The Stewardship of Wealth, Gift, Grasp, and Grace: In black and White
By Norman Franklin
Norman Frankin
Once again, our nation is in the perils of travail in the aftermath of a public assassination that has shaken our conscience and stirred the soul of America. Violence never solves the discourse of opposing opinions, but violence, as the means to an end, has been the choice by default.
Charlie Kirk, conservative, outspoken founder of Turning Point, didn’t deserve to die because of his opinions, his ideas―his exercise of First Amendment rights. That amendment takes on various forms of tone and expression.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris didn’t deserve to have their stellar careers devalued by his dismissive remarks. Each attended elite institutions, Harvard, Princeton, Howard, Hastings, navigating with exceptional intellectual abilities, rhetorical prowess and strategic skills grounded in discipline and moral conviction. It’s not an academic journey of mental lightweights.
Whether you agreed or disagreed with Kirk’s ideas, his life should not have ended because of what he believed. But Medger, Malcolm, and Martin died―assassinated because of what they believed, what they advocated. Violence has been the uncivilized method of solving our differences in this civilized society. Violence has been a means of perpetuating systemic injustice.
What the assassinations of King and Kirk, Malcolm and Medger posthumously proclaim is their shared experiences with injustice that crosses the boundaries of racial and political ideologies; their deaths were to silence their voice―rather it stirred our moral conscience and engaged our collective prayers.
Just as we prayed for the widows: Coretta, Betty and Merlie―their heads bowed in mourning, their shoulders weighted down by the all too familiar grief suffered by Black Americans; we earnestly lift our voices in prayer for Erika Kirk and her two small children. May she lift her head with the unbridled strength witnessed by King, Evers, and Shabazz. Each was a mother who rose to the challenge, became the face of hope for humanity, and the inspiration of generations of Americans.
The God we serve still hears our prayers of compassion for one another. In His divine word, shared in 1 John 4:20, we are all family, adopted in Christ into the family of God. “If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen.”
Our civility has devolved to the point where insanity sets the tone and demeanor for our intersecting lives―it is the standard for our discourse with one another; opposing viewpoints birth more insanity instead of possibilities to consider. We’re locked in a vicious cycle.
The irony is that the absurdities of this culture lay at the feet of the common Americans―the working-class poor, and middle income regardless of ethnicity, melanin, or political affiliation. In clueless zaniness, and arrested critical thinking, we expect that our system of governance, the wealth-dominance capitalism, and a society of conflated religiosity should operate any differently from the principles it was founded upon―wealth as dominance and power.
The ravages of this system are never more poignant than now. The harsh, wealth-centric policies emanating from the pantheons of conservative rightness are shaking the American people woke.
To get to the genesis of the “wealth as dominance and power system” we must pull back the layers of sheets that have obscured the realities of our governance of the people, by the people, and for the people―the sheet draped history enshrined in purist narratives of a biblical principled foundation. It’s an aberration, framed as unapologetically right―God is on their side, that resists empirical data presented as possibilities of valid differing opinions. It remains a challenge for our quintessential light-to-the-world democracy to solve.
At the heart of the matter is wealth, how we steward it, how it is used as a system of dominance and power. To prepare us to be aware of what is to come from this methodology, we must return to the genesis―when it was birthed, why, and how it has been used to control and dominate the underclass for centuries.
In a three-part series, we will examine “Wealth as Domination” – “Wealth as Stewardship” – “Wealth as Weapon vs Wealth as Justice.” The classic folklore, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” authored by Stephen Vincent Benet, may offer a moral lesson for the aggressive pursuit of wealth and prosperity in our culture.