"Is It Lawful to Pay Taxes to the Emperor?"

“We who are rich are often demanding and difficult. We shut ourselves up in our apartments and may even use a watchdog to defend our property. Poor people, of course, have nothing to defend and often share the little they have.

When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self-sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love. In a poor community, however, there is often a lot of mutual help and sharing of goods, as well as help from outside. Poverty can even become a cement of unity.” - Jean Vanier

Forgive me if I ramble here. Last night I was at a midnight breakfast at Rochester College. It is an old tradition at the College. Students began lining up more than thirty minutes beforehand to get the prime run on French toast, omelets, sausage, and muffins. This morning I am up at the church building (after about three and a half hours of sleep) drinking my Java Dave’s Fair Trade Organic coffee (snaps to Kevin for helping me see the importance of buying fair trade) and listening to a group from Orion Township setting up the voting equipment and ballot tabulator for today’s school board elections. We also have the American Red Cross on tap for a blood drive this afternoon, so it could be a long day.

Last night I had a conversation with a staff member at Rochester on one of the voting issues on tap today. He was a foreign student at RC who worked his way into an IT position after graduation. Our discussion was regarding a proposed tax for people with second homes or investment property in the county. He told me that one of his friends said that he had to vote against that because no one wants to pay more taxes. I suggested that maybe there is more to it than that.

One of the problems we face is the complicated nature of the decisions that may seem so simple at first glance. Oakland County boasts some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I would venture to say that, for a lot of people and families, ownership is difficult at best, more likely impossible. (More often than not, when our phone rings at the church building, we are getting requests for help paying rent or utilities.) Unable to pay the premiums and interest that accrue on a mortgage, along with the township or village and county taxes, those people find themselves in need of affordable rental options for their families. By increasing taxes on second homes and investment property, the County will actually drive up the rental costs in the area, further marginalizing those who are already on the edges of our communities.

When I read the Jean Vanier quote this morning, I flashed back to my conversation on the implications of our voting for the poor. There are no easy answers to the problems that caused by our democratized capitalistic economy. Those of us in churches, those who ‘have’, tend to think about and value self as of first importance. Yet, the American dream can be more like a nightmare to those one the margins. For every individual who pulls themselves up by his or her own bootstraps, there are hundreds who are left squashed by those boots. Yet, as Vanier reminds us, in poverty there is solidarity. In poverty there is the sharing of goods. In poverty there is unity. Jesus said that if we want to find him, we can just look amongst the poor. He will be there.

In his book Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age, Brad Kallenberg rightly suggests that the postmodern world is craving unity in a community that really embodies the beliefs they claim to profess. Conversion takes place when they are invited to share in and become enculturated into the life of that kind of community. Think of the powerful witness our Christian communities could have if we actually struggled together over some of these difficult decisions, questions of our taxes and resources and the sin of our anti-relational individuality. What if we could become communities that share in the solidarity of the poor? What if we could open the doors to our hearts and our homes, lock up the Doberman, and help provide for their needs? What if we would help defend the value of the humanity of those on the margins of our society instead of defending the value of our portfolios? What if we shared our hearts instead of defending dogmatic conservative political ideologies? Maybe that could be a way for our churches to become a meaningful alternative culture in society. Maybe then we could bring the new creation into this world.