 thousand. Few attend school. Most are involved in high risk activities, applying dangerous pesticides, carrying heavy loads that leave scarred backs, beaten with bicycle chains or coca branches when they fall behind..

The two largest US firms involved in slave-trade chocolate: Mars and Hersheys.

You know Mars: makers of M&M's, Snickers, Dove, Milky Way, Kudos, and a wide range of other foods and candies. Mars is still owned by the Mars family --  chairman John Franklyn Mars, VP Jacqueline Badger Mars, and former CEO Forrest Mars Jr. Together the Mars siblings are worth forty billion dollars, making their family one of the wealthiest in the world. How much of that wealth was at the expense of children working twelve or more hours a day, with no shoes, no school, little food, no pay?

CNN Chocolate Child Slaves 2010

While Mars has made only small moves toward monitoring cocoa sources for the chocolate they sell in the European Union (but not in the US), the Hershey company has done even less. Hershey is the largest supplier of chocolate in the US - Resse’s. Kisses. Nutrageous. 5th Avenue. Almond Joy. Caramello. Heath. Kit Kat. Mounds. Mr. Goodbar. Rolo. Symphony. Take5. York. Whatchamacallit. The list goes on and on. 


According to a 2011 report by the International Labor Rights Forum, Green America and Global Exchange, “Hershey remains a laggard in its industry on the important issue of child labor. Consumers, businesses, and legislators are increasingly embracing greater transparency and the reduction of labor abuses in supply chains. The most iconic chocolate company in the US … is the lone holdout.” 

Fortunately for chocolate lovers everywhere, there are alternatives, and from now on, I’ll be seeking them out. Equal Exchange has been working with small farmer cooperatives since 1986, and has moved increasingly into cocoa and chocolate production in the past ten years. Equal Exchange is itself worker owned and run, and encourages democratic decision making and shared best practices at every level of their supply chain.

Divine Chocolate is another bright spot in the world of chocolate. The company partners with Kuapa Kokoo, a cooperative of cocoa farmers from Ghana. All cocoa comes from the cooperative, ensuring the farmers fair prices, protection from price volatility, and a say in how the cocoa is produced and marketed.

There are other ethical chocolate companies working hard to treat farmers well and ensure fair wages and education for child workers while providing delicious chocolate. Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and any fair trade or natural food store will offer a selection.

But think for a minute: if you had forty billion dollars (the collective wealth of the Mars siblings), what would it take to change the lives of the children in your supply chain? In a country where a living wage is less than $2 a day, and annual salary is less than $700, it would take $70,000,000 to pay 100,000 children a generous wage. Add some schooling, throw in some shoes, and you won’t even notice it’s missing.  

Green America Chocolate Scorecard

All the big chocolate companies have made gestures toward addressing this problem. International watchdog groups say not nearly enough. The agreement was to have slave trade in chocolate solved years ago. The most recent Tulane report, overseen by the State Department, was that less than 3% of cocoa farmers in West Africa had any awareness at all of a move to address child labor.

Sometimes it feels like it takes too much work to live as an ethical consumer in a profit-mad world. Why should I have to research my chocolate before I eat it? Why should I need to debate pros and cons before I order a cup of hot cocoa? Does it matter where Wegman’s gets the cocoa in their chocolate cakes? What about the chocolate in brownie mix? Just thinking about it exhausts me.

But then I stop to think of the exhaustion of small children, lugging huge bags of cocoa pods on their backs. Of young boys, scaling trees with machetes, swinging tired arms, too often missing and hitting legs instead. Of hungry pre-teen girls, chopping away, day after day, at mountains of cocoa pods.

On the Slave Free Chocolate site, I came across this:

In Conclusion: Circumspectus Orbit. Look around you. If you accept that which you are aware is intrinsically wrong and have influence over, have you not contributed to its existence? You are what you do. . . Willful blindness will not buy divine absolution. That which is ignored will not cease to exist.  Closing one’s eyes serves only to feed the rabid, gaping maw of indifferent, self-serving greed, the continued existence of harsh injustice and the exponential growth of dehumanizing inequality; and in the process . . . makes us responsible accomplices.

That which is ignored will not cease to exist.

So, while I dream of a day when large corporations do the right thing, because they can, because people count more than profit, I’ll act in full knowledge that I do have influence, no matter how small, and I’ll use it on behalf of those children who have none.

I’ll sign the online petitions and campaigns.




I’ll look for Fair Trade chocolate (and cocoa, and brownie mix, and ice cream).

I'll try some creative ideas - like a Valentine's Day greeting on manufacturers' facebook pages,  reminding them that I can't eat their chocolate until they address their cocoa sourcing and pay cocoa farmers a fairer price.



And I’ll pray – for conviction where needed, for courage where needed, for freedom for the oppressed,  justice for the poor, fair prices for the farmer, slave-free delicious chocolate for us all. 


As always, comments, ideas, suggestions are welcome. Click on the _comments line below for the comment box to appear.