With every rapid turn of the spinning wheel, the soft, white lamb’s wool is spun out into delicate threads. The threads are twisted into yarn, and the yarn is woven into a fine cloth, the color of snow. Then the cloth is dipped into rare, bright dyes which the wool thirstily drinks — indigo for blue and violet, saffron for yellow and gold, cochineal and cinnabar for scarlet.
Such was the cloth that became Joseph’s coat of many colors. But at the sight of that costly coat, his brothers raged with envy and threw Joseph headlong into a deep, dark pit. Seeing Joseph in the pit, one brother asked, “How much money will we make if we kill our brother? Come let us sell him instead.” Thus, Joseph was sold for 20 pieces of silver to be a slave in Egypt.
Another sort of coat has been made for the religious right, spun by those outside their movement who are not so religious and not so very right. That coat is a cloak of obscurity, woven and tailored to hide the poor. To be sure, there are as many good deeds done by the religious right as there are flowers under the sun, but in opposing expanded access to Maine’s Medicaid program, known as MaineCare, the religious right consigns the poor to the blackest of nights.
Few among the leaders of the religious right have ever carried bricks to build a bank or a school. Nor have they ever seen a laborer, his swollen wrist in a brace, beg for work, saying he is strong enough to carry a heavy load. The sight of the homeless with bedraggled clothes and dirty faces never comes to their eyes, for it is a sight they do not wish to see.
When these castaways grow sick, the religious right recommends a quick visit to the emergency room, not knowing that the very poor cannot afford the health care needed to cure them of a serious or fatal disease. “Only let them work!” the leaders of the religious right cry out. But we must also include those who do work, but are too poor to afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
No Marxist, no matter how zealous, ever consigned the rich man, Dives, to eternal fire or rewarded Lazarus, a sick and infirm beggar, with the comforts of paradise — but Jesus did. The leaders of the religious right are content to look on, fold their arms, wag their tongues disdainfully and slander the poor.
This strange reversal of Christian teaching is too big a subject to be discussed here. Instead of blaming whole ideologies, institutions and denominations, what is needed is an appeal to the individual heart. Theologians once taught that Christ enjoined poverty on his disciples, and many of these same theologians agreed he did not even own his own robe and tunic.
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” But a still more overwhelming force is needed to pry Christians away from the teachings of Christ. The religious right has abandoned the precept “The love of money is the root of evil” for the contradictory opinion that profit and prosperity should be the goal of all men, and the guiding principle for all nations.
This false opinion, which some have called “the gospel of greed,” requires a blind faith in progress and efficiency. Only let there be a more powerful iPhone, better material goods and more commodities, and all will be well. In order for the gospel of greed to succeed, the disciple of progress and the apostle of profit must turn their eyes from the sight of human suffering, lest they lose faith in the power of avarice to cure the innumerable and endless afflictions of mankind.
And thus the sight of the lonely woman who dies from an otherwise curable disease or the shipwrecked man who spends his last night on earth crumpled in an alleyway, his arms and legs drawn up close to his shivering body for warmth, vanish quickly, lost in the glare of bright, glittering and abundant gold.
Fritz Spencer of Old Town is the former editor of the Christian Civic League RECORD.
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