Week 22 Sunday
Week 22 Sunday
Famine Needed!
Leviticus 5:1-10
Last week we were dealing with selfish competition as a cause of sin. We must look at it again until this fact burns itself into our souls.
India is the poorest and richest country of the world. Here we have the world’s richest people and the world’s poorest side by side. A poor person will say, “Sahib, that wage means only half a stomach for me and my family.” Wages not in terms of the possibility of the latest car, but of half a stomachful.
In the midst of this India, I sat and talked with an able missionary, devoted and hardworking. He said: “What we need is another famine to get rid of surplus stocks. That will raise the prices and will bring back prosperity.” I felt as though I had been struck, for the statement was serious and thoughtful. Now, here was a man of most gentle, loving disposition talking about the necessity—mark the word—of another famine. Look at that word famine until it is no longer a word but a fact—the fact of living skeletons, of babies, thin and scrawny, sucking in vain at the dry breasts of famished mothers—but you can’t look any longer, for you’re sick at the thought. And yet a missionary, a Christian, a father of little children, said we needed that—that! It horrifies you? Yes.
The thing that horrifies me most is not that he said it, but that what he said was true—under this order. In a competitive order you have to produce scarcity, in other words, a famine, to keep up prices, to bring back prosperity. There is something wrong here. And the thing that is wrong is the system itself. It must be changed.
“Hush, don’t say that; you’ll lose some of your friends.” My answer is simple and final: If I don’t say it, I’ll lose my own soul. For I cannot tolerate an order that causes my gentle friend to sin by saying we need a famine. Can you?
O Christ, we ask you to give us a burning sense of shame that we have tolerated and still tolerate an order where famine is our suggested remedy. Forgive us. Amen.
Week 22 Monday
Employer and Employee
Amos 5:11; 8:4-9
A phase of this competitive system works out in relations between employer and employee. Does it then become a cause of sin on both sides? It does.
Here is an employer who is a gentle, kindly person and desires to be a Christian. His Christianity tells him that he should do unto others as he would like to be done by, were he an employee. If he were an employee, he would like as high a wage as possible under the circumstances. He has to compete with others, though, so he hires workers at the lowest wage possible. The competitive order loads the situation against his being a Christian; it causes him to sin.
Some of the employees may be young girls, and because of the insufficiency of their wages they are tempted, yes, pushed to sell their virtues to feed their bodies. The employer’s forcing down wages becomes a cause of sin.
The employees may not go that far, but may simply take it out in resentment. To harbor resentment, according to the gospel, is sin. The system causes that sin too.
Because the employee feels wronged, resentment may be shown in poor work done, loafing on the job. Skimped work is not honest; it is sin. The order caused that sin.
It may be that the employee is getting a decent wage but knows that if he or she is efficient, there will be an end of the job the sooner. What incentive is there to work harder if in doing so the job is ended? The pressure is to string out as long as possible. This is not honest, hence sin. The system caused the sin.
The employer, finding his employees lying down on a job, reacts in anger. He tightens the screws. More resentment. The situation goes from bad to worse—a strike, a lockout. Hate. The system was a cause of sin to both.
O Christ, we have been caught in the meshes of an impossible situation. Our souls are ground by the very machines we have produced. Help us to a way out. Amen.
Week 22 Tuesday
Worshiping the Machine
Exodus 32:8; Isaiah 3:8; Revelation 13:16-17
We ended up yesterday by showing how the system runs both employee and employer into a clash.
Two pack ponies, trudging wearily up the steep Himalayan mountainsides, loaded with too heavy burdens, jostled each other on the narrow pathway. One kicked and broke the other’s leg. Their burdens made them bad-tempered. The system lays too heavy a burden on both employer and employee. The kick of the lockout or the strike is the result. Somebody is always crippled.
“But what are you going to do, if you see new machinery introduced that sends half of us to the bread lines? ‘Labor-saving machinery’ indeed; ‘labor-sacrificing’ would be a better name,” someone retorts. I agree. This system causes the employer to shut eyes, tighten lips, install the machinery, and let the workers go—to the bread line and the park bench. It causes the employer to sin.
