Now the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their Jewish brothers. ^2 Some were saying, “We and our sons and daughters are numerous; in order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain.”

^3 Others were saying, “We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.”

^4 Still others were saying, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards. ^5 Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our countrymen and though our sons are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”

^6 When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry. ^7 I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials. I told them, “You are exacting usury from your own countrymen!” So I called together a large meeting to deal with them ^8 and said: “As far as possible, we have bought back our Jewish brothers who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your brothers, only for them to be sold back to us!” They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say.

^9 So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? ^10 I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let the exacting of usury stop! ^11 Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury you are charging them—the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine and oil.”

^12 “We will give it back,” they said. “And we will not demand anything more from them. We will do as you say.”

Then I summoned the priests and made the nobles and officials take an oath to do what they had promised. ^13 I also shook out the folds of my robe and said, “In this way may God shake out of his house and possessions every man who does not keep this promise. So may such a man be shaken out and emptied!”

At this the whole assembly said, “Amen,” and praised the Lord. And the people did as they had promised.

^14 Moreover, from the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, until his thirty-second year—twelve years—neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor. ^15 But the earlier governors—those preceding me—placed a heavy burden on the people and took forty shekels  of silver from them in addition to food and wine. Their assistants also lorded it over the people. But out of reverence for God I did not act like that. ^16 Instead, I devoted myself to the work on this wall. All my men were assembled there for the work; we  did not acquire any land.

^17 Furthermore, a hundred and fifty Jews and officials ate at my table, as well as those who came to us from the surrounding nations. ^18 Each day one ox, six choice sheep and some poultry were prepared for me, and every ten days an abundant supply of wine of all kinds. In spite of all this, I never demanded the food allotted to the governor, because the demands were heavy on these people.

^19 Remember me with favor, O my God, for all I have done for these people.

We have less than ninety days until the next presidential election. We have before us what is arguably the most fascinating race in my lifetime of voting and we have two interesting candidates on the ballot. The problem is that I don’t like either one of them. Some people are calling for a third party candidate and some say don’t vote at all. I am offering another suggestion—a write-in ballot, and this morning I am officially declaring my support for this man. I believe that we should find a way to resurrect Nehemiah and convince him to run for president. (Of course, Hebrew is written from right to left, so his bumper sticker is going to look a bit odd. We’ll have to run some focus groups to determine how to communicate to the masses that our guy is NOT the Muslim candidate!)

There is no question that Nehemiah is more qualified than our present two candidates. I would like to list my reasons for supporting Nehemiah, my talking points, if you will.  

· His foreign policy record is nearly perfect. He has a proven track record of working with leaders of other nations which resulted in increased safety, liberty and prosperity for his own country.

· He is an unqualified military genius. In a few weeks time, he gathered ordinary citizens and turned them into a fighting force which scared off armies from four surrounding nations—and he did it all without shedding a single drop of blood.

· He supports the right to bear arms. Nehemiah abhors violence, but he clearly supports the right of every household to bear arms for personal and national protection.

· He is famous for his success in the business world, specifically his construction business. Without the benefit of modern equipment or even skilled labor, he completed the massive construction process on time and well under budget. Moreover, he was solely responsible for gathering 100% of the funds to complete the project.

· Read his lips: he will never raise taxes. In fact, during his twelve year tenure as governor, not only did he never raise taxes, he refused to take a salary or even one shekel of tax money from his constituents.

· He is 100% prolife and has an untarnished record of human rights. In a single cabinet meeting, he reversed the disgusting practice of slavery in his country and championed individual freedom and basic human rights for every man, woman and child.

· His economic policy combines social justice and free market ideas. He placed proper restraints on wealthy land owners, and at the same time, Nehemiah fully supports the rights of private land ownership and free market wages.

