Sunday, 9/22/13
Let’s start with the first reading in which the Prophet Amos
heaped scorn on rich shopkeepers who hated holy days when they were not allowed
to open their shops to bring in money. Amos pictured them on such days as occupying
themselves in making plans for squeezing more money out of customers. They
would make false-bottomed quart scoops that were a half pint short. They would
use false weights to cheat their customers of ounces every time.
Let me go back to my Korea years for an incident involving
shopkeepers who cheated their customers. Once, coming back to my coastal parish
on a Saturday afternoon the bus broke down twenty miles short of my church. I
was looking around for an army truck that might be going down my way, when a
man came up, introducing himself as a shop owner from my town. He suggested
that we split the cost of the cab.
He said he knew me because I was the only foreigner in his
town; and he said I wouldn’t know him, because none of the people running shops
ever came to church.
“Why is that,” I asked; and the man said, “We don’t go to
church because we cheat all our customers. If we didn’t lie, we’d lose them to
shops where they do lie.”
He insisted that religion and morality meant a lot to him,
and he was a follower of Confucius and a Buddhist. He explained that while
Confucius laid down beautiful rules for upright behavior with parents,
siblings, teachers, relatives; he had not bound his followers to be honest in
dealing with strangers. Confucius let him lie to outsiders.
He went on to talk about being a Buddhist. He said he made
up for cheating people by taking six months off every five years. He would
shave his head, and like a monk, he’d dress in a gray robe, and go about
begging for food. (He told me that right then his mother, after five years of
dirty dealings, had shaved her head, and was serving her six months as a
Buddhist nun)
I told him that we would improve our world if we refrained
from cheating people. I told him how Christ told us we should become like
yeast. By mixing our honesty with the dry flour of the business world, we could
serve to making the whole mass rise.
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