Dennis Tuuri

We’ve come to the topic of gleaning. God’s primary provision for the poor, the widow, the fatherless, and the stranger in our land on the same Sunday as there’s another event occurring, Hands Across America, that also seeks to address some of these same issues.

We will review here for a minute or two what we talked about last week and then we will look at God’s primary provision to take care of some of the problems that we’ve been discussing for the last five or six weeks. We’ll talk about what gleaning is and then after we talk about what gleaning is and how to apply it today, we’ll go through six ways in which I believe that God’s provision of gleaning is a better system for taking care of the problems that God wants us to address than Hands Across America.

Otto Scott last week at the Reconstruction conference said that in days past in this country, newspapers would print the sermon the day afterwards. It was very applicable to what they were doing, and it was important to understand the Word of God and its relationship to society as well. And so today we’re going to be a little more topical and relating it to a specific act in our nation that’s going on called Hands Across America. And as I said, it’s in the providence of God that we have these two things happening on the same day—our discussion of gleaning and then their participation in Hands Across America.

Now, if you remember correctly, last week we were talking about the poor and we made a couple of theological discoveries, if you will. Our concern for the poor and whatever we do for them, first of all, is analogic. It’s to image God’s concern for the poor, God’s concern for us who are poor in spirit. So whatever we do has to image God’s action toward the poor.

We discussed Psalm 111 and 112 in that context. And you know, I’m just really impressed with those two Psalms. Psalm 111 and 112. And I’d encourage you to read through those again this next week or so with your children, particularly, and show them that scripture clearly points out that covenant man is to be understood in relationship to the character of God himself. Psalm 111 discusses God. Psalm 112, same exact structure—alphabetic psalms—discusses man in the terms of, in the terms that just discussed God. In this portion, man is analogic.

So whatever we do for the poor has to be understood as imaging God’s concern for the poor. We also said that God’s concern and God’s dealing with the poor—his mercy—is always seen in context of his justice. To separate mercy and justice is wrong, and God always talks about mercy being tempered with justice.

Based upon those two facts, we noted that both of those things are bound up in the covenant. And so our concern for the poor is covenantal in that sense—that it images God’s relationship to us and calls us then to love our neighbor the way that God has loved us.

Practically speaking, then, as a result of those theological points, we said that our concern first of all—we said that we must help the poor. It’s a commandment of God. We have to help the poor. It’s not optional.

Secondly, we said that we must truly help the poor. We must address the root causes of poverty instead of just helping with the immediate problem. We’re to help with the immediate problem, but we’re also to address the root problems.

Third thing we said that, based upon mercy and justice being coterminous here, our concern for the poor should not result in leveling and should not be egalitarian in structure. Egalitarian being everybody should be equal, fairness, that kind of thing. We want to keep that out of our understanding of concern for the poor because God doesn’t want that kind of leveling or egalitarianism in our concern for them.

And the fourth thing we said is that our concern and compassion for the poor, what we do, should not be primarily statist. In other words, God doesn’t particularly call on the civil magistrate to enforce these things about the poor. What God tells the civil magistrate is to assure them justice in the land and opportunity, but he calls on individuals to be concerned for the poor and to put that concern into active works.

Now, we’ve been talking for the last five or six weeks, leading up to this talk and the one next week. We began this whole series of talks talking about the fact that scripture continually tells us to have this concern and compassion for the poor. Fine. What do we do about it? How do we obey those laws of God? How do we apply them in our situation today? And how do we understand them?

We’ve seen over the past that God’s concern for the poor singles out the fatherless, the widow, the stranger, and then the poor. Those are all lumped together in the discussion of gleaning specifically.

Now, we’ve seen over the last few weeks there are various things that we can do personally in relationship to these various groups. We talked about a portion of our tithe being the third year tithe. We talked about the third year tithe in the Old Testament structure being today applicable in every year’s tithe for us. A portion of that tithe is to be used for the fatherless, the widows, and the stranger in the land.

So that’s something personally we have to do with a portion of our tithe. And I’d encourage you, then, for instance, one vehicle you could use to address that concern is to have a box in your house and use a portion of your tithe—put into that box weekly—and talk to your children about what that box is for: to assist these various groups. Then look for opportunities to use that money in helping people. That’s something we can do personally.

