God's Economy - Week 1: Economics

SUMMARY AND PRACTICES

Yesterday in Forum class we began our series on Economics. Our word for “economy” comes from the Greek word oikonomia, meaning the “law or management of the household.” (That means the phrase “home economics” is redundant!) As Christians, we are members of God’s household. Over the next couple months we are going to explore what the laws of God’s household are. We are going to explore God’s economy.

We started our study yesterday by taking a moment to remind ourselves of the abundant fruitfulness of God’s creation. Walter Brueggemann has called creation a liturgy of God’s abundance. We celebrated that abundance by reading from Psalm 104, a poem many scholars believe is a kind of poetic commentary on the biblical creation story.

Then we began discussing how the economies of the world – in particular, capitalism and communism—have at their foundation “the myth of scarcity.” We looked closely at the second half of the story of Jacob, Joseph, and Joseph’s brothers in the book of Genesis. We saw how, after the people of Israel had settled in Egypt under Joseph’s care, a severe famine came on the land. We saw how over the course of three years all the people of Egypt, their livestock, and their land became part-and-parcel of Pharaoh’s monopoly. Even in the midst of the famine, the people of Israel flourished as a community of abundance—but they were now under the control of the Egyptian imperial economy, and by the first chapter of Exodus, under the rule of a new Pharaoh, they were forced to build store cities for the empire’s wealth, forced to make bricks, forced to work in the fields, ruthlessly enslaved, and were the victims of genocide. As Christians, we can and should relate to the people of Israel. But 21^st century America bears a striking resemblance to ancient imperial Egypt. How do we, as Jesus followers, live in that tension?

We got a brief glimpse of the “Sabbath economics”—the economics of enough—that God would teach God’s people during their 40 years of wandering in the desert, but we will have to pick up that discussion some other time. Next week, perhaps.

We were also reminded how important, and how personal discussions are about economics, money, and debt. These are topics we are often afraid or embarrassed to discuss. There were some tears, some confessions, and some visions of a community characterized by radical generosity and care.

This week we began adding opportunities for praxis to our time together. Here are the three practices we settled on. If you do one or more of these practices this week, and feel comfortable sharing, we’d love to hear about your experience next week in class.

1. What are the things you are anxious about when you wake up, the concerns that you think about as you lay in bed staring at the ceiling? Each morning this week, prayerfully offer those concerns up to God.
2. Every day this week, write down three or four things you are grateful for. No repeats!
3. This week, pick one item in your house, your garage, or your table, and try to trace back its story. For example, how did your cup of coffee get to you? Where was the coffee grown? Who grew, picked, and dried it? What are their working conditions? Is the coffee fair trade and, if so, what difference can that make? How was the coffee likely shipped? Was it roasted locally? Where did you buy it? And on and on. We are all plugged in to a global economy, so my breakfast ties me to people in Africa (coffee), Latin America (banana), the Midwest (wheat bread), and New England (butter). Our stuff has a story…and the story has faces.