Four score years ago
04/03/13 03:22
The people who know me probably also know that I return to certain scriptures more often than others. There are some parts of the Bible that are better known by me. I have snippets of scripture memorized, and the things that are in my memory come to me more quickly than other passages. And there are certain passages that get quoted more often than others. If you hang out with me for long, you will hear me quote Psalm 90 quite a bit. The starting and ending lines of the psalm resonate with the way I think about God and see the world. It begins, “Lord, thou has been our dwelling place in all generations.” And the ending is equally dramatic: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”
I’ve preached many a funeral meditation with those two ideas, often reversing their order. I comment on the work of the hands of the person we are remembering. I speak of the things that those hands have done. Then I remind people that we have a home that has been known and recognized by generations of our people. Our home is not a building. It is our faith. We dwell in God. And when you dwell in God the transition from this life to what comes next is not as dramatic as it sometimes seems.
In the middle of that psalm is a reflection on the nature of time. Like many other places in the bible, Psalm 90 reminds us that our ways of measuring time are not the same as God’s perspective: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.” Later the psalm puts a human life in perspective: “The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” A score is 20 years. Every kid in our school knew that because we were encouraged to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. If you have to memorize a speech, it is good to pick a short one. Lincoln uses the same way of counting in the opening of that speech: “Four score and seven years ago our father brought for on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I’ve wondered what Lincoln meant by counting the years. Was he saying that this new nation was a recent creation – only a little more than one lifetime - ago? Or was he saying that our forefathers brought forth this nation a long time – more than a lifetime – ago?
Four score years ago today – March 4, 1933, the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression. It was the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. You can still find people who think of that day as a positive moment in history and others who think of it as a negative time. It was, I am sure, a moment of personal triumph for a man who nine years earlier had been struck with poliomyelitis, the virus that causes polio. He suffered nearly total paralysis and used braces and a wheelchair for mobility for the rest of his life. But on that day four score years ago today he delivered a powerful address to the nation, outlining a “New Deal” – an expansion of the role of the federal government and told Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Franklin Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family. He personally – and all of the people in his immediate family – had the wealth to weather the depression. They weren’t the kind of people who were standing in the soup lines or riding the rails in search of work. Whether or not you agree with his vision for the role of government, you can agree that the man didn’t come from poverty. He was motivated in his thinking by a concern for other people.
Over the years, we Americans have received significant leadership from some pretty wealthy people. Many of our presidents didn’t come from common stock. They haven’t, on average, been middle class.
50 years ago we had another president who came from significant wealth. President John F. Kennedy came from a family that no one thought of as impoverished. Early in 1963 – a year that would prove to be tragic in many ways – President Kennedy proposed a $13.6 billion tax cut. (Note to those who today think that tax cuts are a strictly partisan cause – we haven’t always been divided along the same lines that are currently drawn in congress. Kennedy was a democrat.) The tax cut, he surmised, would increase economic growth, promote fuller employment (the unemployment rate was about 4 percent in those days) and reduce or eliminate recessions. The tax cut proposed by President Kennedy wasn’t passed until 1964 – after has assassination. The result was not positive in terms of the federal budget. It set in motion the cycles of deficit spending that have continued to this day. In fact, there have only been 5 balanced federal budgets since that tax cut was made: in 1969, when Richard Nixon was president; 1998, 1999 and 2000 under President Clinton and the first year of the George W. Bush administration, 2001.
I suppose that if you are a Republican you’d like to point out that the source of the current budget crisis was an action of a Democrat president. If you’re a Democrat, perhaps you like to point out that the origin of federal deficits was a tax cut.
But I didn’t mean to write this blog about contemporary federal budget issues. What I meant to do was to reflect on what can happen in four score years. And one thing that has happened in that span in the United States is that we have totally redefined wealth and the distribution of money. According to a Harvard survey of 5,000 Americans, most Americans believe that the richest people in the country should be 10 to 15 times richer than the poorest folk. These days 80 percent of Americans have only 7 percent of the wealth. The middle class is barely distinguishable from the poverty class. The average CEO earns 380 times what the average employee (not the lowest paid employee) in his or her company earns. In 1976 the richest one percent of our country took home about 9% of the total wealth each year. Today that one percent takes 24%. The bottom line is that within a decade we won’t be able to afford the richest 1% even by having everyone else below the poverty line. The number at the top has to get smaller in order for their wealth to continue to grow.