Once a year the Hindus worship their tools. Did the tools not provide them bread that year and should they not be grateful? I was in a great steel mill on that day one year and saw them decorating the huge machines with flowers and plantain leaves and palms and making merry, bowing to the machines in worship.
I think I too could have bowed to the machine—not in worship, but in gratitude—if I knew that the machine were harnessed to a cooperative order and used for the collective good. But I knew those machines were in the hands of a competitive order, and because of the fierceness of competition they would be replaced by “labor-saving” machines, and many of the laborers would be thrown into unemployment. Poor wretches, I thought, “If they only knew! Worshiping that which will send many of them to the scrap heap!”
No, I cannot worship the machine. Not now. Someday, I hope to bow to it in gratitude because it is in the hands of cooperation. Now the spirit behind it causes people to sin.
O Christ, your best gifts to us become a curse because we do not know how to use them. Forgive us and help us to find a new way—your way. Amen.
Week 22 Wednesday
Another Cause of Sin: War
Psalm 68:30; Isaiah 2:4; Matthew 26:52
Another phase of selfish competition is war. Selfish competition works out into international relationships and then war!
Even with the clouds of war in the sky and the world filled with increasing armaments, I am not hopeless about getting rid of war. Look where we have come from! In 2 Samuel 11:1, we read: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, . . . David remained at Jerusalem.” Kings went out to battle when the springtime came, exactly as a farmer goes to spring plowing, and as regularly. It was news when David stayed at home.
And then the Bhagavad Gita, the very cream of India’s philosophy, is a philosophical defense of war. We have come a long way since then. Practically every nation on earth has signed a pact renouncing war. War is now sin. Are we ready to live up to it? No, not yet. But a conscience is being created. Fifty years ago had Italy attacked Abyssinia, we should have shrugged our shoulders. Now we are profoundly stirred. A conscience is forming. And a conscience is a terrible thing when it does form. Conscience banished slavery and conscience will banish war.
The world was never so near to war and never so near to getting rid of war. We are not more warlike than we used to be. We are far less. But science has thrown us together as a world by its rapid communications, and it has at the same time put into our hands terrible instruments of destruction. The result? Fear. It is fear, not warlikeness, that is driving us to war.
If the very center of life could be changed from competition to cooperation, then war would drop off like a dead leaf. But war is almost inevitable in a world based on competition.
Selfish competition makes us sin the chief of collective sins—war. I therefore want a cooperative world.
O Christ, we stand before this appalling fact of war. If ever we needed your help, we need it here. And if ever we needed to follow you, it is at this place. Help us to do it. Amen.
Week 22 Thursday
My Attitude toward War
Exodus 20:13; Isaiah 9:6; John 18:36
During World War I, I preached on these two texts: “Herod and his soldiers treated Jesus with contempt” (Luke 23:11 CEB) and “When the mob saw the commander and his soldiers, they stopped beating Paul” (Acts 21:32). Militarism treated Jesus with contempt, but then it does defend the weak and defenseless. That was my theme. Of course German militarism was treating Jesus with contempt; and we were on the defensive protecting the defenseless. How blinded I was! Every nation felt the same.
The distinction between the offensive and defensive war has for all practical purposes broken down. There is nothing left to do but to renounce all war. And that I do. And I’ll tell you why. My chief reason is that war causes people to sin. People caught in the war spirit do things they would not dream of doing otherwise. It causes us to sin in the following ways:
1. It poisons the air with lies. The first casualty in war is Truth. You cannot fight your enemy unless you make the enemy out a devil. Lying propaganda attends to that.
2. It poisons the air with hate. If the first casualty is Truth, the second casualty is Love. Bitter, burning hate settles into the breasts of millions. The very air becomes poisonous with it. You cannot breathe without breathing it. Hellish hate.
