Biography
The Rev. Jim Wallis, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners magazine in Washington, D.C., is an author, activist, columnist and preacher. He is one of America’s most active church leaders on issues of poverty and social justice. Jim is founder of Call to Renewal, a national federation of faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty and revitalize American Politics. He teaches a course on "Faith, Politics, and Society" at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio. Ken Medema is a musical storyteller and a master of musical improvisation. He’s a recording artist, composer, and popular performer in the U.S. and abroad. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

KEN MEDEMA (Song):

          GOD KNOWS WHY

          I read the news and the panic strikes me once again,
          Just like it has before.
          I can't help feeling that the ship is lost,
          And we're a long way from the shore.
          The sea is a raging confusion,
          And madness has taken control.
          The deadly cold wants to bury my body,
          As it always buried my soul.

          It's a long horrid night,
          And I fear that it might be the last.
          And the ship is listing badly,
          And the water is coming in fast.
          And just when I think that the moment for hoping is past,
          There is a star shining in the midnight sky,
          Above the wind and the baby's cry,
          And life goes on and God knows why.

          TV is blaring in the burned-out streets,
          Reading the rules of the game.
          There is no voice for dissenters these days,
          Now they've all gone down in flames.
          I hear the boots of the soul police,
          As like the haunted I run.
          They'll be bashing someone's head in tonight,
          And I just might be the one.

          It's a long desperate night,
          And I fear that it might be the last,
          And the streets are fire,
          And the people are running so fast.
          And just when I think that the moment for hoping is past.
          There is a star shining in the blackened sky,
          Above the wind and the baby's cry,
          And life goes on and God knows why.
          Hear the baby's cry.


JIM WALLIS:

This world of ours is not working. Even while we cling to the illusion that everything is all right, we know in our hearts that it is not. In our society the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than any time in our whole history. The threats to our environment seem to grow every day and the middle classes are afflicted with an anxiety, a loneliness and a fear that we know too well.

On a world scale, the poor are dying in enormous numbers now -- forty thousand children each and every day. The world is gasping for breath, pleading for mercy for us to stop. The credo of the affluent comes to us from bumper stickers which read, "I shop, therefore, I am." This is a faith statement, a theological affirmation of a culture that is in danger of losing its own soul. Now we are on the edge of war in the Middle East. We face a horrible catastrophe to protect our access to cheap oil. The President says the oil symbolizes our way of life, but it is really our national addiction to an over consumption that is killing the poor, killing the earth and denying us our own humanity. The questions we must ask are "Where have we gone wrong and how do we find the resources to move into a different future?" Where do we turn?

I was a seminary student in Chicago many years ago. We decided to try an experiment. We made a study of every single reference in the whole Bible to the poor, to God's love for the poor, to God being the deliverer of the oppressed. We found thousands of verses on the subject. The Bible is full of the poor.

In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, it is the second most prominent theme. The first is idolatry and the two are most often connected. In the New Testament, we find that one of every sixteen verses is about poor people; in the gospels, one of every ten; in Luke, one of every seven. We find the poor everywhere in the Bible.

One member of our group was a very zealous young seminary student and he thought he would try something just to see what might happen. He took an old Bible and a pair of scissors. He cut every single reference to the poor out of the Bible. It took him a very long time.

When he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?" he just cut it right out. All those Psalms that see God as a deliverer of the oppressed, they disappeared.

In the gospels, he came to Mary's wonderful song where she says, "The mighty will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things and the rich sent empty away." Of course, you can guess what happened to that. In Matthew 25, the section about the least of these, that was gone. Luke 4, Jesus' very first sermon, what I call his Nazareth manifesto, where he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to poor people" -- that was gone, too. "Blessed are the poor," that was gone.

So much of the Bible was cut out; so much so that when he was through, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. I held it in my hand and it was falling apart. It was a Bible full of holes. I would often take that Bible out with me to preach. I would hold it high in the air above American congregations and say, "Brothers and sister, this is the American Bible, full of holes from all we have cut out." We might as well have taken that pair of scissors and just cut out all that we have ignored for such a long time. In America the Bible that we read is full of holes.


KEN MEDEMA (Song):

          On your way to a business meeting,
          You discover that there's a hole in your suit.
          You go fix it.
          On your way to a fancy dinner,
          And you discover that there's a hole in your dress.
          Fix it.
          What are you going to do,
          With a Bible full of holes?
          What are you going to do?
          Are you just going to let it roll?
          What are you going to do,
          With a Bible full of holes,
          In the good old U.S.A.?


