Hilton Head Island, SC – June 16, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 10:1-18; Luke 18:18-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And when Jesus heard it, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” – Luke 18:22 (RSV)
Except for the very oldest among us, the past five years have been the deepest economic recession anyone in this country has ever known. Those in their 80s and 90s can recall the Great Depression, but the rest of us have known only the Great Recession of 2008-12.
I can remember my parents and others of their generation saying that in the Depression, everyone was poor. Well, not everyone was poor, but a majority perhaps were. Now we have the highest percentage of poor people in the USA we have had for many decades. Fifteen percent of our population live in poverty. That percentage increased 30% since the year 2000. Of the fifteen richest nations in the world, we have the second-to-highest percentage of poor people in our total population.
Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Recently he wrote a book called So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America. He says that Social Security and food stamps are the two government programs which have done the most to lessen the level of American poverty. But he also notes that 46 million people now receive food stamps --- up from 20 million who received them as recently as 2007. He declares that it is the people at the very bottom of the economic scale whom we are helping the least. He worked in the Clinton Administration in the Nineties, but he resigned when the federal government turned much of the assistance to the poorest Americans over to the states, and half the states stopped giving any cash assistance to the poor, which is what he predicted would happen. The result is that there are six million Americans whose only source of income is food stamps. How can they live solely on food stamps, if there is no cash income at all for them? How shall they pay for rent, and so on?
Obviously jobs are the best means of providing income to anyone. But there are not enough jobs to go around, especially in a recession. And the sad fact is that some people are incapable of holding down a job. We may find that impossible to believe, but sadly it is true. Actually, there may be children or grandchildren indirectly represented in this congregation who have been unemployed for many years. They do not have the skills or mental acuity or stamina or whatever is necessary to work steadily anywhere doing anything. What is to become of them?
Peter Edelman insists that one of the most effective ways to stave off poverty for millions of our fellow citizens is to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour from its current $7.25. It is a political fact of life that many Members of Congress of both parties are loath to raise the minimum wage, because it is always unpopular. Thus it gets changed only once a decade or so. In the meantime, inflation invariably makes the poor poorer, where it only squeezes us a bit.
It is very difficult for anyone born into the bottom fifth of our population economically ever to escape that status. In the Scandinavian countries and the UK, almost twice as many work their way out of poverty as in America. Upward mobility is harder here than in most other developed nations. New York University sociologist Pat Sharkey wrote a book called Stuck in Place. In it he said that children born into poverty tend to live in poverty for their entire lives. Because schools in poor neighborhoods are much harder pressed to educate children well, the students there score 16 points lower on standard test scores than children in more affluent neighborhoods. Those 16 points lower in reading skills mean those children may complete their elementary and secondary school education with the equivalent of up to eight fewer years of school than youngsters from the places in which most of us grew up. Poverty thus becomes virtually like a congenital social disease or condition or infection to those who are born into it.
A couple of months ago in The Times of London, staff writer Caitlin Moran told about growing up very poor in the English city of Wolverhampton. She is someone who escaped the circumstances of her childhood, went to university, and became a well-paid journalist (if such a term is not an oxymoron). She said politics doesn’t affect most people in the way it affects the poor. She wrote, “As a class-jumper, I would say…that politics can never mean as much to the professional classes as it does to the working class or the underclass.” Then she went on to say the worst that government policies can do to those with good jobs is perhaps to tax them more. But then she asks, “What’s the worst that a government policy can do to you if you’re poor? Food-bank poor? Dependent-on-the-government poor? Well, everything. It can freeze, drop, or cancel your benefits – leaving you in a panic of unpaid bills and deciding which meals to skip. It can underfund your schools and hospitals – death in a corridor; no exams passed….It can let your entire industry die – every skill earned and piece of knowledge learned left useless.”
Caitlin Moran knows these things, because she’s been there. Her long article was written in response to the death of Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister whose policies deepened the level of poverty for millions of British subjects. She did not feel the same level of visceral emotion when the Iron Lady died as did many Britons born into poverty, but she certainly understands that emotion, and she wrote about it with powerful imagery.
A very well-known and oft-quoted verse of scripture is found in two of the Synoptic Gospels, and also in the Gospel of John. The details are virtually the same in Mt. 26(v.11) and in Mk. 14(v.7). John (12:1-8) gives a very different story surrounding this verse, but the meaning behind it is essentially the same as in the other two Gospels. In all three instances, a woman poured expensive ointment on Jesus only days before he was crucified. The disciples were indignant that she had done that, because they said it was an extravagant waste of money. The money should have been given to the poor instead. However, Jesus commended the woman, and said to the disciples, “The poor you always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
That verse is frequently remembered by many people for quite different and conflicting reasons. Those who oppose doing anything to help the poor use it to support their position, and those who want much more done on behalf of the poor also use it to give support to their position. From the context it is evident Jesus was not intending to make a major pronouncement of any sort about poverty. What he intended was to suggest that the woman had performed a very loving act on his behalf, and he was grateful to her.
But what about the poor? Are they always with us? Has poverty always been a factor in every human society at every point in history or pre-history?
