Every Sunday
in worship, we offer a blessing for our pledges and offerings we make
to our church. It's a prayer of hope that what we give will be
well-spent for the mission of our congregation, within and beyond the
walls of our sanctuary. It's a prayer that expresses our covenant with
each other, and with the Spirit that unites us, to work for the common
good to which we are divinely called.
As strong as our love for
each other may be, as warm and close as relationships are among our
people, there is probably no single person in the congregation who
would agree with the way that every last dollar of our offerings is spent.
Nonetheless, at the end of the offertory prayer spoken by the lay leader in worship, the "amen" speaks for us all. Our church (Mt Hollywood UCC in Los Angeles) is a little democracy. We trust that the collective will of our
people is striving to align with the divine as we make our financial
decisions. We know we're far from perfect in that quest. All the more reason for us to pray a
blessing on our gifts to the church, and celebrate the blessing that
follows from them.
Likewise, in the
much bigger democracy of our
nation, we are blessed to have representation in the process of our
taxation. We are blessed with the freedom to be citizen activists
pushing for the best use of the taxes we pay. We are blessed also by
the benefits funded by our taxes: schools, roads, sewers, public health
services, income support for elderly and disabled and vulnerable
people, national defense. Taxes make civilization possible. We pay
tax to the government, but in a democracy, we are the government. So
we're really paying ourselves to take care of our shared tasks. To be
sure, we often disagree with exactly how taxes should be spent, or how
much tax should be paid and by whom. But given the many blessings that
flow from them, it is good that we offer a blessing in
return.
Over the past thirty years, there has been a well-organized, brilliantly-executed political media campaign by conservatives to demonize taxes. One need look no further than last night's presidential State of the Union
address to see how successful it has been. Our President felt
compelled to brag about how he had accomplished so much without raising
taxes on anybody by "a single dime". This was after he outlined the
disastrous consequences of deficit spending over the last decade. Not raising taxes has become a dogma adopted by both
major political parties
in this country, and few have the nerve to challenge it. Want to go to
war? Go deep into hock, but don't breathe the idea of raising taxes to
pay for it. Want to bail out the banks? Go ahead and mortgage your grandchildren's
future to fund it. To suggest that it be paid for with increased taxes on anyone,
even on those who could easily afford a tax increase, would be
considered political suicide.
Conservative leaders have made a breathtakingly cynical effort to
bankrupt the government so that it will be forced to withdraw from
providing a basic social safety net for our people. The
strategy has worked all too well.
It's far past time to
"re-frame" the political discourse in this country. It's time to
change the way we think about taxes. It's time to do for taxes exactly
what we do for our offerings to the church, and bless them while
praying for guidance about how best to spend them.
A few years ago, I wrote such a blessing ( http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2005/04/a_prayer_at_tax.html ). It is a prayer for use by faith community leaders
to give thanks for the blessings that come through our taxes. It also prays for wisdom and for citizen action to
see to it that our taxes are spent best for the common good. In 2005,
I proposed to churches that they invite their members to bring their
tax forms to worship, lay them on the altar, and have the pastor offer
this kind of blessing on them. This event happened at a small number of
congregations around the U.S., including the one I served at the time.
If
taxes are being blessed in churches, temples, and other houses of
worship all over America, it demonstrates that people of faith
consider taxes to be fundamentally good, even if we might differ
respectfully about exactly how they are spent. Such a ceremony,
conducted all over the country, would do much to re-unite Americans
around our divine calling to take care and protect each other, especially those most vulnerable, through our democratic process.
On April 11 this year, the Sunday before our IRS forms are
due, let's see if we can get this to spread around the country in a
much bigger way. Progressive Christians Uniting - www.pcu-la.org - is
planning to organize a national tax-blessing event on that weekend,
mobilizing congregations to participate and getting media attention for
what they are doing. (I now serve on PCU's board of directors.) If
your congregation plans to do a "blessing of the
taxes", let me know, and let me know how you plan to do it. If you
have suggestions about how to make this a meaningful and
significant event, please let me know, also, so I can pass along your
suggestions to PCU.