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enough for us as faithful people to try to convince the government to do the right thing. The church, in the face of overwhelming crisis, must step into the breech and be church.”
Ufford-Chase said civil initiative “maintains and extends the rule of law … unlike civil disobedience, which breaks it, and civil obedience, which lets the government break it. The heart of a societal order guided by the rule of law is the principle that non-violent protection of basic rights is never illegal.
“If you were passing a pond with a ‘No trespassing’ sign, and saw a person in it yelling for help, you would not hesitate to jump in and try to save that person’s life,” Ufford-Chase said. “And no one in the community would accuse you of breaking the law. Even though you had violated a rule or statute, the rule of law had been furthered in the process.
“When we confront great need … the trick is to name the fundamental principles that hold us together as a people and figure out how we are going to live into those principles,” he added.
As examples of such non-violent activism, he cited Christian Peacemaker Teams that provide “a non-violent presence in the midst of overwhelming violence.” One has been in Baghdad since before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Others are in Colombia and along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ufford-Chase, speaking to an audience gathered in a large white tent with a panoramic view of the Rio Chama valley in northern New Mexico, presented a list of challenges he said the church and world face.
“You have the challenge of a world that has lied to us, a country that would like us to believe — our leaders that would like for us to believe — that it is possible for us as people of privilege and comfort and wealth to receive all the benefits of the global economy while taking no responsibility for the global community,” he said. “Eighty percent of the world’s population will work their fingers literally to the bone with no real expectation that their lives will get better, while 20 percent, including all of us seated here in this beautiful place, will receive the benefits of their labor.”
He said our society has a spiritual problem, a “gratitude problem,” an inadequate understanding of community, an addiction to violence, and a fixation on fear.
The spiritual problem, he said — quoting Mary Jo Leddy, author of Radical Gratitude — is a “captivity of craving.” “It works as long as people want more,” he said. “The problem is not the shopping — the problem arises when we think that we are buying identity, meaning and purpose in the process.”
Ufford-Chase said the world has a huge distribution-of-resources problem that is also “a deeply spiritual problem for you and for me.”
On the environment, he quoted Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, India, a speaker at a Presbyterians for Restoring Creation conference in Silver Bay, NY, earlier this month: “As a people, we have felt so small that we feel afraid. That’s why we must connect with one another as we expand ourselves into new communities and new understandings, even as we create an ever-diminishing footprint.
“We are living in a world in which increasingly everything, including those elements of God’s creation which sustain us, is for sale. … If you don’t have money, you don’t have access to water or clean air or the land.”
Shiva said during the earlier conference that it faith communities’ job to create grassroots, local-community-based expressions of democracy to demand justice in the use of resources.
“Christian communities today face challenge of living … the ideal of the first community of common possession, where no one claimed private ownership of what they had, where each made resources available to the others, and each one received according to his or her needs,” the moderator said. “The consequence of this would be the absence of needy persons in the community.”
Quoting Latin American theologian Franklyn Pimentel Torres, he said “many will consider us to be deluded,” but we should not stop working toward the Christian ideal of a just society in which people are more important than money and market.
“We must keep on (pointing out) that it is just and human for all to have enough to meet basic needs, whether material or spiritual,” he said. “We must stand against everything we are told about the way the world will work, and name the real values of community as God calls it. We have a challenge to a new kind of community.”
Regarding what he called our “addiction to violence,” he said the ultimate religious question of today is: “How can we find God in our enemies? What guilt was for Luther, the enemy has become for us — the goad that can drive us to God.”
Ufford-Chase said he was once asked by a Guatemalan pastor: “How can most powerful nation on earth be so afraid? You have all of the world’s resources available. You have a system of government that we would give anything to have — but you act like you have no say at all in what is done in your name.”
“Fear is the fundamental driving problem we are going to have to deal with for some time,” the moderator said, because “the fundamental, underlying principle behind both our politics and our theology as a nation” is that of exclusion ¾ to define a circle and keep others out.”
He proposed a different model: “A circle that is ever being pushed out, so that we can draw more people in. . . . Biblical tradition is that we are defined by the people to whom we extend ourselves to.”
He warned, however, that “if we are truly on the edge of the circle, extending our hands out … we will always be told by the dominant theology and politics that what we are doing is a subversive act.”
John Sniffen is associate editor of Presbyterians Today magazine. |
