Blessed are the Poor
A sermon in The Other Six Days series
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 25, 2007
Deuteronomy 15:7-11; Luke 6:17-26
I. BEGINNINGDeut. 15:7 If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. 8 You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. 9 Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, "The seventh year, the year of remission, is near," and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the LORD against you, and you would incur guilt. 10 Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. 11 Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land."
Luke 6:17 He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. 18 They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19 And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
"Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 "Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
"Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
24 "But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
25 "Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
"Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
When I was a law student I was broke. I mean broke. Had no money. I once had a meal of Helper because I couldn't afford the hamburger to make it Hamburger Helper. That was probably as broke as I've ever been.
Well, I suppose there was the time I was so broke that I tried to make my own bread out of a bag of flour I had because I had nothing else in my fridge. Or, I suppose there was the time that I purchased the twenty-five cent cornbread mix to make myself some cornbread for something for dinner. Those were lean years for me when I didn't have a lot of money.
That was broke.
But I wasn't poor. And never have been.
Even in the brokest days in school, with a phone call (and the subsequent lecture about financial responsibility) I could get money from my parents. I had skills, work was available. And I was in law school--training for a career that has the potential for a lot of income.
So, as tight as times were for me and as uncomfortable as I was at times, I was not poor.
I had a safety net and a way out. I had a family that could take care of me. There were resources available. I was developing a skill set for a lucrative career. That is not the case for so many people. It is not always easy for people who have that kind of fall back to really understand poverty.
Poverty is one of the greatest crises, if not the greatest crisis, if not the crisis of our generation. All kinds of social ills can be traced to poverty. Crime, violence, terror, lack of education--all have their roots in poverty.
It is the issue that we as a community of faith are called most powerfully to respond to.
II. THE TEXTS
We heard some of those words read earlier for us. The text from Deuteronomy is clear about the duty of the people of faith in taking care of the poor and is not pulling any punches when saying:
7 If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. 8 You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. 9 Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, "The seventh year, the year of remission, is near," and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing... (Deuteronomy 15:7-9)
The "seventh year" refers to the Sabbatical Year--the year that came along every seven years when debts were cancelled, bonded servants were released (even the land had rest every seventh year). It was meant to prevent massive accumulation of wealth at the expense of others in the community. The sabbatical year allowed for cancelling of debts and the leveling of the playing field. Every fifty years, that is seven sets of seven, was the Jubilee, when even property reverted to its original owner, preventing the accumulation of land without any regard for those who had lost their land.
And so, what the author of Deuteronomy is saying is: "Look, I know that some of you are thinking, 'Well, they'll be fine--the year of remission is coming along. Their debts will be cancelled. They'll be okay. Why should I have to help them? Aren't they receiving food stamps? Isn't welfare enough? Can't they just join the military?'" The blanket of snow we have outside makes me think of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Scrooge's response to a plea to help the needy: "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"
This is the kind of response that we so often have: we view the poor as poor by their own fault. If only they would show a little initiative and get to work, they could lift themselves up by their bootstraps and dig themselves out of poverty and would be so much better off.
The author of Deuteronomy does not let us get away with this kind of thinking.
...your neighbor might cry to the LORD against you, and you would incur guilt.
And continues:
11 Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land."
I don't know that it gets much clearer than that. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible whose meaning we can debate. We can be unsure about the point of a particular passage. This passage is not one of them. It's fairly clear.
In fact, when looking at issues that matter throughout scripture, poverty is always at the forefront. Jim Wallis, the director of Sojourners, an evangelical organization committed to social justice, tells a story where he and some of his colleages took a Bible and cut out every passage that had something to to with poverty. Every commandment, every warrant for taking care of the poor and needy. The Bible was shredded. It could barely hold together. It was in tatters.
And yet, sometimes in the church, our attitude toward the poor is not what it ought to be. An attitude made all the more surprising given the enormity of the crisis.
III. THE PROBLEM
The facts alone are staggering:[1]
- Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
Less than what you and I might spend on Metro fare in a given day is someone's daily income in half the world.
- The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined.
There are three people--three--who have more money than 48 nations. Forty eight.
- Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
- In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.
- According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.