We have acts of charity, acts of compassion, such as the good Samaritan. We’ve talked about when we see somebody in need, we can minister to them immediately in terms of helping them out if they’ve been set upon or some other thing like that.

We talked about God’s concern for the fatherless, providing a biblical model for us in terms of adoption. We were seen as fatherless. God has adopted us into the faith. So adoption of fatherless children in our land or fatherless children from other countries is certainly a good vehicle on the personal level to apply our concern for these groups that God has told us to care for.

And we’re also talking, on the personal level, family care. Family has to provide for one another within the family. The family is the first line of defense when times get bad. And so we personally and in our families can apply these things, making sure that everybody in the context of our extended family is taken care of in relationship to God’s Word.

We also talked about the church. The church has responsibilities. We talked about in the first couple centuries of the church—they established an order of widows. Widows specifically are said to be put on church rolls, meeting certain conditions, and then they would do work for the church and, as a result, from that, get sustenance or wages for that work.

We said that the primary vehicle the church is to be engaged in, in terms of assisting the fatherless, the widows, the strangers, and the poor, is instruction. The church is, after all, the oracle of God. It takes the scriptures and applies it to life and tells people and tells the nations their responsibilities in light of God’s Word. So it’s instructional.

We also mentioned though that some of you have been contributing part of your poor tithe to the church for the last few years, and it’s appropriate for the church to use part of that money to assist these groups—the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger.

And then we put legs on that, as it were, and we gave some money toward a candidate who is involved in anti-abortion work. Because the abortion movement is a movement of parents abandoning their children and creating fatherless out of them, and the church should have a concern for those fatherless, and they should be involved in that sort of work. A portion of the tithe that’s legitimate to use toward that purpose.

And we also talked about how the church has a love feast. We have a meal here every Sunday after our sermon. That meal leads up to communion and is seen in the New Testament context of the love feast, linked with communion. And we have an obligation as a church to try to get people into that love feast and demonstrate to them the grace God has shown to us and to the poor and to the fathers and the widows and the strangers again.

And I hope that we’ll begin to do that in this church—invite people into that love feast and show them that kind of rejoicing that can occur in the covenant, in the context of the covenant of God.

And then we talked about the government’s responsibility in some of these things. One of the primary things the government has to do is provide equal justice. The government is always in a position of being warned not to enslave these various groups, because the civil magistrate, as it does wield the sword, is always in a position to enslave them. It’s always going to be a temptation to use those groups for their own advantages, and we have to make sure that doesn’t occur in our land.

Equal justice, of course, also implies that the rich get equal justice as well as the poor. There are specific commands in the case law in Exodus 22 and 23 talking about that—to not favor the poor over the rich either.

And then we also said the government has a responsibility to avoid setting up unjust economic systems. In other words, economic systems such as inflation actually hurt the poor. And so the government that involves itself in those sort of coercive policies ends up actually hurting the poor instead of helping them.

All that’s leading up to the fact that these things are all good and well, but the central element—I’m convinced that God tells us in terms of helping the poor, the fatherless, and the widow and the stranger in our land—is what we’re going to talk about today. And it’s gleaning.

Gleaning is the central element of God’s concern and program for the poor.

Now, what is gleaning? Just briefly, we’ll talk a little bit about what it was. It should be fairly obvious. We’re talking about an agricultural community here in the context of these laws. They had parcels of land that they would harvest and take the fruit and weed off of. And they were told not to harvest in the corners. They were told in the olive trees not to beat all the olives off—leave some there for these groups.

Gleaning was leaving a portion of their field for use by those who were hungry and who needed income in order to survive. Gleaning then was leaving a portion of this field.

Now, remember that in the Old Testament and in the agricultural system, this field and the produce of it was their profit. Remember we talked about the tithe several months ago. The tithe is on the produce—what comes out of the field. That’s the income. And for our situation in today’s economic system, that income is usually in terms of wages.

So the field and giving over a portion of the profits or of the fruit of this field was actually giving over a portion of the profits whereby God had blessed the people.

I’d suggest this as maybe a statement trying to examine what exactly gleaning was. Gleaning was a process whereby covenant man sacrificed part of their income and profit for assistance to the deserving poor.