JIM WALLIS:

We call it a holy Bible,but it doesn't mean it is supposed to be full of holes. In our day, what we have to do is to put our Bibles back together to restore the integrity of the word of God in our lives, in our churches and in our streets. We should know by now that our fidelity to faith is not determined by adherence to sound dogma and doctrine, but how we live our lives, whether they are the test of what we believe. Well, the Good News is that it is already happening. It is already going on. Our Bibles are being put back together again.

You have to look in some unlikely places to see where it is going on. I'll never forget a day when I came back to Washington, D.C., my hometown. There were the headlines in the newspaper saying that Ed Meese, the highest-ranking legal officer in my country, had just had a press conference and proclaimed from the White House pulpit that there were no hungry people in America.

The next day was Saturday and the food line formed early outside the Sojourners Neighborhood Center, our little community, just one-and-a-half miles from the White House -- three hundred families standing in line to receive a bag of groceries which is critical to getting them through the week.
Just before the doors are opened and all the people come in, all those who help prepare the food and get it together, join hands and say a prayer. The prayer is often offered by Mary Glover. She is our best pray-er, a sixty-year-old black woman who knows what it means to be poor and knows how to pray. She prays like someone who knows to whom she is talking. She has been carrying on a conversation with her Lord for many, many years. She first thanks God for another day, "Another day to serve you, Lord," she says. On that day, I'll never forget she prayed these words, "Lord, we know that you'll be coming through this line today so, Lord, help us to treat you well."

Mary Glover's prayer is the best commentary on the 25th Chapter of Matthew I have ever heard. She knows very well who it is that stands in line with the hungry or sleeps on those steam grates, the homeless in Washington, D.C. She knows the meaning of Jesus' words when He says, "I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty; I was a stranger; I was naked; I was sick; I was in prison, you didn't do anything for me." All the people said, "Lord, we didn't know it was you. We would have responded had we known it was you, but we didn't know it was you." Jesus says to them, "As you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me."


KEN MEDEMA (Song):

          I'm just a coal black Jesus with a hole in his shoes,
          On a D.C. street with no more to lose,
          Get into the line and there you'll stand
          And sing, "Sweet Mother Mary, put some food in my hand."
          A coal black Jesus with a hole in his shoes,
          On a D.C. street we got no more to lose,
          Get into the line and there you'll stand
          Saying, "Sweet Mother Mary, put some food in my hand."


JIM WALLIS:

What Mary Glover teaches me and what Matthew 25 is all about is the critical lesson of solidarity. The world is too small now for "us" and "them." There is only "we." We are bound together. We will either learn that or we will die as those who fail to learn that we share a common destiny. We have broken covenant with our neighbor, with the poor, with the earth, with ourselves and with God. Our hope is the re-establishing of that covenant again, understanding that solidarity. How can that be done in a world full of injustice and despair?

My best definition of hope is this: Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. That is a faith perspective. Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense, but hope believed is history in the process of being changed. The nonsense of the resurrection story became the hope that shook the Roman Empire and established the Christian movement. The nonsense of slave songs in Egypt and Mississippi became the hope that let the oppressed go free.

Just last week in Washington, D.C., seven church leaders came together to speak out against the momentum and the war fever taking over our country. They spoke against the uncertain sound that had been struck by the churches and they made a very prophetic note. Their witness carried around the world and helped to disrupt the consensus leading us to war.

A few months before that, on the steps of a church in Washington, D.C., after a meeting, people came out and found a young man shot to death because he couldn't get into the locked church door. Because of that event, thirteen churches have declared a holy war on drugs, dealing with the causes and not just the symptoms. They are showing that hope is indeed possible. Because we can have faith and because hope is possible, today we can echo that ancient call of Amos and speak it into a world bound by despair and fear. We can echo the prophecy that says, "Let justice roll, roll down like waters and righteousness like a flowing stream."

So we say, let justice roll. Let justice roll into our streets of oppression and drugs and hopelessness, but also into the avenues of luxury and fear. Let justice roll into the ghettoes and barrios and squatter camps, but also into the affluent suburbs of comfort and indifference. Let justice roll into the board rooms of corporate wealth and the corridors of political power. Let justice roll into a church made lukewarm by its conformity to its culture and made isolated by its lack of compassion. Let justice roll and set free all the captives, those under bondage to poverty's chains, but also those under bondage to money's desires. Let justice roll, we say, this day. Let justice roll and let faith come alive again to those whose eyes long to see a new day!


