WESTBROOK, Minnesota (STPNS) -- Sunday morning in church one of the lessons came from the apostle John, it was from 1 John 3:17. I think most Christians are familiar with the verse  John 3:16, “For God so loved the world he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” But in 1 John 3:17  it seems some what unrelated to the previous verse in 1 John, This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.  1 John 3:17 says “But whoever has the world’s goods, and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide, him?” Are we confused yet?



    The verse got my curiosity up so I looked up some information on bible verses about the rich and poor. The bible contains more than 300 verses on the poor, social justice, and God’s deep concern for both. In this site were several examples of God’s concern for the poor, God’s commands concerning the poor, consequences of not serving the poor, biblical attitudes for believers toward the poor, and God’s identification with the poor.

    Interestingly enough I could not find a single reference about helping the rich!

    Imagine that — yet the Conservative Religious Right Politicians seldom seem to find anything to help the poor and needy. They seem to always want to balance budgets on the poorest and neediest amongst us. When it comes to people sharing the pain, when solving budget problems, it never seems to fall on the wealthiest in this country.

    An example of this is the upcoming doubling of interest rates for college loans The conservatives want to take it out of health care. The liberals would prefer closing tax loopholes for off shore corporations, or a slight raise on the highest wage earners in the country.

    They call the low interest rates a subsidy of about six billion dollars. Well I think this could be solved easily by taking away the oil subsidies from the rich oil companies. There are plenty of other subsidies that go to wealthy or the highly affluent. The four or five  billion they receive would hardly be missed when you look at the huge profits American oil companies are making. Also whatever happened to the “windfall profits tax” that was levied on the oil companies 20 or 30 years ago?

    The next time someone tells you, we have to protect the rich in this country — don’t believe them — the American people are being duped by the big business machine.

    My faith in our society is falling very rapidly, especially when the so called smartest people on the supreme court can rule that a corporation is a person. I fear there is little hope for this country’s future. But that is a whole other issue.

Have a great week and do good!