24/07/2014

Good morning.

For most people the phrase ‘kitchen debate’ suggests wearisome domestic discussion about what’s for dinner or who’s washing up. But it was given a whole new meaning on this day in 1959. At a trade exhibition in Moscow Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice-President Richard Nixon stopped in front of a mock-up American kitchen to debate the merits of communism over capitalism. It’s an argument Christianity has always been interested in since a key question for Jesus seemed to be: what about the poor?

Under Roman rule, the Mediterranean world of the first century was awash with ethnic, racial and religious identities. But then as now perhaps the deepest division was between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’. In our seaside parish in Co Down some people talk about ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-yachts’, making the point that for individual believers as much as for whole belief systems the ‘what about the poor?’ question refuses to go away.

Human alienation and social division had no place in the classic utopian vision of communism, yet they were plain for all to see in every attempt to live it out. Likewise, the free entrepreneurial reign of modern capitalism seems to have failed to close the economic gap between those at the top and those at the bottom. You have to wonder how things might be re-ordered if we were to start instead with Christ’s observation: you always have the poor with you.

Father we can imagine that the wealth will filter down, but again and again it fails to do so. Help us to see why, and grant wisdom, compassion and charity to those who hold the purse strings of the world. Amen