There was a process whereby covenant man sacrificed part of their income and profit for the assistance of the deserving poor. It was, after all, as I said, their profit. It was their profit they had reaped from their land. And yet, they were to give a portion of that profit—let it sit there for the deserving poor.

Now it’s interesting. I thought about this in terms of the tithe again and profit. And I thought, “Well, you know, it says that the tithe is whatever came out of the field. Whenever you came, whatever came out of the field, you counted that and you gave God a tenth. The charitable portion of the field left for the groups that we’ve mentioned was not part of what you took out of the field. It was not tithed. It wasn’t taxed by God’s 10%.”

And I wonder if that wasn’t originally the origin for the idea of a charitable deduction from your income. See, they left it in the field. They didn’t take it out. They didn’t count it as part of what they were being taxed on. It was given over.

So we have to understand the sense of profit to apply that today. And I think what we have to see is that if we’re going to look at systems that attempt to emulate gleaning and bring it into modern-day application, there’s several points that would have to be in it.

First of all, modern gleaning would have to result in a diminution or a lessening of our profit. Okay? Because, after all, the owner of this field could have reaped the entire thing and gotten more profit. God said, “Don’t do that. Give a portion of the profit. Leave it there for the deserving poor.”

So whatever we’re going to talk about in terms of applying that today has to result in hurting us economically, reducing our overall profit margins. Okay? It has to result in a diminution or lessening of our profit.

Secondly, any system of gleaning that we establish today has to have in it the element of working charity—not in the words of Russian politics of guilt and pity, not promiscuous pity or charity, but rather working charity.

You see, the people had to come into the fields. They didn’t harvest all this stuff and then put it in a silo somewhere and say, “You can come and get it now.” No. The people that were to receive the benefits of the gleaning had to come to the field and had to work—very hard work, backbreaking work—to reap off those portions of the harvest that were found in the corners.

After all, the corners are more inaccessible. The upper branches of the trees that bore fruit are more inaccessible. So it took a lot of hard work. It wasn’t like going down the middle of the field where all would be very easy to pick. No, it was working the perimeters after the primary harvest had been accomplished.

So it has to be working charity. It has to involve an element of work and hard work for a lessened amount of return than you would normally get if you had a regular job or if you had your own field.

The third thing I think that’s important here is that gleaning, present-day gleaning system, should ideally be personal. Okay? It wasn’t God didn’t tell the nation of Israel civilly to gather these portions of the glean fields and to put them someplace. And he didn’t tell the church either in the Old Testament to take care of this problem. He told the individuals within the within the covenant to let people glean a portion of their field.

So it should ideally be personal—our systems of gleaning that we establish today.

Now there are some present examples that people have used in terms of gleaning, and they’re appropriate, but I think they fall a little bit short of the mark in some of these things.

Goodwill Industries has been talked about as an example of gleaning in our society, and certainly they are to a certain extent. They glean off these various elements that have been given to them and they turn around and use it to employ and put people to work fixing them or selling them or whatever.

However, one of the problems with Goodwill, first of all, is that it isn’t personal. It’s an organizational effort. Again, it’s a voluntary association, which is good and proper. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t think it has the personal element to it that gleaning would seem to imply.

Additionally, most people when they give things to Goodwill, it isn’t really a diminution of their own personal profit. It’s something they don’t really want anymore. And it’s something I think a lot of people—they give that stuff to Goodwill so that somebody will come and pick it up, so they won’t have to take it to the dump or someplace. So it isn’t seen primarily as a diminution of a profit, and after all, we said that gleaning should result in our profit being diminished somehow.

Now George Grant in his book, *Bringing the Sheaf*, which is a great book and we all should be reading that book, talks about churches providing food pantries, and that’s good because what you’ve got there is you’ve got food. The food is to be used. What he means by food pantries—if you have these bags of food and a church man who is hungry would come to the church, he’d say, “I’m hungry. I need food for my family.” The church would say, “Well, that’s fine. We have a lawn to be mowed or we need some painting done or whatever.” He would do the work and then he’d get the food.

Well, that’s good. That’s putting people to work. It involves work, and it involves a diminution of profit on the part of the participants in the church because, after all, they bought food that they’re putting into these bags. So it actually is cutting into their pocketbook, if you will. So that’s good.

