Les Exclus
Week of Monday August 9, 2004
Lectionary Readings
Isaiah 1:1, 10–20
Psalm 50:1-8, 22–23
Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16
Luke 12:32–40
In late 1986, Jonathan Mann left his post as the state epidemiologist for New Mexico and joined the World Health Organization to lead their Special Program on AIDS. Flying back and forth between Geneva and Kinshasa, and beginning with no budget or staff, Mann almost single handedly put the global pandemic on the world radar with his 1986 study "Global Strategy for the Prevention and Control of AIDS." His threefold approach began with surveillance and prevention. But what was most imaginative was how Mann located the disease in the larger context of social marginalization. As Mann understood it, HIV/AIDS was more than a health problem. To combat the disease effectively, one had to place it in the broader context of social equality, development, human rights and dignity, women's empowerment and the like. Many of the early victims of the disease lived on the periphery of society. They were what the French called le exclus—drug users, homosexuals, prostitutes, and the promiscuous, people whom society punished by marginalizing them. But marginalizing these people, Mann knew, only pushed them further underground, which in turn exacerbated the disease. He urged the world to move beyond stigma, denial, and prejudice to sacrificial care based upon the dignity of every human being.[1]
Mann's strategy to construe and then combat HIV/AIDS as an issue of social marginalization strikes a uniquely prophetic note that we read in the text from Isaiah this week: "Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow" (Isaiah 1:17). When you read a little more broadly in the Old Testament you discover a cluster of synonyms that recur—the poor, the widow, the alien, the orphan, the weak, the needy, and the oppressed. What these otherwise disparate groups of people have in common is not that they are financially poor. Even more pernicious, they are vulnerable, marginalized, and pushed to the periphery of society where they can conveniently be overlooked and forgotten. They are les exclus and they are everywhere.
The first lines of Isaiah's eloquent poetry are unsparing in their denunciation of people who busy themselves with religious ritual, but who in the next moment make a life of exploitation, partiality, passive neglect, defending the unjust, and chasing after bribes. He writes that the marginalized have been oppressed, which means that there are oppressors. In fact, the Hebrew text of Isaiah 1:17 is not entirely clear, and the reading "encourage the oppressed" might well read "reprove the oppressor" (NIV). True, some people are their own worst enemies and need look no further than their own laziness or ignorance to discover why they are poor. But Isaiah insists that there are many others who are victims of exploitation and oppression.
Sometimes exploitation is an individual matter of one person abusing another, as when someone steals a car. But beyond the private and the personal, the worst forms of oppression are systemic, institutional and corporate, as when racism is not the unfortunate behavior of a single police officer but an accepted pattern of business as usual. Or again, what do the numerous studies about executive compensation tell us about our entire society's lust for money? About twenty years ago the average compensation for a CEO of a large company was about 40 times greater than the average employee in the company. Today, depending upon which study you read (and there are many), that ratio has skyrocketed to over 400:1. In contrast to the United States, the ratio in other industrialized countries is 57:1 (Brazil), 45:1 (Mexico), 25:1(UK), 11:1 (Germany and South Korea), and 10:1 (Japan).[2] To take a third example, if in 2003 America's military spending surpassed the military spending of the rest of the world combined, we might wonder whether institutionalized violence as a form of public policy has become entrenched as a tool to marginalize just about any country we so choose.
God's prophetic call to His people through Isaiah challenges such business as usual, and it is easy to imagine how the recipients of his message—the leaders in religion, business and government, responded. But Isaiah does not stop there, nor let us wallow in sanctimonious rhetoric. Instead, he urges each of us to make a difference, to act upon what we know. His opening salvo to Israel is powerfully summarized in Proverbs 31:8: "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute." Similarly, a few chapters earlier in Proverbs 24:11: "Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?"
There are many people in the world today with no voice, and God invites us to speak for them, to defend their cause and to seek their good. Think of the 14 million AIDS orphans, or any one of numerous countries like Malawi where life expectancy has plummeted to less than 40. Or the victims of the Sudanese genocide in the Darfur region of that country whom the world has ignored until recently.
On a recent trip to Kenya and Uganda I visited a village on the outskirts of the border town of Tororo. Moses Odugo, a brick maker, Susan Okepa who sold dried fish, Patrick who ran a roadside tea cafe, and all their neighbors understood that they were invisible people. As our van bumped down what passed for a driveway, a dozen women chased us to sing greetings. A duo of singers, one crippled and the other blind, sang songs to us that they had composed for the occasion. They fed us with the best they could offer. Why? What surprised me was that although they were deeply appreciative of the financial help offered by the Village Enterprise Fund (the reason for our visit), when it was time to leave they articulated something far deeper: "Thank you for visiting us; thank you for remembering us. Please give a voice for us when you return home." These villagers lived in poverty that our African driver Stanley confessed he found shocking; but what spoke far more powerfully was their own realization and articulation that they knew they were voiceless and forgotten by most all the world.
The genius of Mother Teresa was not that she engineered what has become one of the largest providers of social services around the world. Rather, she understood that the worst disease any person can suffer is that of being utterly invisible, neglected or forgotten. She resolved, as she picked up the dying from the streets of Calcutta, not so much that she would ameliorate their physical suffering (although she did that whenever she could), but that every person should have the right to die within reach of a loving embrace. Further, she understood that in loving the weak, the poor, the vulnerable and the disenfranchised, we love Christ Himself, and so in our own poverty of mind and spirit receive the healing that only the poor can give us.
[1.] Greg Behrman, The Invisible People (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 40–47.
[2.] See William McDonough, "Overcompensation," The Christian Century (June 15, 2004), pp. 8–9. McDonough chairs the Public Company Accounting Board, which was created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The board oversees the auditors of public companies to protect investors and the public interest.
