Thanks for indulging my request of singing that piece of music in a setting where we often use those words. I can now check it off my bucket list.

The reading from Deuteronomy that we just heard is actually from the Revised Common Lectionary for this first Sunday of Lent, and it does tie in with the issue that I think is very important in our world and in our Church. That is “Whose Land is it Anyway?” Some people, including some who are presidential candidates answer: it belongs to us European-Americans and we can decide who can stay here and whom we are entitled to exclude or deport, or to send on a trail of tears to areas that are less productive. But the biblical answer to this question Whose Land Is It Anyway is found in Chapter 25 of Leviticus, where God says, “Lev 25:23 The land must not be sold without a way of getting it back. That is because it belongs to me. You are only outsiders and strangers in my land. (NIRV). Now if this means anything, it means that everyone is to receive a share of this gift of God and that we are to receive our material income from our earned labor, not from unearned income such as land profiteering or land speculation. The importance of this commandment is shown by the phrase, “ that is because God says, “it belongs to me” The commandment disturbs me a lot, not because of what God says, but because the church and our country have completely ignored it.

The selection from this Sunday’s reading from Leviticus is very interesting in this regard.

26:1 When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it,

26:2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.

26:3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us."

26:4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God,

26:5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.

26:6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,

26:7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

26:8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,

1 with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;

26:9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

26:10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.

26:11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

The point of this section is that God links the gift of land, of natural resources, with that of the obligation to return to God and God’s community dues proportional to the amount of land that an individual or a family had.

I said that this mandate to consider land as a gift of God not to be exploited , has been largely ignored. However some people have paid attention to this mandate. One of them is an American journalist, writer, and sailor named . He lived in the nineteenth century and in 1879 wrote a book called “Progress and Poverty”, in which he asks the question.” Why in this age of such technological Progress (steam engines and mass production) do we have an increase in the gap between the rich and the poor?

His answer is that of land is a mechanism which is the privilege that governments give to landowners, allowing them to keep the returns on an investment that costs them little to maintain, results in ever increasing escalating land cost (and therefore housing cost). With the promises of ever increasing profits, investors pour money into land, and since the amount of land is fixed, the cost of land rises until it’s judged too high, so investment stops and a severe decline results, as we saw during the Great Depression, and in the recession of 2007-2008.

George’s proposed remedy to this was a -shift; to shift for labor to land. It’s often called the Single Tax.

As I looked on the section from Deuteronomy today, it seems that the tithe was based on the amount of land owned since more land meant more production and more product, whether it was grain or animals.

Now, I’m assuming that taxes are used either for programs that benefit all people equally or are distributed to all in a Citizen’s Dividend, as is done in Alaska with a tax on oil mining.

A beginning of this tax shift has been done in some places, mostly in Pennsylvania, by adjusting the tax. Usually property assessments are based on land value and

2 building value, reported separately. Land and buildings are usually taxed at the same rate. Some cities, such as Altoona, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg, did a gradually increasing revenue-neutral tax shift increasing the tax rate on land and lowering it on buildings. The result has been an increase in building, to meet an increase in the number and quality of jobs. The other result is a lowering of land prices, making housing more affordable, since land investors are less willing to bid up the price.

A movement going in the opposite direction is that of California, which passed Proposition 13 in 1978. It reduced the , which includes land tax, so that the revenue needed to pay for schools and social services had to be made up by an increase in wage and sales taxes, which negatively affects workers, especially the poor. One result of this has been the extremely high prices of housing and higher unemployment in California.

Another reason that land tax is beneficial to working people is that the rent or selling price is not based on the costs to the owner or seller, but on the value which is increased by what the local and state governments do, and sellers and those who rent out their property are already charging the full land rent, even though their costs are minimal.

I think the principles of this movement can be summed up as: 1. Tax only those activities that limit someone else’s freedom and opportunity. (If I own a large piece of land, the government gives me exclusive right to use it: that means that nobody else can use it, without my permission) Pollution would also fall under this criterion. 2. Consider the whole cycle of (a). earning by working, (b) buying a piece of land, (c) using it, then (d) selling it, or having one’s heirs sell it. This movement is sometimes a hard sell, because most influential people thank of themselves as landowners rather than workers. This is especially true of politicians. It’s important to think of all people especially the homeless, as well as young people who typically start adult life with no land. Last week Karin suggested that for Lent we should give up indifference to others. She got the idea from Pope Francis. 3. Use the questions of “who benefits? who pays,? and who decides?”, when thinking about a public issue or program or the lack of one. 4. Think about the incentives or disincentives that each kind of tax encourages. A tax on land encourages a frugal use of land. A tax on work discourages people from working or creating jobs. 5. Examine privilege, which means Private Law. Which laws in reality restrict the 80% while favoring the 20%?

One of the other things that affects the cost of land and therefore of hosing is zoning. Much of the land in our cities is zoned R-4 or R-6. This means that if person wants to live in those areas; they have to able to buy or rent a quarter or a sixth of an acre and the house that is built on that land. This excludes most people who don’t have a college education and many that do. I suggest that you look up Jane Jacobs and her book the Death and Birth of Great American Cities.

3 The thing that most drew me to the Mennonite Church was the book “Living More with Less” by Doris Janzen Longacre,. Its main principle is: more life with less stuff. I think this particularly applies to land, especially given that it’s a limited resource.

Also, this system is sometimes called the Third Way, because it’s socialistic with respect to natural recourses, yet free-enterprising in regard to allowing people to keep the fruits of their human work, manual or mental.

Also as Mennonites, we need to look at the unequal distribution of natural resources as a cause of most wars. A Jewish friend of mine Walt Rybeck, has written a book “Re- solving the Economic Puzzle” in which he asserts that Land Value Tax would solve many of the existing conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Another acquaintance, Fred Harrison, has written a book The Preditor Culture: The Systemic Roots and Intent of Organised Violence

For me, this understanding of land had a strong affect on my thoughts on immigration policies. As I’ve hinted earlier: how can we European-Americans expel the very people whose land we took by deception and violence?

Jesus said “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the land”. I believe that it is the responsibility of us, the not-so-meek to be sure that the meek do, in fact, inherit it.

I’d like you to indulge me once more, by singing the verse we sang at the start.

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