· He is a man of faith. Some would argue that he comes off too strong in this area, but I am certain that we can put a more moderate spin on his radical views. J

In reality, the more I thought about this amazing man, the more I truly wished he could run for president! I promise you, I would not only vote for this man, but I would campaign for him to my last breath. Everything I listed here is not only true, but it is probably a gross understatement of his leadership genius and remarkable faith in God. We know what Nehemiah accomplished with completing the wall in fifty two days, but this chapter shows even more clearly that Nehemiah’s main goal was not merely to build a wall. The theme of this book is: A Vision for Building, but Nehemiah had a different kind of a vision—a vision for the glory of God, and he had a different kind of building in mind—building the kingdom of God. In addition to all of the problems associated with the wall and Israel’s enemies breathing down her neck, in chapter five, Nehemiah was presented with an equally monumental problem. But this time the problem was not an attack from without, but disintegration from within.

Israel was experiencing a famine, yet instead of working together and following the law of love and the law of liberty, fellow Israelites were oppressing and even enslaving one another. It was a social and economic tragedy and it came to light while they were rebuilding the wall. I could not even pretend to have filled Nehemiah’s shoes, but if I were leading the building campaign and I was approached with this problem, I would have pushed the problem aside and tried to tackle it after the wall was completed. But Nehemiah didn’t brush this aside, because his main concern was not to build a wall, but to build the kingdom of God. Nehemiah knew God’s law and he knew that the perpetrators were violating nearly everyone of these laws by oppressing and enslaving their fellow Jews. His goal was to build the kingdom of God by building the law of God into the people of God. If Nehemiah had built a wall without building the people, he would have failed. In the same way, if we build a church building without building a church body, we will have failed.

Before we go any further, we need to acknowledge a strong temptation to pass over this chapter. After all, is anyone in our church currently struggling with the problems in this chapter? Is anyone lending money to one another at exorbitant interest rates? Is anyone confiscating another’s property as collateral on these unfair loans? Is anyone forcing their brothers and sisters in Christ into slavery in order to pay back outstanding debts? I am confident that not a single person in our church is guilty, or even close to being guilty of any of these sins. So then, why should we bother with this rather obscure chapter in the Old Testament? It doesn’t appear to have any relevance to our church, our families and our lives, so maybe we should just skip over it, right? Wrong. This chapter has incredible lessons to teach Christians in the 21^st century and I encourage you to stay engaged and not tune out.

If I had to give a title to this chapter it would be either, “Building the Kingdom of God through Economic Justice,” or “Do We Really Care About the Poor?” But I knew if I had given you either of these two titles at the beginning of the message, some of you might have gotten angry and tuned me out. You might get angry because you are tired of hearing people say that Christians, and especially evangelicals, don’t care about the poor. You know what? I am tired of the same thing. In fact, every time I hear someone say it, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, my eyes narrow slightly and I get ready for a fight. I may not say it out loud, but I think thoughts like, “How dare you say we don’t care abut the poor? What evidence do you have to prove your point?” Can you relate to my response? Saying that we Christians don’t care about the poor is equivalent to saying that Christians are racist—it is highly offensive to us and makes us ready for a good fight.

Do Christians care about the poor? Let’s look at some facts. A well researched book by Arthur Brooks called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, gives the following statistic.

 “A person who goes to church every week and strongly rejects the idea that it is the government's responsibility to redistribute income will give, on average, 100 times more money to charity each year than a person who never attends a house of worship, and strongly believes that the government should reduce income differences between people.”[i]

Conservative Christians are clearly more generous than non-believing liberals. According to Brooks, we are even far more generous with our volunteer time and we donate far more pints of blood. We are far more generous in every way, but does this mean that we have a genuine, God-driven compassion for the poor? I am not sure that we really do care about the poor, at least not to the degree that the Bible cares about the poor. The Bible is abundantly clear and filled with commands to care for the poor.

· Blessed is he who has regard for the weak; the Lord delivers him in times of trouble. (Psalm 41:1)

· He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses. (Proverbs 28:27)

· “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, ^19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

· Cornelius stared at him in fear. “What is it, Lord?” he asked. The angel answered, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God.  (Acts 10:4)

I know that you know these Scriptures. I know you are aware of issues of poverty, but the sticky problem is how to deal with poverty. We may think that we have a thoroughly Biblical understanding, but I want to gently challenge us that our belief may not be as Biblically informed as we might like to think, and I am fully including myself in this assessment. In fact, I think our political views are more often informed by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity than they are from the Bible.

