Has anyone played Monopoly?
It was originally patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as “The Landlord’s Game.” The game illustrated how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants.
Ironically, the story of what became of The Landlord’s Game is one of the powerful overwhelming the powerless, involving Parker Brothers and a man who claimed to invent Monopoly when it was a mere modification of The Landlord’s Game.
Let’s go to God in prayer.
God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.
Amen.
We live in an age of centibillionaires. Those are people who are “worth” 100 billion dollars or more.
Let me give you an idea of how much a hundred billion dollars is:
Imagine a person lives for 100 years.
They could spend one billion dollars every year of their lives. That’s 83 million dollars a month. 19 million dollars a week. 2.7 million dollars per day. 114,000 dollars per hour.
But at this level, it’s not about buying groceries. It’s not even about buying toys like yachts with smaller yachts in them.
At this level, money is about power.
Money is power over corporations, power over employees, and power over government officials. Owning a large fraction of a corporation gives power in that corporation, and therefor also employees. And monetary contributions to campaigns gives power in government.
Power protects itself.
We recognize it when someone says “you can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hand.”
But the same is true for other kinds of power:
- Elected office
- Management roles in business
- Money
Those with power will use that power to keep that power, and to deny power to others.
Those with money will use that money to keep that money, and deny money to others.
If you have any doubt,
- According to a study by ThinkProgress.
thirteen states spent more than $200,000 screening federal-aid applicants for drugs in 2018.
Only 338 people tested positive. - According to a paper by Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan,
the average cost of keeping a homeless person in jail is $33,000 per year
and the average cost of inpatient drug or mental health treatment is $7,100 for just six days,
but the estimated annual cost per household for housing and services for Housing First is
$8,500 to $20,000, depending on the level of services needed.
The choices are not being made based on cost/benefit, or even on cost alone. The choices are being made based on punishing poverty.
For most people, money is about security: that we keep our homes, continue to have food to eat, have health care when we need it, and have something for retirement.
There’s a power there too: the power to secure what we have against the risks we see.
But for people in poverty, money is about survival. With the money I have today, which of these things can I pay for? Food? Clothing? Medicine? Housing? Utilities?
So when we read this passage from Amos:
“trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,”
– Amos 8:4b, NRSVue
and
“buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals”
– Amos 8:6a, NRSVue
we’re talking about a system that abuses the powerless for the benefit of the powerful. And this was 2800 years ago!
I don’t think any of our church members are directly engaged in the oppression of the poor. But we do have a government that seems to be putting its thumb on the scales to help the powerful.
I believe we are called to use the power we have, however small it may seem, to speak truth to power, and to give voice to those with less power than us.
So my challenge this week is to be a prophetic voice, in whatever way we can, to call into question the insatiable desire for more by those who have much, when so many are in want of even the most basic needs.
Amen
Let’s sing NCH 485 O Love that Will
* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue
* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.
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