Joseph’s Experiment With Redistribution

I’m shifting my schedule by a day this week for this extra post on the Joseph story.

In a recent Food in the Bible post on Exodus 3:7-8 one of the intelligent readers of this blog (if you read my blog I assume you must be above average and good-looking) asked a question about my charcterization of Joseph’s policy to deal with famine as “misguided.” Wasn’t it God’s will for Joseph to interpret the dreams and save the people from famine (including his own family)? If the policy was wrong, then was God wrong? I think it will help to look closely at the text.

First let’s look at what Joseph’s actual plan was for dealing with the famine,

Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land, and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plenteous years. Let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to befall the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine. (41:34-36)

So, take one-fifth of the produce of the land and store it up for the seven bad years. Good idea. What happens when the time comes?

He gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities; he stored up in every city the food from the fields around it. So Joseph stored up grain in such abundance–like the sand of the sea–that he stopped measuring it; it was beyond measure. (41:48-49)

It says that Joseph stored up all the food. The plan was pretty specific about storing only one-fifth of the produce, so I take the general term “all” to mean that Joseph did not follow this policy. The description of the amount of food is intended to make clear exactly how ridiculous the amount of food he stored was. I will speculate that Joseph took as much food as he could without people dying. So, the people lived a subsistence existence only keeping enough food to survive on.

Why did Joseph do this? We don’t know. Maybe he was worried that one-fifth wouldn’t be enough. Maybe the power got to him. It tends to do that as we see when we turn to the famine years in chapter 47.

Now there was no food in all the land, for the famine was very severe… Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, in exchange for the grain that they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house. (47:13a, 14)

Next the Egyptians come asking for more food. So, Joseph asks for their livestock. That goes on for a year until the livestock are all gone. (It’s worth noting here that the livestock and the money are not “all gone.” They are now the property of Pharaoh.) So, the people again ask for food saying, “Buy us and our land in exchange for food…just give us seed, so that we may live and not die.” (47:19). They are forced to sell themselves into slavery and leave themselves landless. Well, now who is going to work the land? The landless slaves of course.

“Now that I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh, here is seed for you; so the land. And at the harvests you shall give one-fifth to Pharaoh, and four-fifths shall be your own, as seed for the field and as food for yourselves and your households, and as food for your little ones” (47:23-24)

Lest we forget, this is in the midst of a famine. The reason they are coming to Joseph is because they have no food and can grow no food. His solution is to take their land and their freedom and tell them to go back to the land they no longer own and try growing some food. Notice that the specific number of one-fifth returns at this point. Now that the people have become landless slaves, Joseph is handing out seeds instead of food (Where did the “sea” of food go?). Now that he’s forcing the people to grow the food he promised them he’s also requiring them to give the one-fifth that was supposed to be collected during the years of abundance, not the years of famine. Joseph says it all with a big smile as if he’s doing them a favor.

So, there are probably a number of ways of interpreting this. 1) You could claim that the whole thing was God’s will. What we perceive as injustice and/or suffering might just be part of God’s bigger plan (i.e. bringing the Hebrew people out of slavery later to create the nation of Israel) 2) You could claim that Joseph’s original policy was God’s will and he botched it because of his own greed, incompetence or both. Or 3) it is not at all clear from the text that Joseph’s policy was given by God at all.

The first option makes light of suffering, injustice and evil and cannot be reconciled with the portrait of YHWH as a God of justice. The second option is fine if you need the plan of action to be ordained by God for some reason, but it seems to me from the text that the policy was Joseph’s idea. It might have worked out better if he had followed through, but he didn’t.

I think the Bible is made up of some passages that describe the way the world should be and some that just describe the way things are. My opinion is that this falls into the latter category.

Relocation and Reorientation

I will be teaching the Netzer Co-op May 17th on “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire.” This is the last installment thinking through what this might mean.

The mark of relocation for new monastics has most often involved downward mobility to urban places that are the places most people least want to visit let alone live. I respect and admire many of these people for their willingness to abandon the excesses and comfort of Empire for the challenge of living with the poor. They are on to something important about geography and place. They commit themselves to a particular place and particular people where they attempt to incarnate the universal gospel. This is absolutely essential to our practice of Christianity.

However, whenever we take a particular way or model of living out the gospel as the only way, we tend to miss the point. For example, what if all faithful Christians decided that this mark was consistent with the gospel and should be followed? There would be a reverse “white flight” of suburban soccer moms to the inner cities. The intruding hordes of guilty middle class families would simply overwhelm these poor neighborhoods and most likely do more damage than good. It would be gentrification with the best intentions. Is this the vision of new monastics or the kingdom? No.

New monastics, as I see it, are living out the gospel in a radical way in order to 1) shed light on the inadequacy of the way we currently practice Christianity and 2) to invite us into a different way of being the church in the world. This is what monastics have always done when the church goes astray. So, not everyone should relocate to the inner city, but the witness of these monastics points us to something important.

I would like to suggest that the mark of relocation really gets at is a reorientation of our lives toward the marginalized and oppressed. When the kingdom of God begins to inform and permeate our lives and perspectives, we are reoriented towards those that society forgets and marginalizes. This does not necessarily involve physically relocating our lives, work and families to a new geographic location. It does mean that we can no longer see our current context in the same way.

As I pointed out in the previous post on abandoned places, everything that Empire (that dominating system that has captured our imaginations) touches becomes an abandoned place. Consumerism leaves us all an empty shell, void of meaning or substance. To take it another step, our suburban lives, while far physically from the poor are as close as a trip to your local grocery store or big box chain to be instantly connected to people in China, Taiwan, Vietnam and the thousands of other places where the things we consume are produced. We don’t have to relocate to take action about the effects of Empire in our midst, but we do have to reorient our lives around the marginalized and oppressed so the veil can be lifted.