We quickly place our solutions to poverty into black and white categories. The liberals want to give handouts while conservatives seek responsibility. The liberals give handouts while the conservatives give a hand up. We could just as easily say that liberals show compassion while conservatives are so committed to an economic free market that they lack compassion. I think that all of these statements have elements of truth in them but none of them are completely true. When it comes to the issue of poverty and what to do about it, we suffer from a hardening of the categories and blind political alliances. I’ll say it again—I suffer from the maladies as much as anyone else, but I have been informed by and I feel I am beginning to be transformed by the truths in Nehemiah, and I would like for you to understand and experience these same truths. Isn’t this what we all desire—to be transformed by Biblical truth?

The first thing that hit me in this chapter is that we live under the illusion that there is a level playing field in the U.S.. We believe that America is the land of opportunity and everyone has an equal chance at success or failure. If you succeed, you did it out of your own intelligence and risk taking, but if you fail, there must be something wrong with you. We believe that people are poor because they have not taken adequate responsibility for their actions. We hold these stereotypes of poor people as ones who spend all of their money on satellite TV, beer and cigarettes. They tend to be stupid, lazy, immoral and make lots of bad choices. They take advantage of the welfare system. Poor women keep having more children so they can live off of government checks. We pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps and if poor people did the same, they wouldn’t be poor any longer.

I realize I am exaggerating these stereotypes to make a point, but the fact is, we all hold to some of these stereotypes at some level. It is type of classism where we believe the middle and upper classes of people are inherently superior to poor people. It’s not a race issue per se, but a class issue. Some people are white trash and some are white treasure, and there’s not much we can do about it. We can even show evidence of these stereotypes. We can point to the many, many cases of abuses in the socio-economic system. If you want facts and statistics on this stuff, we can supply them. It is true that many poor people do spend all of their money on satellite TV, beer and cigarettes. Many poor people are stupid, lazy, immoral and make lots of bad choices. But there are an equal number of stupid, lazy, immoral middle class and wealthy people who make lots of bad choices. The core issue of all of this is that we live under the illusion that there is a level playing field and that equal success or equal failure is the right and destiny of all Americans.

But I do not believe this is the case and I believe the Bible helps us understand this. In the first five verses of this chapter, I have identified seven categories of people.

1. Land owners who were stable, had enough to eat, etc. We don’t see this category of people specifically listed, but we can assume that not everyone in Israel was starving or in slavery.

2. Land owners were hungry “during the famine.” This category is given in verse two. These Jews were struggling to get enough food to eat, although they do not indicate that they had lost land or had to enslave their children.

3. Land owners who borrowed money by mortgaging their land in order to get grain to eat during the famine. These Jews are described in verse three. They have not yet lost their land, but they strongly feel the weight of their indebtedness to their fellow Jews.

4. Former land owners who mortgaged away all of their property in order to pay taxes. Verses four and five describe the next two categories of people. Once they lost their land they entered into a downward spiral of poverty. With no land, they had no way to earn money to pay back their debts and no way get food to eat. What awaited them next was unthinkable, but it did happen.

5. Former land owners who mortgaged away all of their property and had to enslave their own children. They were forced to send their children into slavery for two reasons. One, they couldn’t afford to feed them, and two, the children were required to work off the debt of the former land owners, which meant they would probably never escape a life of slavery. Verse five gives a hint of their desperation when the people complain, “we are powerless.” A good way to describe poverty is powerlessness. Poverty stricken people have no choice about where to live, what job to work at, how to raise their family, what kind of vacation they plan to take. They are powerless because they have no choice but to eek out some sort of survival.

6. Wealthy land owners who held the deeds to Jewish land of former land owners and the right to Jewish child slaves. These people are the true villains of the story. They are the ones who were soundly rebuked by Nehemiah. It is hard to imagine anyone treating their fellow Jews in this way, but when times were tough and the people lacked Godly counsel, as it says in Judges, “everyone did as he saw fit.” It was every man for himself. We can imagine that they tried to justify their actions by labeling them as acts of compassion, after all, they could reason that without their help, many people would die of starvation. If they did not give “employment” to these children, then surely they would have starved to death. If they did not “take care of the lands” and give grain to their former owners, then certainly many would perish. Do you see how unrighteous acts can so easily be justified and actually turned into acts of righteousness?