3. It makes people sin economically. [At the time of World War I] a shot from a big gun cost $500, the equivalent of 20,000 loaves of bread. The economic cost of the war is estimated at $337,000,000,000, so that if we had paid $20 an hour since the birth of Christ, we would not have finished paying for it. And yet we wonder why the world is hungry! War is economic sin—a sin against hunger.
4. It causes us to sin against persons. One estimate of the indirect and direct loss of life from World War I reached 40,000,000 lives, so that if these dead could march past us 10 abreast, it would take 184 days for them to pass. And they the flower of our race!
O Christ, how can we stand indifferent before this collective madness? We do not. We hate it. We renounce it. Amen.
Week 22 Friday
My Attitude toward War (continued)
Micah 4:3; Matthew 5:21-22; James 4:2
Yesterday I began to tell why I renounce war. I must continue. War causes us to sin:
5. By killing the conscience. Here is the portion of an address delivered July 19, 1918, by a drill sergeant drilling boys in the use of the bayonet:
You’ve got to get down and hook them out with a bayonet; you will enjoy that I assure you. Get sympathy out of your head. If you see a wounded German, shove him out and have no nonsense about it. . . . Kill them, every mother’s son of them. Remember your job is to kill them, exterminate the vile creatures. . . . I remember a corporal saying to me, pointing to some German prisoners close by, “Can I do these blokes in, sir?” I said, “Please yourself.” He did. When the corporal came back, he said, “I felt something that I never felt before. . . . I felt what it was like to kill; but it’s d—d hard to get it out, he had a belly like iron!”*
War does that to a man. That!
6. It lays hold of the finest virtues and prostitutes them. It lays hold of patriotism, heroism, self-sacrifice, idealism, and turns them toward destruction. It takes this fine gold and turns it into the very coin of hell.
7. It sins against the helpless. War protects? When? Where? Did it protect millions of little children from starving? And millions of mothers and widows from weeping beside their dead? Protect the helpless? It produced them.
8. It stands against everything that Christ stands for. It sins against Christ. If war is right, Christ is wrong; and if Christ is right, war is wrong. If Christ stays in this world, war must go. If war stays, Christ must go. Or if he does stay, he must be blown to pieces on a thousand battlefields.
Christ and war are irreconcilables. They are not “compossible.” If I must make my choice, I choose Jesus. Therefore I renounce war.
O Christ, we pray you to help us to make the break complete. And help us to help others to see the light until we shall have a warless world. Amen.
* Source unknown.
Week 22 Saturday
The War Gods’ End
Matthew 5:43-45; Romans 12:19-21
I once saw the Hindus worshiping their two war gods. They worshiped them with the deepest reverence and most passionate loyalty, and then a strange thing happened. Immediately after the ceremony, the tension seemed to relax, the spirit of reverence left, and they put their war gods on a platform and carried them to the river and dumped them in most unceremoniously. When I asked the reason for this sudden change of attitude, they replied, “After the worshiping has taken place, the spirit goes out of them, and they are only common clay.”
I thought I saw light. We have been worshiping the war gods for centuries. Ardently we have sacrificed the finest of our youth and the noblest of our virtues upon that altar. We thought something was there—protection, chivalry, duty, love of country, perhaps even God. But now we are disillusioned. The spirit has gone out of the thing for us. There is nothing there except lies and blood and mud and hate and hunger and death and desolation. We cannot worship that, not now. Yes, the real spirit has gone out of the thing. It is just clay. No more.
The painted mustaches of the Hindu war gods were still there after the departure of the spirit, turned up still in triumph. But it was only paint. There was no spirit in it. Mussolini and Hitler and Araki may repaint those mustaches, but it is the painting of the dead. True, we shall still carry these dead gods through our civilization, and we shall try to make the people think they still live and can do something for them. They will not. Our eyes are open.
I tell you: They are dead the moment you cease worshiping them. Never, never again shall I bow at their shrine. They are only clay.
The next step is to the river bank! We shall do it someday.
O Christ, your hand, your terrible hand, is on our consciences. Help us to put these strange gods away. They belong to our ignorant, barbarous past. Help us to begin anew—without war. Amen.