Jitterbugging for Jesus

I think it was Moses–or was it Benjamin Franklin–who said:

“Waste not, want not.”

Probably Moses.

Here’s a startling fact that would no doubt appall him:

More than 40 percent of the food grown in the United States of America every year is left to rot in fields, or thrown in landfills.

This at a time when millions of men, women and children go to bed hungry every night in what is still far and away the wealthiest, greatest nation in the world.

It’s an especially startling fact in light of the divine but neglected principle of “gleaning” we find in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.

From my book The View From Down in Poordom: Reflections on Scriptures Addressing Poverty, available at the online bookstores at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and WestBow Press.

I’m quite busy these days with a couple of writing assignments. But I’ll be posting occasional “Noon Wine” posts in the days or weeks ahead on the topic of gleaning, the biblical principle on which the entire, wonderful book of Ruth turns.

With intense debates and discord going on about how to provide care for those laid low by everything from illness and injury to hunger and homelessness, I aim to unpack what the the Bible, especially the Torah, has to say about providing for the vulnerable folks including aliens and refugees.

The Torah shows that providing food for foreigners and other strangers among us–as well as those we know and live with, work with and worship with–is an expectation for Jews and Christians alike.

The Torah exhorts us in Leviticus 19:9-10:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest… you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.

“You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather all the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien.

The poor and the alien. That is, your neighbor and the stranger who might be an undocumented immigrant or war refugee.

The Torah emphasizes that because I’m blessed with more than enough food, I have a social responsibility to share with anyone who has little or none.

I have that spiritual obligation whether it’s to the neighbor in my town whose spouse died and I greet with food so he or she won’t have to cook, or it’s the refugee from some ravaged country.

That very well may be a country that my own country is largely responsible for ravaging with its endless military adventures and ever-ballooning military-industrial complex.

(Never forget: it was an under-rated conservative Republican president and World War II hero who had the foresight to see and to warn us about the militarist nation we’ve become.)

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The way I see it, you and I have a biblical and social responsibility to those who, as an example, might be a fearful family of undocumented workers taking sanctuary in a church basement out of fear that the family will be split up when aggressive ICE agents come around armed to the teeth.

Mind you, those undocumented aliens among us, who may have made a good and honest living toiling in American crop fields and contributed to our American economy by making our food so cheap, are likely to be from some country in the Southern Hemisphere where American and multi-national corporations displaced them from their own private land that they had happily and productively farmed for hundreds of years.

This still happens every day down here south of the U.S. border, where corporate behemoths seize huge amounts of land for mines or dams, making them the “gleaners” who risk life and limb to flee to the U.S.

They have little choice but to leave behind the violent drug cartels and corrupt, violent, U.S.-backed governments that fill the voids.

Political rhetoric that dehumanizes, demonizes and scapegoats the poor, the refugee and the immigrant is easy enough to spew out. It seems to give a lot of people a puffed-up sense of moral superiority to talk the poor, the homeless, the immigrants and the refugees.

Recently, shamefully, it’s come to this in the healthcare debate: We now have officeholders in D.C. and statehouses who scapegoat even the sick and disabled, wanting to deny them medical care because they haven’t lived the healthy lifestyles of monks who work the fields to consume small portions of the foods they toil to produce in solidarity with the poor gleaners of the world.

As if those political officeholders never indulge in unhealthy gluttony at $50,000 fund-raising events where they hobnob with the perennial “fat cats” who literally write U.S. legislation concerning health care and crop subsidies for U.S. farmers.

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Drilling down to the root causes of crises involving the poor, the hungry and the aliens among us requires mature thought, civilized discussion and debate, a lot of foresight, hard work, compassion, and intelligent leadership in D.C. and the state capitols–as well as in churches and other houses of faith.

(Sadly, intelligent faith leadership that is not exactly a hallmark of perennial shysters like Jerry Falwell Jr. or Pat Robertson, who–amazingly–have places at the head of the table in the White House now.)

* * *

Nobody ever said that being a compassionate, merciful, faith-based or morally based nation that treats all the vulnerable people within its borders with equal protection and mercy is easy.

Then again, it’s not that complicated if we let the wisdom of Bible, starting with the Torah, be our guide.