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Clergy Mail

Remember The Poor 5/5

Remember the poor 5/5

‘They [the Jerusalem church leaders] asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do’ (Galatians 2:10)

(These notes of sermons/studies originally commissioned by World Vision are not copyright. They may be adapted by preachers or small group leaders and used with or without acknowledgment).

Shalom! Rowland Croucher





SOCIAL JUSTICE: GET INVOLVED!

PAUL says that when we are united in Christ Jesus the barriers between races, slaves/freepersons and sexes are removed (Galatians 3:28).

A Christian can no longer pray the words of the Jewish daily thanksgiving, ‘I thank thee O Lord that thou hast not made me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.’ This principle — that we are all united in Christ, and that racist, economic, and sexist divisions have been obliterated — has taken a while to catch on in the church.

The 11 am worship-time in the U.S. has been called the most segregated hour in the nation’s week, and the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa is very reluctantly dismantling its institutionalised racism. (I met an intelligent white Christian in South Africa who told me he believed blacks were created by God to serve whites!).

The income gap between the poor and the rich, everywhere, is widening. Since the Industrial Revolution we’ve never learned to share wealth properly. It’s not ‘trickling down’ to the ever-increasing poor. White western Christians are among the wealthiest people in the world. And they are potentially the most powerful lobby in the world: but they don’t lobby governments in the area of wealth-redistribution. In Australia, the most effective recent lobbying efforts have been about issues of self-interest: a proposed ‘bill of rights’, consumption tax, and a fringe-benefits tax, at a time when we have record stockpiles of unsold grain, and are giving less of it away than at any time for 25 years!

Justice is all — and only — about the uses of power. Injustice is the mis-use, non-use or abuse of power. In the Bible justice is personal (living a righteous, just life), forensic (relating to matters of law), and social (our treatment of the poor). The Bible is full of God’s concern for justice, from his holding Cain accountable for the murder of his brother in Genesis, to a similar accountabil- ity by the secular powers persecuting Christians, described in the graphic imagery of the Book of Revelation.

Social justice concerns the least privileged – the poor, widows, orphans, foreigners. When harvesting, the Israelites were to leave them something (Deuteronomy 24:19-21). Interest on loans is forbidden (Exodus 22:25). All persons – including slaves and migrants – are entitled to rest on the sabbath (Exodus 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:14). Slaves must not be treated harshly (Leviticus 25:39-43). There is a clear relationship between oppression and poverty: ‘Remember you were once slaves’ (Deuteronomy 26:5-8). The God of the Exodus intervenes on behalf of the powerless and oppressed: so must his people.

The message of the prophets can be summarized: ‘Seek justice, correct oppression’ (Isaiah 1:17). They thunder against the rich and powerful who oppress the poor but their outrage is strongest against a religion devoid of justice (Hosea 6:6, 8:13; Amos 5:15, 21-25; Micah 6:6-8, Isaiah 58:1-11; cf. Proverbs 21:3). God accepts or rejects Israel’s worship according to their concern for the poor. Even prayer mustn’t be a substitute for helping the poor (Isaiah 1:15-17). In the relatively affluent 8th century Israel, poverty was not accidental. The prosperity of the rich rested largely on the exploitation and mistreatment of the poor – through a legal system biassed towards the rich, monopoly control, restrictive trade practices, unjust wages and arbitrary price increases. Many of the poor had lost their land to large property owners. Later, Ezekiel rebukes the rich for unscrupulously accumulating real estate for profit (22:28).

Many of the Psalms describe God judging the world with justice (eg 96:13; cf. 97:6, 98:9). His will is that justice and peace kiss each other (85:10-11). ‘The Lord executes justice for the oppressed’ (146:7).

Mary’s Magnificat praises a God who shows mercy, scatters the proud, puts down the mighty, lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry (and by these means ‘helps Israel’, Luke 1:46-55).

Jesus’ ministry will bring good news to the poor… announce a ‘jubilee’ (Luke 4:16-19). In the Jubilee (Leviticus 25:3-5, 8-12) soil was to be left fallow, debts remitted, slaves liberated, and property returned to owners who had forfeited it by debt.

God in Christ becomes poor, choosing the weak, as Paul says, to ‘confound the mighty’. The Kingdom, says Jesus, is given to the poor (and to the rich if they will repent). It is all about new relationships – with God, with others. It turns our customary values upside down: so the ‘first in the kingdom’ are those with no status in society. The poor are blessed, not because of their poverty and misery, nor because they are ‘better’ than others but because they recognize their need for God (Matthew 11:5, 5:3-11, Luke 6:20). To the rich, the gospel is ‘bad news before it is good news’, so the rich young ruler, with his inordinate love of money and power is told to sell his possessions and give them to the poor so that he could have ‘treasure in heaven’ (Matthew 19:16-30).

