Once again I have been irritated by the selective bias of the Lectionary's (Church of England's set pattern of reading through the Bible). This morning we skipped over a revolutionary text - the Ezekiel 27 deununciation of the city of Tyre the epicentre of the Phoenician empire. The city is described as a ship starting off with the mast - cut (of course) from a cedar of Lebanon but then assembled using the wealth of the Mediterranean. And then once the ship is assembled it is dramatically wrecked.
It is an extraordinary tirade on several counts - firstly because of the sheer detail of commercial exchanges - war horses, spices, iron, turquoise, purple cloth - the chapter reads like a harbourmaster's cargo manifest. Secondly like most commercial empires at their height it looked impregnable so the prediction of its demise must have seemed absurd. Thirdly the locus from where the prophetic denunciation came - a refugee camp by the Shatt en Nil canal in the southern part of Iraq - the writer Ezekiel was a deportee, a priest without a temple. Its as if a denunciation of the City of London was made from Sangat refugee camp on the French coast. No such denunciation would be reported by the press today- the opinions of marginalised people are as marginal today as they have ever been. But here we see how subversive the Bible can be and why it is readily accepted by minorities. 500 years ago owning a Bible in the English lanugage was a capital offence - we've forgotten that.
Business is conventionally treated by those in the church and those outside of it as a spirituality free zone. Where all that matters is money. And profit. Those of us who work in it know otherwise and perceive trade as being just as much about a network of relationships most profitable, many exploitive. The silence of our religious communities towards business is a scandal not least because most of them directly profit from business - in pensions, commercial property and international investments. Requiring businesses to trade ethically is the least we should demand of investors and companies. That businesses should benefit all of the communities who participate to create the goods and the services seems to me to be axiomatic. And in recent years in the West businesses have made giant strides in fair trade, in improving their environmental record, in their community related activities. At present I perceive the church to have little or nothing to say to these businesses. The texts are there but as we did this morning - we step around them.
