The Canadian federal election of 2021 is drawing to a close. Days after the election one of the close races for a seat as a Member of Parliament was declared. The delay was due to the fact that it was a tight race. The riding I am referring to is in Vancouver. One of the top issues in Vancouver is housing affordability. The person who won the riding has made large sums of money (4.7 million total, 3.9 million in the last six years) from buying then quickly selling houses (flipping). He has owned 21 properties for a period of less than a year. He is presenting himself as someone who will help his party take the issue of housing affordability seriously. This morning I heard him interviewed and the interviewer asked how he can justify speaking about housing affordability when his actions helped to drive up the price of housing simply for his own benefit. He gave answers that spoke to the general issue, but not to his actual actions. He did not mention that what he did was wrong. His party wants to make actions like his illegal. As I listened to him speak about how he would represent the interests of his constituents I thought of a few things at least;
Are our actions determined by ethics or legality?
What does it mean to make amends? Is it entirely naïve to think that the politician could put some of his questionably attained windfall into helping others afford homes? Call it a Zacchaeus decision.
Why is it so easy to identify inconsistency in the belief and behaviour of others rather than seeing it in ourselves?
I go back again to one of Karl Barth’s more cutting diagnoses of sin and wrong. He said that Christian faith ought to compel us to reflect on our own sin more than on the sin of other people. He said that acting as if other people, non-Christians in particular, are bad while Christians are good is a display of ignorance and absence of faith. He summed it up with the direction that we ought to always remember that “We are the wicked rascals.”
This is not to mean that I should applaud nor ignore the stated intention vs. the actual behaviour of a politician. The MP said in the interview that he would always have the best interest of his constituents in his mind as he served in Ottawa. That might be his intention, but until now he has clearly viewed those around him as competitors to be defeated. He has clearly been willing to make money by way of making things more difficult for other people.
Hearing an interview like that need not lead me to deny his culpability and hypocrisy. However, there is little that I can do about that. What I can do is think about my own culpability and hypocrisy. If I see a clear picture of such things in this example, then how can that help me see how I excuse my own behaviour, my own lack of regard for others, my willingness to count my own comfort as more important than even the basic needs of other people? What would I do were I given a chance to make a lot of money, even at the expense of other people?
You remember the time when Jesus instructed his followers not to judge other people? He said that we notice the speck in someone else’s eye while we are walking around with a beam of wood protruding from our own eye. He was funny like that. He said that given the beam in our eye we would have a hard time reaching the speck in the eye of another. We couldn’t get close enough. The whole thing would look ridiculous. He said we should deal with the beam first. That would be the only way to get close enough.
The Desert Fathers spoke a lot about sin, not the favourite topic of the day then or now. Virtually every time they spoke about sin, though, it was about their own, about how even the sin of other people should remind us first of our own failure to be truly loving.
An example; From “The Sayings of the Fathers: Part IX: That We Should Judge No Man”
A holy man wept bitterly when he saw someone sinning, and said, ‘He today: I tomorrow.’ However grave a sin is brought to your notice, you must not judge the culprit, but believe yourself to be a worse sinner than he.
Vancouver real estate has occasioned a great deal of sin; a whole world of specks and beams.