The New Testament epistles are replete with admonitions to care for the poor (eg. Galatians 2:10, James 2:5-7, 5:1-6, 1 John 3:17, 1 Timothy 6:17-19). Greed is a cardinal sin, a form of idolatry (1 Corinthians 5:10-11, 6:10, Ephesians 4:19, 5:3, 5, Colossians 3:5).

For Jesus ‘the really important teachings of the law’ are ‘justice and mercy and honesty’ (Matthew 23:23). Elsewhere Jesus gives us ‘the great commandment… love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength… [and] love your neighbour as you love yourself’ (Mark 12:30-31). It is interesting that evangelical Christians rarely agree with Micah or Jesus when asked to highlight what are for them the most important doctrines: outside of the Wesleyan, some Catholic, and a few conciliar churches’ creeds or statements of faith, I can find no evangelical ‘doctrinal basis’ before the Lausanne Congress (1974) that explicitly mentions justice or love!

Every human being is made in God’s image. So we uphold the right of every person to live in freedom, in dignity, in peace, in health, and to know the One whom to know is to experience fullness of life.

Here’s something to ponder from Billy Graham’s book Approaching Hoof Beats: ‘My basic commitment as a Christian has not changed, nor has my view of the Gospel, but I have come to see in deeper ways the implications of my faith and the message I have been proclaiming. I can no longer proclaim the Cross and the Resurrection without proclaiming the whole message of the Kingdom, which is justice for all.’

But there is so much injustice in the world. What can one person do? Here are five suggestions.

(1) Research: Get the facts. Talk to the ‘poor’ – single parents, unemployed, migrants – and to social workers, district nurses, etc.

Why are they poor? Is it their own fault? Most answers are either too simple or untrue. Perhaps it’s the death of a parent, ill-health, physical/mental disability, collapse of a business, breakdown of marriage, lack of basic education, medical bills for sick children – the list may be endless. Anglican Archbishop Peter Hollingworth says: ‘…the causes of poverty are precipitated more by problems in the organization and structures of society than by individuals themselves.’

Item: Brazil has more cultivated acreage per person than the U.S., yet in recent years the proportion of undernourished there has risen from 45% to 72% of the population.

Item: 1.9% of El Salvadorans won 57.5% of the land – mainly selling cash crops abroad while at home hunger is endemic. Archbishop Oscar Romero spoke out against his country’s injustices and the newspapers almost daily vilified him as corrupt, insane, a communist – and never printed his sermons. (Many wealthy El Salvadorans are mass-going Catholics too). Behind him on an office wall were huge photos of two priests who were murdered, and a banner HE WHO GIVES HIS LIFE FOR ME IS SAVED. Romero was shot while celebrating the eucharist on 24 March, 1980. In El Salvador, to work among the poor is an act of subversion.

For Jesus when a system got in the way of people’s wholeness, it had to go. Inveighing against the pharisees’ legalistic religious system he said, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath’ (Mark 2:27). Our systems are mostly serving mammon, so we too will call for systemic change. We may not hold to any particular economic/ political theory: a Christian is called to critique all ideologies. (As the cynic put it, capitalism is people exploiting their fellow-humans; with communism it’s the other way around!!). Systems either do God’s will, or they are under his judgment…

Item: There are one billion hungry or starving persons, and 38,000 children dying every day from hunger-related diseases.

Item: more people died of hunger in the last five years than were killed in all wars, revolutions and murders in the past 150 years. Four-fifths of the hungry live in rural areas. Fifty thousand a day die from diseases associated with dirty water. Up to 100,000 children and 400,000 adults go blind each year because of insufficient vitamin A.

The rich countries contain a fifth of the world’s people, but consume four-fifths of the world’s resources. That’s not fair!

(2) Reflection: Think about the facts. Working hard to think clearly is the beginning of moral conduct, said Pascal. Beware of temptations not to think objectively. Our church congregations are mostly embedded in the rich half of society, so our ‘suburban captivity’ can be self-protective. We meet few destitute ‘hidden people’.

The problems are complex, but some things can be said simply:

# Poverty is not just a lack of resources, but of power, of knowledge, of help and of hope. Poverty is loneliness. So it is not alleviated by handouts alone, but when the poor themselves become givers.