Let us look at our own time, and then work backwards. Without question there are millions of poor people in this, the richest nation in the world. We define ourselves as that, and others also define us as that. There are several other countries which have higher per capita income and standards of living than we have --- the aforementioned Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, some of the petroleum-based states of the Arabian Peninsula, Singapore, and perhaps a few others. But even wealthy nations all have poor people. The percentages vary from one country to another, but even the most politically intentional welfare states still have citizens who live in poverty. And being poor in America, Canada, or Europe is a relative breeze compared to being poor in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Congo, Somalia, Nigeria, or similar nations. In other words, poverty is and always has been a relative reality.
Nevertheless, poor people have no doubt existed in every society or culture which ever existed. Certainly that is true of the biblical period. There are hundreds of verses and thousands of words in the Bible devoted to a concern for the poor. Time and again the Jews were told to provide for “the widow, the orphan, the fatherless, and the stranger in your midst.” It was assumed those kinds of people could not fend for themselves very well, because “the system” was skewed against them. Women whose husbands had died, children who had no parents or who had only a mother, and immigrants had a much harder time subsisting than did others, and the writers of the Bible frequently reminded everyone of that sober reality.
In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye makes a very wise comment about economic inequalities. “It’s no shame to be poor,” he sardonically observes, “but it’s no great honor either.” Poverty happens. Attention must be paid to that by all of us.
But it isn’t happening very much in 2013. In 2013 we are by no means fully out of the Great Recession. Far more attention is being paid to the needs of the middle class (i.e., us) than to the poor (i.e., them). The middle class is shrinking, we are told, and presumably it is true. But the numbers of the poor definitely are growing, and most if not all levels of government are concentrating on the voting class, which is to say the middle class, and not the non-voters, which is to say the underclass. For the most part, the very poor do not vote. They see no point in it. They believe they have no stake in it.
In November of 2008, when he was first elected as President, Barack Obama sounded as though he would be a champion on behalf of the poor. But before he even took office in January of 2009, the wheels of the economy had started to fall off. Ever since, he has been playing fiscal catch-up, and his concern for the poor has decidedly taken a back seat.
There have been periods in our political history where it was declared that the poor should receive help mainly from private charities, not from government coffers. Other people, but not nearly as many, think the poor should be assisted only by the government, and not from private charities. If the poor are to receive adequate assistance, it must come from both sources.
The Bible clearly suggested that. In biblical times, everyone was to give a tithe, in other words, a tenth, of his income to support the larger society: the kingdom, the army, the religious establishment, the priests, and the poor --- the widow, orphan, etc. The tithe was probably more like a voluntary tax than a charitable contribution. Likely it was not mandatory. However, the Bible also made provisions for charitable actions as well. Farmers were not to harvest the grain at the corners of their fields, and all the grain that fell to the ground in the threshing process was to be left there for the poor to glean. Vinters also were leave clusters of grapes on the vines for the grape gleaners. The 19th century French painter Jean Francois Millet has a painting called The Gleaners. It depicts French peasants from a century and a half ago doing what Jewish peasants did three millennia ago in Israel; they sifted through the stubble to pick up any heads of wheat or oats or barley which the threshers had dropped to the earth.
There is an old Jewish saying which declares, “Many people worry about their own stomachs and the state of other people’s souls. The real task is to do the opposite: to worry about other people’s stomachs and the state of your own soul.” The 19th century Rabbi Israel Salenter said, “Someone else’s material needs are my spiritual responsibility.” Close to a billion people go hungry every day. Moses Maimonides was one of the great saints of Judaism in the medieval period. He said that the primary purpose of religion was perfection of the body, not perfection of the soul. By that he meant that it is impossible to give one’s mind to higher things if we lack food or shelter. That is why the extremely poor do not vote, nor do they participate very much in religion. The “merely poor” might, but not the “extremely poor.” And that is why it is a religious duty for us to do whatever we can to alleviate poverty at all levels.
I may be wrong about this, but I think Jews are more concerned about the poor than are Christians. Many Christians, particularly American Christians, think everyone can pull himself up by his bootstraps. We might note that is hard to do if you have no boots. Or shoes either. Very few Americans are that poverty-stricken, but hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world are that poor.
When Jesus told the rich young ruler to give away all he had to the poor and then to come and be his disciple, he was pointing out a problem that most affluent people have. We value things and wealth and affluence too much, and discipleship and sacrifice and self-abnegation too little. Poor people are much more inclined to help poor people than are middle-income or rich people. I don’t know what it is truly to be poor, nor, I suspect, do most of you. But I think we can all sufficiently imagine it to conclude it is important to do whatever we can to ease the suffering which the poor uniquely experience.
It is impossible to eliminate poverty. It can only be mitigated, or diminished, or lessened. Economic and political and social conditions guarantee that there will always be poor people. For example, no matter how much money certain folks were given, they would squander it all. But that doesn’t mean we therefore have a divine sanction to ignore them. And as Abraham Lincoln so sagaciously observed, “God must have especially loved the poor; He made so many of them.”
Haves too frequently ignore or prey on the Have-Nots. Of a stereotypical Have, Psalm 10 says, “He lurks that he may seize the poor, he seizes the poor when he draws him into his net” (v.10).
Why should we try to help the poor? Because God said so. It is as simple --- and complex --- as that. Pay what you should in taxes, and give what you should to charity. For all the many other issues demanding the attention of our nation, its people, and its government, one issue we must never forget is the poor among us. By themselves, the poor will never succeed in demanding enough of our attention. But God demands it. Therefore, let’s not forget it.