When considering justice issues and relying in part on our consciences to help us decide where we stand on issues there is one major point we need to factor in. In 1st Corinthians 4:4 Paul says "My conscience is clear, but that doesn't prove I’m right. It is the Lord himself who will examine me and decide." (NLT) In other words, sometimes our conscience in a matter is faulty. Our conscience may not be pricking us, but that does not make everything we do right. Sometimes we don't have enough information on a topic and other times we have deadened our conscience by making excuses or continuing to make choices contrary to what it is telling us.
Let's consider coffee. I might know that many people who farm coffee are exploited due to their lack of knowledge, poverty and that they work for very low wages on large plantations. Also, some small coffee farmers accept very low prices for their crops, but even knowing all that might not be enough for my conscience to bother me when I go to buy the cheapest can of coffee I can find. Maybe I really don't have the correct information for my conscience to be informed enough to understand the issue. Maybe I have reasoned away the pricks to my conscience because after all coffee growers are so far away, mostly in poor countries anyway and after all if they were smarter they would be able to figure out how to get out of that cycle of poverty right? Besides if I don't buy their coffee they won't make anything at all. Those are a few of the arguments I've heard that might come from dulled consciences.
Here is how I think the processing of that information about coffee should probably go: I should be thinking "What scriptures tell me how I should react to this knowledge?". Well, there is the second "commandment" that Jesus gave in Matthew 22:39 "Love your neighbor as yourself." If I was a coffee farmer who worked hard to produce a crop of coffee would I want to be treated like many coffee farmers are? How about the very strong admonition given in James 5 verses 1 through 6. The language is very in your face when James says in verse 4 "For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of those who harvest your fields have reached the ears of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies." On the basis of these two verses I can see that if I want to live in a way that would please Christ I must consider my actions in the marketplace - I need to line up with the values of the kingdom of God.
I picked coffee as the subject of this blog post because I have more than just a passing interest and knowledge on the subject. In 2005 my family opened a fair trade, organic only coffee shop in Durham. In researching coffee, after deciding that we wanted to attempt opening a shop, I learned a lot about coffee as a crop and how it is brought to market. We decided there really was no choice to be made even though the cost to us would be up to double the cost of regular beans and we could not sell a cup of fair trade coffee for more than the going local rate. Even so we just could not sell something produced by what sometimes amounts to slave labor so knowing we might be shooting ourselves in the foot we chose to sell only organic fair trade beans and coffee. I think our shop may have been in front of the organic, fair trade movement by a few years - now many more people have become interested in both organic and fair trade. We enjoyed the shop but after 18 months decided that selling it was in the best interest of our family.
Here are a few resources for more information on coffee if you're interested http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/ , http://www.equalexchange.coop/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade
No comments:
Post a Comment