Abandoned Places of Empire

I will be teaching the Netzer Co-op May 17th on “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire.” This is the second installment thinking through what this might mean.

Where are these abandoned places? How do we find them? Do we have eyes to see?

The people who first articulated “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire” for the new monastic movement belonged to primarily urban communities. They saw the degradation and destruction that industrialization and gentrification had wreaked on their communities. Many places were little more than wastelands where industrial waste and toxic sludge was dumped in many ways and forms. Nary a speck of green could be seen in these neighborhoods.

Many of these places are also food deserts, where food is not available within a convenient distance. Local grocers have been forced to close or move to better neighborhoods. According to those in power, city planners and officials, these places are eyesores, crime-ridden problems that can best be dealt with by turning them into something else for other people with more money. In other words, don’t deal with the problem just move it somewhere else.

As a church, we must open our eyes to these abandoned places and be willing to hear God’s call to uproot our lives in order to embody the kingdom in thsoe places. I want to take this one step further. We should also expand our ideas about where these abandoned places are. Farm policy since the 70s has steadily destroyed the small farms and with it many communities in America. When the interests of large corporations became the center of our farm policy many people and communities were abandoned and driven off their land.

Perhaps it isn’t as sexy to move to some hick town to serve the poor and abandoned. Nevertheless, these are places that God weeps over just as much as ghettos in urban areas. There may be other areas that have been affected by the Domination System that we have overlooked. We need eyes to see and ears to hear the cry of the oppressed that moved God in Exodus to liberate those slaves in Egypt.

Without spiritualizing this idea, I think we must also look around us and see the effects of Empire in our own lives and our neighbors. Suburbia is also abandoned in that there is also a lack of community and connection in those places. Abundance is an illusion when all of our things are destined for obsolescence and landfills. Empire dominates the entirety of our lives and has taken our imagination so captive that it is sometimes difficult just to see its effects. May we be awakened to the reality of Empire in our midst.

You have Heard it Said

Don’t get too wrapped up in the flag, ’cause every flag is subordinate to the cross.

- Cornel West

Considering the theme of Empire I started this week, I thought this was a great and appropriate quote to include. I also saw a T-shirt recently at a Christian bookstore that said “By His Stripes We Are Healed” with an image of red and white nails making up the stripes of the United States flag. I couldn’t quite figure out what made up the stars portion of the flag. I was in too great of shock. Never before have I seen such a blatant wedding of church and the state. Words of Isaiah typically applied to Jesus are being applied to the flag of a nation.

Who have we pledged our allegiance to?

What is Empire?

This may seem a digression from the topic of this blog, but if the question of what we should eat ultimately involves issues of justice then the answer must involve the church’s relationship to the state. There…now I’m justified in discussing this topic here.

I will be teaching the Netzer Co-op May 17th on “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire.” Some of you may recognize that this is one of the 12 “marks” of new monasticism. I’m in the early stages thinking through what I will talk about and how the evening will go. I thought it worth processing some of these thoughts here, particularly as they intersect my theology of food in numerous ways. I think I will organize the evening around three questions 1) What is Empire? 2) Where are the abandoned places of Empire? and 3) What does relocation mean? I’ll consider each of these questions in separate posts.

So, what is empire? Many call America an empire, but historians debate the accuracy of that description. In God and Empire, John Dominic Crossan defines empire as an entity that dominates in four areas military, economic, political and ideological.

Walter Wink calls empire a domination system. In order for this system to perpetuate its military dominance it must rely on the “myth of redemptive violence.” This is the idea that violence will be bring about peace and stability. This story so permeates our culture that we almost don’t see it. It is in almost every action movie, news story, cartoon, TV show and novel that we consume. It is the air we breathe. In fact the idea that violence can somehow achieve peace is so pervasive that we cannot even imagine the alternative, that nonviolence is a better way. We create elaborate “what if” scenarios to debunk the possibility of nonviolence. Empire dominates our imagination and molds us into a particular way of thinking, seeing and understanding the world.

Empire also controls economic power. This may be more difficult to put our finger on today than it was for Rome or other empires. Nevertheless, a shrinking number of companies and people control the flow of the world’s goods and capital. This could be an entire series of posts, but suffice it to say that the majority of the world’s people are not in control of the economic forces that run their lives. We have already considered how “free” the free market really is.

There is also the myth of democracy. In America this is most evident by looking closely at the two choices we seem to have in every election, Republican or Democrat. Both would have us believe that they are diametrically opposed to each other, yet they so often vote similarly and have similar agendas. The tell-tale sign is the money trail. All of the largest contributors to political campaigns and parties play both sides. Both Republicans and Democrats are beholden to the same corporate interests that finance them. It helps for people to believe that they have choices and can participate in the system, so that they can be co-opted to perpetuate as little change as possible.

Finally, empires dominate through ideology. Pax Romana or the American dream, what’s the difference? The thing that got the earliest Christians on the wrong side of Rome was not that they chose the wrong religion. Rome could care less who you worshipped…so long as you bowed down to Caesar as Lord. Imperial theology is the glue that holds the thing together. Propaganda is what allows empires to continue to dominate people and stay in power. The earliest Christians, indeed Jesus himself, got on Rome’s bad side because their message undermined the very glue that kept them in power.

After considering all of these elements I would like to suggest a definition of empire as that which defines the framework for thought and life and orders our lives over against the alternative imagination of the reign of God.