# The best prophet of the future is the past, Lord Byron said. Reinhold Neibuhr has argued (convincingly in my view, in Moral Man and Immoral Society) that is we wait for the powerful to come altruistic we will wait forever. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrups absolutely. The powerful have never – well, hardly ever – relinquished their privileges without some form of coercion being applied to them. Those with a biblical view of sin and evil won’t find that surprising.

# Let us beware of ‘selective indignation’, preaching only against evils threatening my family/group/church. Ask what Jesus got mad about… And I must accept myself as part of the problem, rather than blaming others: what have I not done that causes this one to be poor?

# Jesus grew up in an oppressed country. The Zealots were ‘freedom fighters’, Herodians and Sadducees went along with the status quo; Essenes withdrew to the desert; Pharisees debated questions of private morality. Jesus disappointed them all, renouncing violence, exploitation, apathy and moralism: they’re all dehumanizing. His was the way of sacrificial love.

(3) Pray. Ask ‘Who are my people?’ then pray fervently for them – and their oppressors. Prayer, says Jacques Ellul is the ultimate act of hope. Prayer is ‘God with us’ in our struggle. It is the only possible substitute for violence in human relations. Without sincere and earnest prayer the church can easily develop a bureaucratic oppressive mind-set, becoming an ally of, and operating like, worldly powers. Prayer rescues action from activism, and inaction from bewilderment and despair. But prayer is not a substitute for action. Contemplative love is not the end, but a means to the end of authentic love. As Thomas Merton once put it, let us not forget that Mary and Martha are sisters.

(4) Feel. This is ‘listening presence’, compassion, identification and encounter (ie. incarnation). We won’t do this as well as Jesus did but we must try. Reality is much more than objective facts. We must not act for others merely through feelings of personal outrage, but when – and until – through caring friendship we earn the right to be invited to be their helper or advocate. Such feeling presence enables us to transcend narrow bigotries. Our practical help and advocacy for the poor will have the marks of suffering – the beatings, crown of thorns, and the nails – if we are truly the church of Jesus Christ. Only thus will it be sacramental, mediating the grace of God to those in need.

(5) Act Creatively. Let us not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems: if enough individuals act, in concert, almost any problem can be solved. To act is to effect change; godly action is to bring in the kingdom somewhere on earth. Robbers move against their victim; the priest and levite have a passive mind-set and move away – to be ‘neutral’ (encouraging more injustice); the Samaritan uses the materials at his disposal (donkey, oil, wine, clothes, money, physical strength, compassion. In our culture he would also make representations to the police about security on the Jericho Road).

The church is involved politically if it does nothing: it is voting for the status quo. All it takes for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing. The villains in Jesus’ stories were seldom those who did things they ought not to have done; usually they had left undone the things they should have done. The rich man let Lazarus lie unhelped at his gate; the servant made no use of his talent – these received the severest cond- emnation. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

If ‘charity begins at home’ then a church will ask: ‘What needs exist in our neighbourhood, and what resources do we have to meet them?’ Day-care facilities, a food box in the foyer, counseling centre (with fees related to ability to pay), housing for the homeless/elderly, writing letters to keep elected officials honest – these are some beginnings. Above all, let us build ‘shalom churches’ where the values we preach to the world are incarnated in the faith community.

Father Brian Gore, an Australian priest held for 14 months in a Philippines prison, said recently that aid organizations were actually supporting a system of injustice when they do not ask why Filipinos went hungry. ‘An organization which exclusively looks at the effects rather than the causes is a dead loss’, he said. We must therefore be involved in process as well as projects. Camara’s best-known quote is devastating on this issue: ‘When I give money to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask “why are they poor?” they call me a communist!’ From a biblical perspective, mercy and justice belong together.

Let us not succumb to immobility: let us do something, and be free to learn through failing, if necessary. Let us repent of our sins of omission before we blame others for their sins of injustice. Then let us get involved. Fighting poverty is war: the violence of poverty kills just as surely as bullets. I am convinced, however, that we must fight this war non-violently. Christ gave his life for others who could not save themselves: let us give our lives for the wretched of the earth. Let us begin with ourselves, and in a world of crying need, adjust our lifestyle accordingly. Let us renounce addictions, especially those involving the desire for immediate gratification. Let us be ‘Christs to others’, as Luther put it – serving them, being advocates for them, acting as agents for change. Albert Einstein once said: ‘The problems of the world cannot be solved with mechanisms, but only by changing people’s hearts and minds and speaking courageously.’

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