7. Wealthy Jews who lent money with no security or collateral. Nehemiah and his men fit into this category. As it says in verse ten, they were lending money and grain but not charging any interest. They were true heroes and the true leaders of compassion and mercy.

Now that we have detailed the different categories of people, let’s ask a few questions. First, did these people fall into poverty because they were lazy, stupid and made lots of bad choices? Odds are that some of them would have dug their own grave, so to speak. Out of the entire population it is not conceivable that 100% of the farmers were making wise, careful decisions all of the time. But most were victimized in two separate ways. They were victims of the famine—which may have been sent by God as a judgment upon the nation—and they were victimized by their fellow Jews. In this sense, then, they were victims of circumstances and victims of the greed of their Jewish neighbors. The wealthy Jews became more wealthy, the average Jew became poor and the poor became destitute. Most of them entered into a cycle of poverty through no fault of their own. This was not an individual problem but a social problem, a government problem, a national problem. Poverty is sometimes an individual problem, but it is always a social and corporate problem.

Second question. If Nehemiah had not intervened, what would have happened to the next generation who had never owned any land or who had always lived in slavery? If the first generation is powerless and stuck in poverty, then the second generation is even worse off than their parents. They would not know the taste of real freedom or the joy of working their own land and providing for their families. Their entire existence would have been one of slavery and powerlessness. People like this have no hope or future.

This is the face of poverty. But you may still be tempted to say, “Well that happened 2,500 years ago on the other side of the world. What does that have to do with poverty in the US today?” It has everything to do with today, because more than ever, you and I live under illusion that there is a level playing field in our country, at least we would like to believe this. It is true that it nearly impossible for a person to starve to death in our country. In this sense, the type of poverty we have is different from what Nehemiah faced, but in no way does it mean that we have a level playing field. We still have a tiered society that looks a lot like the list from Nehemiah.  Americans are not starving to death at epidemic levels, buts slavery still exists in our great country.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that 50,000 people are trafficked into or transited through the U.S.A. annually as sex slaves, domestics, garment, and agricultural slaves.[ii]

Two weeks ago a story broke about a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. When federal immigration agents raided the kosher meatpacking plant here in May and rounded up 389 illegal immigrants, they found more than 20 under-age workers, some as young as 13. Some said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, sometimes six nights a week. One, a Guatemalan named Elmer L. who said he was 16 when he started working on the plant's killing floors, said he worked 17-hour shifts, six days a week. In an affidavit, he said he was constantly tired and did not have time to do anything but work and sleep. “I was very sad,” he said, “and I felt like I was a slave.”[iii] And he was.

I don’t merely want to burden you with suburban, middle class angst. I don’t want to add a load of guilt to your conscience, but, as always, I want to be faithful to Scripture and I believe that Scripture is clear that we must have compassion for the poor and when you come to the realization that there is not a level playing field in our country and that many people stuck in poverty feel powerless to change their circumstances, then we can begin to develop a genuine, Biblically informed, God-centered compassion for the poor. This is where it must begin.

The reason I put this picture of our building on the first powerpoint slide was not to show the progress over the weekend (though we should take a moment and celebrate this together), but to help you see the real “vision for building.” I wanted you to be bale to see past the building site to the fifty or sixty mobile homes who are our next door neighbors. Can you see them? Many times we have quoted the statistic that Vernon County is the third poorest county in the state. Too often we have quoted that statistic with a “woe is me” attitude, as in, “We are so ‘poor,’ how will we ever have the funds to build our own building?” Can we take that same statistic—we are the third poorest county in the state—turn it around and consider if God might want us to do something about this problem?

I am not standing here with a lot of solutions to this problem, in fact I don’t have a clue about where to begin. But I know the place to start is with Bible-centered, God-given compassion for those stuck in the cycle of poverty, for our neighbors, for the weak and needy.

Rich Maurer

August 10, 2008