A reporter recently asked me, "As a Christian leader, does your faith have anything to say about Wall Street?" I said, "How much time do you have?"

Theologian Karl Barth said, "We have to read the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other." For too long we Christians have used our faith as a ticket out of this world rather than fuel to engage it.

In his parables, Jesus wasn't offering pie-in-the-sky theology… he was talking about the real stuff of earth. He talks about wages, debt, widows and orphans, unjust business owners and bad politicians. In fact Woody Guthrie breaks it all down in his song "Jesus Christ." The song ends with Woody singing, "This song was written in New York City. If Jesus were to preach what he preached in Galilee, they would lay him in his grave again."

The more I read the Gospels, the more they seem to confront the very patterns of the world we live in. At one point Mary, pregnant with Jesus cries out: "God casts the mighty from their thrones and raises ...