What Have We Become?

Greetings All,

Let's begin with a quote from Steinbeck again:

"And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer.  And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more.  And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country.  And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer.

And the crops changed.  Fruit trees took the place of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms: Lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes - stoop crops.  A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch.

And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms.  They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it.  And some of the farms grew so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see that the stopping men were moving among the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand.  Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store.  He paid men, and sold them food, and took the money back." from The Grapes of Wrath by John Milton, pgs. 316-317

Steinbeck is writing in a time where the world is changing from small farm agriculture to corporate agriculture; from many men working the fields with oxen and mules to a few men working the fields with a tractor; from self sufficiency rooted in the ownership of land to a forced dependence upon others.  The chapter this quote draws from is one of those general chapters, not about the Joads, but a commentary on the California that they are driving into with their hopes and dreams which is not worthy of those hopes and dreams.  I love the quote because it paints a picture of how the change depersonalizes everything.  No longer do "farmers" till the soil with their own hands, rather they hire the cheapest labor they can find to do it for them.  Steinbeck is describing a people who have lost touch with their roots, with their land, even with their community.  No longer are they the kind of people who can look on people in need with compassion and a mind to help, now they simply see someone who might steal their land.  No longer are people human beings, they are simply a commodity in the world of big farm agriculture.

I comment on this today because it strikes me that perhaps the church has done the same thing.  The big farmers started small and gradually grew away from that connection.  Like the farmer, we started our Christian walk excited, close to God and each other, wanting to tell others about God and to serve others in His love; but the longer we have "owned the land" the farther we have gotten from that initial excitement.  We have even come to the place that we have so few new Christians in our churches that we don't even get to watch that excitement on someone else, thereby growing our own excitement.  John Wesley always worried that with holiness comes financial prosperity and that financial prosperity would limit our face to face time with the poor and the needy.  In essence, he was concerned that we would become like Steinbeck's big farm owners.  The question for each of us today is this: In our walk with Christ, are we like the large farm owners who are more concerned about keeping what we have or are we like the hungry farmers wanting just a little piece of the whole of which we are more than willing to share?

Your brother in Christ,
Faron