But my primary concern with food pantries is that it isn’t primarily personal. It’s good, and if we want—I think it’d be a good thing for our church to get involved with—but it doesn’t have that personal element to it. And so I think that it’s not—we don’t want to restrict understanding of modern-day gleaning to things like food pantries or to Goodwill.

I think that more appropriately—now I should say also that, of course, Goodwill and food pantries are much better than food stamps, which you know don’t really incorporate any of these elements that we’ve just talked about. I should have added, by the way, that in terms of the lessening of our profit, that’s a voluntary lessening of our profit—it’s not involuntary. In other words, somebody doesn’t take it from you and give it to somebody else. It’s voluntary in the sense of you have discretion over who you’re going to let go in your field. But in any event, these things are good, but I think that more properly what we’d want to think about in terms of applying this principle today is—there are, as an example, if you own a farm—obviously, if you’re a farmer and you have a farm, you can apply it directly. You can let people glean the corners of the field.

There are other methods, though, in order to apply these things to our own lives. All of us have odd jobs around the house that could be done. And we could do those things ourselves instead of hiring somebody else to do them. And we do that, although most of us in the church—because we’re, you know, not in the upper income levels usually—fix faucets and mow lawns and paint and this kind of thing in our houses by ourselves because we can’t really afford to hire somebody to do those things, and we keep more of our money intact if we do these things.

However, if we were to take those portions of our modern existence—both at the workplace and at home—and let people who are willing to work and who are hungry and in need and who fit these categories we’ve talked about—poor, widow, fatherless, and stranger—if we let those people come into our homes and glean those quarters, as it were, of our household work, then I think we’d see that all these three things that we’ve talked about would be applicable.

We’d have a diminution of our profit. Okay? We’d pay money to these people or food or whatever. Our own personal resources would be lowered by allowing them to do that. It would be working charity because they would get that money from us or that food or whatever it is, or shelter perhaps. We could let them into our house to work in our house, and as a result, stand under our roof. He would get that as a result of direct work. So it’s working charity again.

And third, it’s personal. We know the people then. We see them face to face. And if there are other problems that have led to their position of poverty, we’re going to know about it. And so we can treat them more—again, to use a term that some people don’t like these days—we can treat it more holistically.

We can see if there are personal or family problems there that have helped contribute to the poverty problem we’re trying to address. We can see those things one-to-one and begin to counsel the person and help him through some of those other problems.

The fact that it’s personal, I think, is extremely important. After all, like we said about the tithe, the use of the portion of our tithe that’s used for the widow, the father, the stranger—we had to declare before God that we’ve done that thing, in Deuteronomy 26, an affirmation of the covenant. We had to say, “We’ve done this. We’ve given this money to the poor.”

And if I’m going to have to make that kind of proclamation before God, then I want to make sure that I actually have done that thing and that I haven’t trusted the eldership of the church to do it correctly. Now, you should be able to trust the eldership of the church, but I think that personal aspect is extremely important.

God has commanded us to let a portion of our field be gleaned, to let a portion of our profit be given over to those who are willing to work in exchange for those goods and services. He’s commanded us to do that. He’s commanded us to do that. And therefore, we should walk in obedience to it and try to apply those things in our life today.

Perhaps one other thing that we could do in terms of gleaning is that we could take capital resources that we have. For instance, a computer or a lawn mower or any other kind of capital items that we have, and let the people that want to work use that capital for their own benefit as well. Maybe let them use your computer for one day out of the week to do something that would produce a profit-making venture for them. And we’re sort of then letting the people use our land, as it were, and glean off of the capital that we have—which in the Old Testament was our land, which in the New Testament is various things that we have in terms of our productivity.

Well, that’s the basic idea, I think—to have these three elements involved and to start to develop some systems in our own houses that would begin to implement some of this gleaning.

Now, I think it’ll help us as we go through some of these next six points I want to talk about to understand the results of gleaning and the application of it if we compare and contrast it with this Hands Across America, which is an attempt to deal with the same problems that gleaning deals with.

So we’re going to talk about six reasons why I’m convinced that gleaning is more advantageous and is better than Hands Across America.

The first reason I think that gleaning is better is because of its short-term results.

