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logo    Suffering and Joy


My family enticed me into attending church on Resurrection Sunday, and the experience indeed was enlightening. There was much singing accompanied by an in-house orchestra, applause and cheers, a few (in comparison) prayers whose meanings eluded me, and what seemed to be to be an interminable sermon. I'm sure that those who attended merely to hear the concert were joyfully entertained, but those who went for a spiritual experience must surely have been disappointed, because one very essential ingredient was missing--piety. Religion without piety can be likened to soccer without a ball. But it was the sermon that assailed my mind.

The preacher based his words on an analogy. He claimed that, just as the suffering of Christ on the cross has brought committed Christians the joy of everlasting life, in ordinary life too, suffering brings us joy. His argument was based on examples, the chief one of which was the suffering of the sewer worker whose work brings the rest of us the joys of good plumbing. So the thesis really was the suffering of one person or group brings joy to some other person or persons. And, of course, that is a trivial truth. But unfortunately it is also a justification for exploitation. To bring joy to one group, some other group is exploited, literally required to suffer.

So this question crossed my mind: Has Christianity been the basis for the world-wide exploitation of other peoples carried out by the so-called Western World, that world that was once known as Christendom? Was imperialism essentially a Christian phenomenon, which still goes on today even though the age of imperialism is said to have come to an end after the Second World War?

Of course, the question cannot be answered by an appeal to fact. How could one ever know for sure? Yet it raises other interesting issues.

The United States, for instance, takes pride in being a nation of immigrants. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, The wretched  refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Perhaps the clause after the colon should have read, And we will keep them that way.

The United States has always been a nation that has exploited the lowest among us. Wave after wave of immigrants have come to America--Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Russian Jews, Greeks, Slavs, Armenians, Latin Americans--and each has been exploited in turn. As it became more and more difficult to exploit one group, another came to be exploited in its place. Can the Irish who were domiciled in the slums of New York in the middle of the Nineteenth Century be described any better than huddled masses?

Now the American business community is defending and seeking more immigrants ready and willing to be exploited, the illegal aliens from Latin America, the justification being that businesses cannot find a sufficient number of Americans to work the low-paying, non-benefit accruing jobs that these illegal immigrants fill. Can any justification serve as a better one for exploitation?

So has our Christian heritage caused us to turn the beacon of hope into the shadow of despair? This may be the nation our business and political communities wish to live in, but is it the one the rest of us want to live in? Do we really want to take part in this gross immoral activity? Is this really the Christianity Christ would have condoned?

I have always found sermons in Protestant churches to be strangely unChristian. Most of these sermons are based on passages from the letters of Paul and the Old Testament. Rarely have I heard a sermon based on the teachings of Christ. I've often wondered how one can call himself a Christian while ignoring Christ's teachings. Why has Christianity as we know it ignored the two commandments of Christ? Does the promise of forgiveness and salvation guarantee such bad behavior?  I don't have the answer, but we certainly should think about it. (4/15/2007)