          KEN MEDEMA (Song):

          Can you hear it down the ages,
          Like a mighty trumpet sound?
          A call to leave the night and step into the morning.
          It's a call to join gladness,
          In a world of war and pain,
          Yet it sounds a note of danger and a warning.
          It's a call to death and dying.
          It's a call to life and birth.
          It's a call to plant the seeds of love
          On barren planet earth.
          And it's a call to live like fools,
          By another set of rules.
          Well, it's a call to take your cross in hand and follow.

          Let justice roll,
          Roll down like water,
          And righteousness,
          Like a flowing stream.
          Let justice roll,
          Roll down like water,
          And righteousness,
          Like a flowing stream.

          Let this song be heard,
          All across the world,
          Let justice roll,
          Roll down like water,
          And righteousness,
          Like a flowing stream.

Interview with Jin Wallis & Ken Medema
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Let me start by saying that Jesus was terribly clear, as both of you pointed out, about helping the poor, about being there with the poor, standing with the poor. Let's start with our welfare system. It does not seem to solve the problem of poverty. Do you have any thoughts on that, Jim?

Jim Wallis: The welfare system was never supposed to solve the problem. It is meant to control people, which is a very different thing. The conservatives want to abandon the poor. The liberals want to control them. Everybody is afraid of what justice for the poor would mean, because we would have to look at our structures, our institutions, our values and even our way of life. Justice is a challenge to us, as well as hope for the poor. That is something we are afraid to handle.

Hardin: Are there some things we could do specifically? Would you decentralize welfare? Would you change what it is? Would you work harder on jobs and less on just giving out money? What would you do?

Wallis: There is no single answer to oppression of people that we now find in the city where I live, for example. People are crushed. Their lives have been destroyed. You have to rebuild from the bottom up. It means resources; it means focusing on the people who need the help and it means giving decision-making power to those who know what to do. There are creative programs all over the country that are doing the job -- education, housing, health care -- but they are all dying for lack of resources because we care more about stealth bombers than we do about inner-city education for kids.

Hardin: Ken, what do you think about that?

Ken Medema: I think the bottom line is that people who live in poor neighborhoods, people who live on the streets, people who have been crushed, have got to have the power to make decisions, and the power to make their own way, and to call their own shots. That is why I get so excited when I hear about people who are starting new small businesses in these kinds of neighborhoods and letting people have a chance to do the work that they so desperately want to do.

Hardin: One of the criticisms -- well, it's sort of out of A.A. -- is that we co-depend. We enable people by not asking them to take responsibility but rather, by taking care of them.

I am involved with Oxfam and we have a lot of refugee camps. We have come to the conclusion that when you stop feeding people, when you begin to say, "Hey, we need a plan from you. Six months from now we are going to stop feeding you. In the meantime, what do you want -- plows, pumps?" we're saying that we want you to take responsibility for feeding yourself and you tell us what resources you have got to have to do that. Can that kind of thinking work here?

Medema: I think it can if I am willing as a person in the affluent middle class to give up some of the resources that I horde.

Hardin: You're talking about putting money at the problem, but is there something else?

Medema: It's time and energy, too. It's space; it's land.

Wallis: It gets at the structure of the economy itself. We have gutted the economy and there are no jobs in my neighborhood for people, except McDonald's. You can't create a system that has no room for people and then say, "You all just ought to help yourselves."

Hardin: We're saying to come up a plan that tells what you need and we'll come up with some resources. You are saying that can't be done here.

Wallis: We have a local elementary school in our neighborhood -- 700 kids. In June, 300 didn't pass on to the next grade. In our little neighborhood center, we have 50 of those kids. It is a learning center for kids after school. Only one of those kids didn't pass on to the next grade because its a focus program. The kids want it; they want to learn. They want to make a difference in their lives. But they have no chance.

Hardin: One of the things we have done in Chicago is to de-centralized the responsibility for education to the neighborhoods. Does that swing with what you are saying?

Medema: I think that what is important is that people want to have to change. The people who are in need have to want to get out of the mess they are in, and the people who have created the oppressive situation have got to want every human being in the country to start making decisions about their lives.

Wallis: Which is why we are calling for a fundamental change of heart which is the beginning of social change.

Hardin: We have got to believe that we all have some power in this situation and Christ calls us all to be there for it. I guess that is what we're saying. Thanks, Jim and Ken, for being with us.