Now, Hands Across America—in case you don’t know what that is—they’re trying to get people from California all the way over the East Coast to post—have one person holding somebody else’s hand all the way across America. I saw a cartoon in the Sunday paper this morning, and the guys who were organizing it were saying, “Oh, what’s the problem?” He says, “Well, I think we’re going to have to change it to Hands Across Rhode Island, ‘cuz they didn’t have enough people for Hands Across America.”

There are major gaps apparently that are going to have to be covered by rope or something. But anyway, that’s—we can’t criticize it for that.

Hands Across America—in order to participate in that link, you had to contribute $10. Okay? It’s going to take between 4 and 6 million people they figure to form this human chain from California to the East Coast. That means they should raise between $40 and $60 million. In addition, there’s corporate contributions that have taken place as well. But in any event, they’re talking about maybe producing $50 million worth of money from which they can aid people.

By the way, it cost between $12 and $14 million to stage this event. They had to put $12 to $14 million into it in order to glean out $50 million. Not a real good return on investment, I don’t think.

But in any event, what are they going to do with that $50 million? Sixty percent of that $50 million is to go to immediate aid in terms of helping people. But when they say immediate, they don’t really mean quite immediate. What they mean is that they’re beginning to take applications now from various groups around the country, proposals, applications, to receive some of the $50 million. That means there’s this decision-making that has to go on now, over the next few weeks, to figure out who’s going to get that money for the immediate assistance—that $30 million.

So there’s no immediate beneficial results of Hands Across America in the short term.

On the other hand, gleaning has immediate and effective action to it. At the end of the day, when that person has gleaned the field, or at the end of the day when he’s come to your house and done some work around the house for you and you’ve paid him with groceries or food or whatever, he can take that money out or he can take the groceries out and eat them, or he can take the money out and buy food with it for his family. The same day the short-term results are: that person who’s done the gleaning receives a necessary component of life, which is food.

And remember, we talked about all this compassion for the poor in the context of making alive. So we see an immediate making alive of people when we allow them to glean the resources that we have.

Now, I did mention that there is one immediate benefit of Hands Across America. You do get a t-shirt, probably the same day. I shouldn’t, I suppose, be quite so hard on them, but you’ll understand why as we go through this.

In any event, gleaning is better because of short-term results—immediate meeting of needs of the hungry.

Second, gleaning is better than Hands Across America because of the long-term results.

Now, they’re going to use 60% of the $50 million they gather or something in that area in terms of short-term benefits to various groups over the next few months instead of today. And they’re going to use 40% of that for long-term action.

And when I saw the man who was in charge of this on TV—on McNeil Lehrer, I think it was Friday night—he said that 40% of this is going to be venture capital. Capital. You know, they’re going to try to figure out some creative ways to deal with hunger and poverty using venture. You know, venture capital is a term in business that implies a high degree of risk. You may get zero back out of the money you use.

So when they start using terms like venture capital to deal with the resources that they’ve taken from people—people who in good faith have tried to help the poor through this participation and turn into venture capital—I’m a little bit concerned. But not anywhere near as concerned as I became as I became more and more aware of what they’re actually going to try to do with the results of Hands Across America.

What they’re trying to do is achieve a consciousness-raising on the part of the American people to the problem of the poor in America and the correct way to solve that problem.

Now, on McNeil Lehrer, they had an editorialist from the New Republic who didn’t like Hands Across America. But he said, “You know, the problem is what we need to do is we need to get more taxes. We need to have more government involvement.” These guys are putting $50 million into something—into a problem that the government’s trying to deal with in billions of dollars.

I don’t know if you know or not, but $50 million might sound like a lot to you, but every year this country spends between 11 and 12 billion in food stamps alone. Eleven to 12 billion. Fifty million isn’t much compared to 11 or 12 billion.

The country spends up to close to $90 billion a year on various programs designed to assist people who are classified as poor or as needing assistance. Ninety billion. To take $50 million out of that, venture capital maybe of $20 million, and try to accomplish something when the government hasn’t been able to take their $90 billion and do something with it—seems a little bit wrongheaded, unless you have some new ideas, which they don’t.

But see, they’re not—the organizers of this thing are not primarily concerned with that first $50 million. And this discussion that ensued on McNeil Lehrer, and again, later on that night on ABC News Nightline with George Will and Harry Belafonte and some other people involved in organizing it—George Will wasn’t. He was against it, or at least pointing out the problems of it.