These figures are all the more startling when we realize the things we spend our time and attention on. Heather made a good point for us earlier taking about the things that we are willing to spend money on, and in such extremes. The numbers bear out the discrepancy in values:
- Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998:
| Global Priority | $U.S. Billions |
|---|---|
| Cosmetics in the United States | 8 |
| Ice cream in Europe | 11 |
| Perfumes in Europe and the United States | 12 |
| Pet foods in Europe and the United States | 17 |
| Business entertainment in Japan | 35 |
| Cigarettes in Europe | 50 |
| Alcoholic drinks in Europe | 105 |
| Narcotics drugs in the world | 400 |
| Military spending in the world | 780 |
- And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:
| Global Priority | $U.S. Billions |
|---|---|
| Basic education for all | 6 |
| Water and sanitation for all | 9 |
| Reproductive health for all women | 12 |
| Basic health and nutrition | 13 |
For $40 billion dollars, less than they spend on cigarettes in Europe, we could eradicate extreme poverty. According to the United Methodist Council of Bishops and the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), we could eradicate extreme poverty world wide in this generation--if we would just commit the resources.
What are we to do as Christians?
IV. SPIRITUALIZING THE POOR
Part of the problem is that when we read something like Luke's passage, the parallel in Luke's Gospel to Matthew's 'Sermon on the Mount', "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God" we hear lofty statements about the poor and it becomes very easy to spiritualize them. It becomes very easy to look at the poor as a people who can teach us an important spiritual value. We read great Christian poetry and theology from Latin America and we say, We can learn so much from thinkers in the Third World and theologians who reflect on poverty. And we think: what a treasure that is! That's what Jesus must be talking about. Jesus must be talking about how people without possessions aren't distracted by their possessions, and have access to a deeper spiritual truth. Whereas the wealthy are weighed down by those possessions and they don't have as spiritually fulfilling a life.
Well, I've got news for us. Jesus was saying that the poor would be made rich. That was a statement about a physical reality in the world. He was talking about the inversion of the social order that comes in with the Kingdom of God. It was not a statement about an abstract spirituality or a statement that says that it's hard when you have a lot of things to focus on what's important. That's true, but that's not what Jesus was talking about. Jesus was expressing God's solidarity--what theologians call God's preferential option--for the poor. God is biased toward the poor. We might be tempted to look around and say, 'Well, for all the good it does them...' but that is our understanding, that God is preferentially disposed toward the poor.
We are not allowed to spiritualize the poor. We are not allowed to romanticize the poor as a people who have so much to share with us. The poor certainly do, but that is not the extent of our involvement. We are called to feed them--as obvious as that might sound coming from the pulpit.
V. END--WHAT CAN BE DONEWhen we reflect on that, it becomes clear how much of an ability we have to do something and how little we're doing with it.
In researching the statistics for this sermon, I came across the website of WorldVision, a Christian charity dedicated to helping children around the world and provides opportunities to sponsor a child for a nominal amount of money a month. I could not in good conscience continue to write a sermon about alleviating poverty and ignore this obvious opportunity to sponsor a poor child on the other side of the world. And so I did.
It was ridiculously easy. It was so easy and cost so little money that I feel ashamed for not having done it before. I feel like a fraud standing in this pulpit, preaching on poverty, when I myself went thirty-eight years without doing this. It is so easy and we're so blind to how much of a difference we can make now. Especially given the amount of money we spend on extravagences. And I am as guilty as the next. The amount of money that I have spent on iTunes downloading episodes of Lost, or songs for my $300 iPod, or movie tickets from Fandango, could have taken care of this child for a year.
When Jesus says, "Woe to you who are wealthy for you have received your consolation", I think he is basically saying to us, 'What more are you looking for? You will be unsatisfied if you continue to look for reward--you have had it.' We have been taken care of. And there are so many easy ways that we can help.
So easy for us in this country who have been blessed with so much to make even a little difference. We have tremendous power in this nation to affect the lives of those in need, both individually and systemically. Each of us can give something. Each of us can make our voices heard. Tonight, following worship during our time of fellowship, we will offer the opportunity to write letters to legislative leaders to support hunger alleviating legislation. It doesn't have to be political, it can just say "I care as a Christian about the poor. Do something." That little witness is so easy for us. It is there, ripe for the taking.
When I reflect on a situation like this, I cannot help but think of FDR. In the middle of the Depression, he said, "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." When we read those statistics it is easy to think that the problem of poverty is overwhelming. How many millions of poor people are there? What can I do as a broke college kid? Or as a pastoral intern with seminary bills to pay? Or as a Methodist chaplain with law school debt and a preacher's salary?
There is so much we can do. We can witness. We can pray--an oft-overlooked method of social justice. We can give of our time and our energies. We can forego some of the simple pleasures of life here and there. We can make a difference. We can try one thing, and if it fails, we can admit it frankly. But above all, let us try something.
Notes
[1] Statistics taken from http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp (internal citations provided at that site)
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Copyright © 2007. Mark A. Schaefer.
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