But I am addicted to the psalms and I am reminded by the 90th psalm that our perspective is short compared to God’s. What happens this year in Washington DC with the sequester debate and whatever crisis the politicians devise to follow up is tiny in the bigger scheme of things. I’m no policy-maker, nor should I be, but I’m thinking we need to give this young country a few more score years to sort out our priorities. As much as I feel at home as a citizen of this country I am reminded that I have another home: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”
I’ve preached many a funeral meditation with those two ideas, often reversing their order. I comment on the work of the hands of the person we are remembering. I speak of the things that those hands have done. Then I remind people that we have a home that has been known and recognized by generations of our people. Our home is not a building. It is our faith. We dwell in God. And when you dwell in God the transition from this life to what comes next is not as dramatic as it sometimes seems.
In the middle of that psalm is a reflection on the nature of time. Like many other places in the bible, Psalm 90 reminds us that our ways of measuring time are not the same as God’s perspective: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.” Later the psalm puts a human life in perspective: “The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” A score is 20 years. Every kid in our school knew that because we were encouraged to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. If you have to memorize a speech, it is good to pick a short one. Lincoln uses the same way of counting in the opening of that speech: “Four score and seven years ago our father brought for on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I’ve wondered what Lincoln meant by counting the years. Was he saying that this new nation was a recent creation – only a little more than one lifetime - ago? Or was he saying that our forefathers brought forth this nation a long time – more than a lifetime – ago?
Four score years ago today – March 4, 1933, the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression. It was the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. You can still find people who think of that day as a positive moment in history and others who think of it as a negative time. It was, I am sure, a moment of personal triumph for a man who nine years earlier had been struck with poliomyelitis, the virus that causes polio. He suffered nearly total paralysis and used braces and a wheelchair for mobility for the rest of his life. But on that day four score years ago today he delivered a powerful address to the nation, outlining a “New Deal” – an expansion of the role of the federal government and told Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Franklin Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family. He personally – and all of the people in his immediate family – had the wealth to weather the depression. They weren’t the kind of people who were standing in the soup lines or riding the rails in search of work. Whether or not you agree with his vision for the role of government, you can agree that the man didn’t come from poverty. He was motivated in his thinking by a concern for other people.
Over the years, we Americans have received significant leadership from some pretty wealthy people. Many of our presidents didn’t come from common stock. They haven’t, on average, been middle class.
50 years ago we had another president who came from significant wealth. President John F. Kennedy came from a family that no one thought of as impoverished. Early in 1963 – a year that would prove to be tragic in many ways – President Kennedy proposed a $13.6 billion tax cut. (Note to those who today think that tax cuts are a strictly partisan cause – we haven’t always been divided along the same lines that are currently drawn in congress. Kennedy was a democrat.) The tax cut, he surmised, would increase economic growth, promote fuller employment (the unemployment rate was about 4 percent in those days) and reduce or eliminate recessions. The tax cut proposed by President Kennedy wasn’t passed until 1964 – after has assassination. The result was not positive in terms of the federal budget. It set in motion the cycles of deficit spending that have continued to this day. In fact, there have only been 5 balanced federal budgets since that tax cut was made: in 1969, when Richard Nixon was president; 1998, 1999 and 2000 under President Clinton and the first year of the George W. Bush administration, 2001.
I suppose that if you are a Republican you’d like to point out that the source of the current budget crisis was an action of a Democrat president. If you’re a Democrat, perhaps you like to point out that the origin of federal deficits was a tax cut.
But I didn’t mean to write this blog about contemporary federal budget issues. What I meant to do was to reflect on what can happen in four score years. And one thing that has happened in that span in the United States is that we have totally redefined wealth and the distribution of money. According to a Harvard survey of 5,000 Americans, most Americans believe that the richest people in the country should be 10 to 15 times richer than the poorest folk. These days 80 percent of Americans have only 7 percent of the wealth. The middle class is barely distinguishable from the poverty class. The average CEO earns 380 times what the average employee (not the lowest paid employee) in his or her company earns. In 1976 the richest one percent of our country took home about 9% of the total wealth each year. Today that one percent takes 24%. The bottom line is that within a decade we won’t be able to afford the richest 1% even by having everyone else below the poverty line. The number at the top has to get smaller in order for their wealth to continue to grow.
But I am addicted to the psalms and I am reminded by the 90th psalm that our perspective is short compared to God’s. What happens this year in Washington DC with the sequester debate and whatever crisis the politicians devise to follow up is tiny in the bigger scheme of things. I’m no policy-maker, nor should I be, but I’m thinking we need to give this young country a few more score years to sort out our priorities. As much as I feel at home as a citizen of this country I am reminded that I have another home: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”