It wasn’t like any of the people in either one of these panel discussions that I watched said that the problem is we need to turn to voluntary action. That’s not what this is all about.

What they all agreed on is that the government needs to spend more money to address this problem—that we have to give more in terms of taxation to address the problem with the poor in our society. And they see Hands Across America as a device whereby they can drive political action.

The organizers said that society drives the government. We raise the consciousness. We use the mailing list that we’ve now created to work political action in Washington to affect higher taxes and a bigger portion of the budget going to entitlements. That’s what they’re trying to do with this thing. Okay. The whole point is to drive a statist solution to the problem with the poor.

Well, George Will said, “Fine.” And he agrees, by the way, even though he’s conservative. He agrees that the government is really the ones who should be involved in this. He said the big problem is we’re spending $90 billion a year now. We can’t take care of the problem. No more money is going to do it. We have to have new ways of looking at this thing.

What’s going wrong? What’s going wrong is that Hands Across America and statist solutions do not provide long-term results. They throw money at a problem and they reinforce a mentality that is egalitarian, that is leveling in its concept.

Now, this is real serious stuff, folks. Yesterday on Firing Line, Buckley interviewed David Stockman, and that was a very interesting show, and for those of you who’d like to watch it—I have it on tape now. Stockman—some people think has changed from being supply-side to wanting to balance the budget. Stockman’s point was this: we have developed a welfare state in this country, a system of entitlements that cannot be stopped.

He said, “We tried for a couple of years to stop it and to cut back into some of these programs. We couldn’t do it. If we can’t stop it, then, and if we’re going to have as a result of the entitlement programs and the use of funds a $200 billion deficit a year, we better raise taxes. We’re going to go broke otherwise. We’re going to have economic collapse otherwise.”

You see, he’s not in favor of higher taxes. What he’s in favor of is a balanced budget. But he’s saying practically speaking, we cannot stop the welfare state. He says we have to either raise taxes or face imminent financial disaster.

Now, it’s important because when you see things like Hands Across America, it is accelerating this whole process of the welfare state—an attempt to level all people and to produce egalitarianism and to take from the rich and give to the poor. Okay. That’s going to be the long-term results of Hands Across America.

What are the long-term results of gleaning? The long-term results of gleaning also results in a consciousness-raising, if you will. It results in an increased understanding of the Word of God and how it relates to the problem. It says that the answer to the problem comes from thrift, comes from hard work, comes from saving for the future and trying to better oneself economically. That’s what gleaning teaches.

It wasn’t easy to do that kind of work. One who was doing gleaning work wanted to get out of that work and get to a place where they could own their own field. And they would save pennies, if they had to, every day—if that was all they could save—to try to achieve that end. They forsook what they could do with that money—other things they could do with that money—for the sake of capitalizing themselves for the future.

The long-term benefits of gleaning encourages work and the profit motive. It encourages an understanding and a development of what has become known in this country as the Puritan work ethic. That’s what produces prosperous societies—that kind of hard work and effort.

The scriptures are clear that sluggards produce—and their indolence produces waste, produces inefficiency. They shouldn’t be fed. The scriptures are clear that the answer to problems of poverty are primarily involving those people in work. Okay.

Gleaning is also profitable long-term because it produces an awareness of need for assistance on the part of the person who’s going to be gleaning. They know that they’re there because they’re having hard times financially. They’re aware of their problem.

Hands Across America tells poor people, “You’re poor because somebody stole from you. The rich man over here is rich, and as a result, he’s taking your money or your share of the pie, as it were.” That doesn’t help him long-term. That hurts him long-term.

Gleaning produces a sense of a person’s need for assistance. Story of Ruth and Naomi. Naomi knew her need for assistance when she came back to the land, didn’t she? She said, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara—bitterness—’cuz God has dealt bitterly with me. He’s brought me to a place of need and want.” She came back that way. Ruth, in assisting her, went to glean because she knew that they needed assistance of that type. And as a result of that, God blessed that work. God blessed their obedience to his instruction for taking care of the poor.

Third, gleaning is better than Hands Across America because gleaning is personal.

Hands Across America is anonymous. You give $10 to this organization. You don’t know who it’s going to help. It’s kind of like United Way. You know, you give money to United Way. You don’t know where it ends up going. It ends up going to people like Planned Parenthood, goes to feminist health clinics that, you know, promote lesbianism and illegal use of drugs.

Now, that’s not all it goes to. It does go for some good people as well, but you don’t know where it’s going. You don’t know where that money you’re sending is going to.

People that are doing Hands Across America—the sea-mans who are involved in Live Aid—you know, there again, people gave money to this thing hoping that it would help reduce poverty in Ethiopia. What happened a couple weeks ago is a ship loaded with all this material came in, and the Marxist government immediately took it over, took possession of it. I don’t know if they’ve got it out of their hands yet. But the point is, you don’t know what’s going to happen to your money through that sort of a system.

Whereas in gleaning, you have face-to-face knowledge of the person you’re going to help. It’s personal, face to face. It’s directly administered, and as a result of that, is used more wisely. You’re not going to let somebody come in and glean your fields who is whose whole intent is to wreak havoc upon your fields or something. There’s discretion you have to exercise.

Fourth, the fourth reason why gleaning is better than Hands Across America is that gleaning is near universal.

Now, in point of fact, you know, my daughters were talking about, “Oh, it wouldn’t be fun to be part of Hands Across America.” They couldn’t be, really, because it starts down in California and goes to the East Coast. Doesn’t come up here. Now, they have little circuits they’re doing here too. But the whole human chain is limited in who can participate in it.

Gleaning is not. Everybody who is not poor in our land, who has resources, can allow the poor to glean from them. Everybody in this church probably has gleanable resources of one type or another. And everybody in this church, as a result, is under obligation to make those resources available to the poor in our land.

Fifth, the fifth point why gleaning is better than Hands Across America—gleaning is better because gleaning will not wipe out world hunger.

Okay. Gleaning is better because gleaning will not wipe out world hunger. Well, that doesn’t sound better, does it? Hands Across America—the whole effort of this consciousness-raising is to wipe out human hunger in the world. That’s an illusion.

After all, Jesus told us, “The poor you’ll always have with you.” It tells us in Deuteronomy that if people obey the commandments of God, you’ll have no poor in your land. And it goes right on about six verses later to say, “The poor you’ll always have with you.”

Poverty and scarcity is a result of two things: the Fall—the historical fall—and personal sin. Now, if you see a poor person, you don’t know if it’s personal sin or just the results of the outworking of the Fall. You can’t make those sort of judgment decisions individually. But we know that in the big picture, those two things have led to poverty.

The Fall results in economic scarcity. Personal sin. Hands Across America says we’ll get rid of poverty by addressing the questions of the Fall and sin. Well, of course not through egalitarianism. It’s a dangerous illusion.

The illusion of Hands Across America is that until we get rid of human poverty, you should feel guilty about the fact that it even exists because it really shouldn’t exist. There’s no reason for it. The only reason for it is our own personal lack of compassion. That’s what we’re told. It’s the whole point of Hands Across America.

Well, that’s wrong. God has called us to rejoice once a week in this church over the great benefits that he has given to us. We’re to rejoice with the harvest that he’s provided us as a church.

R.J. Rushdoony quotes C.S. Lewis from *The Great Divorce*, talking about this whole problem. Lewis says:

“Demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe—that till they consent to be happy on their own terms, no one else shall taste joy—that there shall be the final power, that Heaven should be able to veto, or Hell should be able to veto Heaven? Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else forever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grandson to say you’ll accept no salvation that leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry, or you’ll make a dog in the manger, the tyrant of the universe.”

The dog in the manger was one of Aesop’s fables. He had this growling dog laying in the manger. He wanted to sleep there and he wouldn’t let other people enjoy the hay in the manger. The other animals would come and eat them. The point is that if we say that until poverty is wiped out in the world, we should feel guilty about it, then what we’re doing is we’re saying that the person who is poor because of their personal sin—until that person consents to change his attitude—the rest of us are all left out in the cold. That’s dangerous thinking, and that’s the sort of thinking that is promulgated by Hands Across America.

Now, I’m not—I’ve not truthfully—I’ve not read the Aesop fable of the dog in the manger. I have read an Aesop book that has it in it. My daughter tells me that at the end of that fable, an ox comes up and throws the dog out with his horns. Does anybody know if that’s true?

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting that in Aesop, in the Aesop’s version of that, it ends with the horse coming up and walking away hungry. It ends with the dog still in the manger.

See, now that’s—that’s a Christian book, right? Maybe they didn’t like that ending about the ox throwing out the dog with his horns. It sounds kind of mean, you know? We’ve got to be real careful that this kind of fact of thinking doesn’t infect our homes and our churches. It will begin to, and it already has in my household. I’m sure it has in yours. We’ve got to root it out because it’s wrong.

The their attempt to wipe out poverty is by leveling all people. It’s a denial of the Fall and sin, and as a result is directly anti-Christian. It’s an attempt to deny God’s law and the effects of God’s law in terms of blessings and cursings in our society. Okay.

Now, gleaning, on the other hand, is discriminatory. You don’t let just anybody glean in your field. First of all, they have to want to work to get the sustenance of it. And we know with Ruth and Boaz that he knew the reapers, the gleaners rather, in his field. He knew them. He knew who they were. And he—particularly in the case of Ruth—made provision for her because of her understanding of the covenant and showing mercy to Naomi.

So gleaning is discriminatory. Christianity is discriminatory. It discriminates not on the basis of natural privilege, as we talked about before. It discriminates on the basis of faith and obedience or disobedience to God’s law.

Now, in our day and age, that kind of discrimination is going the way of all flesh. Recently, John Lofton interviewed Jean Kirkpatrick in Conservative Digest. Nice conservative—one of the ones that are perceived as a real conservative in terms of most issues. And yet, listen to what she says here.

Lofton says, “Will you not admit that you went a little overboard when you were quoted in the August 19th, 1984 National Journal as saying you believe deeply that it is the government’s business to concern itself about the welfare of all citizens and to provide minimum standards of living for everybody—even the indolent—which my dictionary defines as the idle and the lazy?”

Kirkpatrick says, “I added that especially for you.” Laughing. “No, it’s literally the case. Two days ago before that interview, I met with you in a group you were reproaching me for various welfare state views. You were pushing me on that question. I decided to make my point by going so far as to say the indolent.”

So Lofton says, “Federal indolence? Stamps.”

She says, “I meant to say that I believe in a civilized state—a community which is not only civilized but affluent—where we do not let people starve or freeze, even if they are starving or freezing because they are lazy.”

What she’s saying is that even if a person is lazy, refuses to work, refuses to go out and achieve clothing and housing for themselves, we have an obligation to help that person. She means it. She says she’s not sorry.

Well, that shouldn’t be real surprising to us either, because in 1975, a resolution was introduced in both houses of the United States Congress declaring that every person in the United States and throughout the world has the right to a nutritionally adequate diet.

Well, that’s held by most people in our country now, folks. It’s not held by the scriptures. The scriptures say if a man won’t work, he doesn’t eat. The scriptures discriminate on the basis of ethical decisions by people.

A right to food is what these people are talking about. Now, it’s interesting that the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement has fallen into the same trap. We talk about “right to life.” What’s the implications of that? If a person has a right to life, no matter what they do, then we better take the scriptures and throw them away because God kills people.

Remember, God can make alive and God can destroy. God creates, God kills. God judges people. We don’t have a right to life. What we have, as the basis on the basis of Adam’s sin, is a right to judgment, and God has a right to kill us, even as we stand here this morning. Now God postpones that. God mercifully gives us life, but it is not a right of the human condition. With the Fall of Adam, we do not have a right to life. It’s one small step to go from saying we have a right to life—and that’s the reason why we want to work against abortion—to saying they have a right to food.

Food is an essential component of life. Again, it’s easy for the Christian church to be taken up in these false ways of looking at reality based upon the culture around us. We need to build a worldview of the compassion that we’re to show to the poor on the scriptures, on the Word of God.

And the Word of God tells us that gleaning is good, that discrimination is good. We don’t have a right to life. We don’t have a right to food. Life comes by the grace of God. The ability to earn food comes from God. And if we work—if we deny that mechanism that he’s provided to us in hard work—then we shouldn’t eat.

As Sutton said, that’s God’s death penalty reinforced in the New Testament: Man doesn’t work. He doesn’t eat. Starts to death.

The sixth reason why gleaning is better than Hands Across America is because gleaning is, after all, God’s way of dealing with the problem.