You won't be involved in mercy ministry too long before you come across this one particular term: "undeserving poor." A great deal of mercy ministry effort, at least in my experience, is often given not simply to help the poor, but in first making sure they deserve our help. Having participated in mercy ministry for some years now, I understand this position. When you have limited resources you want to ensure that you are using them where they will help the most and where they are needed. You also don't want to be known as a soft target - easy pickin'. And trust me, there are many who are out to take advantage of those willing to hand out resources.
There are many things I'd love to say about this idea of the the wealthy and the poor, but I've said much of that in other blog posts and on my podcast. What I want to focus on here is not so much the "poor" part, but rather the "undeserving" part. In Christianity, and especially in Protestantism, this notion that "but for the grace of God, there go I" abounds, at least in our verbal confessions and proclamations. We act as though we truly believe that we could be the poor - even the most pathetic, undeserving poor - but by God's grace. Yet for all the lipservice we give to God's grace, we fail to act as though such a concept were actually true. Because if it's true that we would be undeserving poor but by the grace of God, isn't it true that we aren't as such only because of God's free and abundant grace? We aren't the undeserving poor because God graced us in such a state, and has made us the undeserving rich. As John Chrysostom said, the wealth of the rich "is the poor's wealth of which [we] are trustees even in cases where [we] possess it through honest labor or inheritance." Many of the church fathers identified the world as being created by God for the common good, and any alms the rich had to give were not really donations of generosity, but as Ambrose says, "a fraction of [the poor's wealth] which [we] give back." What we have is all from God and is the fruit of his grace.
It continues to amaze me how we - the overly religious - proclaim God's grace from the mountain tops, yet undermine it at every turn of our lives. We do such a good job of being pharisaical. We attribute misfortune, pain, and one's station in life to sin (at least if those things happen to poor people), while attributing our comfort and wealth to our own good works. God's grace rarely needs to enter the equation for us. Forget all the anecdotal and historical examples we have of the wealthy who are horrendous sinners, and the impoverished who are the greatest of saints - and forget the warnings of Jesus against the rich and his uplifting of the poor. We know that we are wiser than God and better discerners of reality than Jesus, and we know that our wealth and comfort are signs of our earned favor with God, meaning that most of the destitute have done something to fall out of favor with him.
When you live out this warped theological view, you end up with a church that looks like our American church. While the poor are grilled about their lives and prior decisions before receiving even a pittance from the church - ensuring they deserve our approbation and assistance - the wealthy are never asked to prove their deserving accolades, praise, or leadership positions by handing over their budgets and proving they aren't greedy. While the poor are assumed to be undeserving and likely living in sin and a life of unwise choices, the rich are given the benefit of the doubt as to their merit and godliness without ever having to prove otherwise, since the sins of the rich are deemed subjective and off-limits to questioning. Yet we fail to recognize that while a life of absolute destitution may be indicative of certain vices, or at least increase their likelihood, so it is with the lives of the wealthy and comfortable. How many warnings does the Bible, and Jesus himself, need to give us about wealth to clue us into this concept? How can we hear the words of a God who almost always uplifts the poor and frequently warns the rich, and then go about inverting our suspicions and critiques? If the poor have an issue with bad stewardship because they have too little, biblically speaking, the wealthy likely have a bad stewardship issue for having too much. The world is God's, and if we've collected more manna for ourselves than needed, or if we have two coats while our brother or sister has none, then we're wicked stewards. I think all of us probably fit that bill.
Part of our problem is that we are a culture of despair. I know we don't think that describes us, but Walter Brueggemann makes an observation that I think fits us very well. Brueggemann says that the opposite of hope is despair, which I think we'd all agree with. But Brueggeman also says that whereas hope produces generosity, greed is a product of despair. When we believe we live in a world of scarcity in which we cannot or will not be provided for, it drives us to be greedy and to horde, which are indicative of our loss of hope. Why don't we keep the Sabbath rest as an eternal ordinance of blessing, which Jesus himself identified as a good gift from God? Why do we horde resources? Why do we have such difficulty giving our money away? Why are we gluttons? Why are we overly comfortable and unconcerned about the poor and needy? Why have we turned our pet sins into sins of subjectivity that we can either ignore or excuse ourselves from? I think it's because we are living lives of despair, worried that God's world is a world of scarcity, and that God's benevolence and generosity is like ours - shallow and lacking.
I wonder what our world would look like in the U.S. if we, the church, were to get our hope back and live lives which reflected that hope. Not only would our generosity increase and our communities be transformed, but such a thing would only occur because our hearts would be transformed and properly oriented. We would live as though we really believed our lives were a gift of a gracious, loving, and generous God. We would begin pulling the logs out of our own eyes and culling our lives and churches of the sins which are actually running amok - sins like greed, gluttony, and a lack of justice. And if Evangelicals who are 20% of the United States population were to live rightly before God and humanity, maybe our warmongering empire of a nation would gain some hope, and in so doing, begin to do justice. For as the church has long declared, it is usually our despair of resources as seen in jealousy and greed, that wars are waged. Our despair is killing us, killing those around us, and exploiting the most vulnerable. We have horded bushels and bushels of goods as we store up our treasures here on earth, but in so doing, we have placed a bushel over our light.
It continues to amaze me how we - the overly religious - proclaim God's grace from the mountain tops, yet undermine it at every turn of our lives. We do such a good job of being pharisaical. We attribute misfortune, pain, and one's station in life to sin (at least if those things happen to poor people), while attributing our comfort and wealth to our own good works. God's grace rarely needs to enter the equation for us. Forget all the anecdotal and historical examples we have of the wealthy who are horrendous sinners, and the impoverished who are the greatest of saints - and forget the warnings of Jesus against the rich and his uplifting of the poor. We know that we are wiser than God and better discerners of reality than Jesus, and we know that our wealth and comfort are signs of our earned favor with God, meaning that most of the destitute have done something to fall out of favor with him.
When you live out this warped theological view, you end up with a church that looks like our American church. While the poor are grilled about their lives and prior decisions before receiving even a pittance from the church - ensuring they deserve our approbation and assistance - the wealthy are never asked to prove their deserving accolades, praise, or leadership positions by handing over their budgets and proving they aren't greedy. While the poor are assumed to be undeserving and likely living in sin and a life of unwise choices, the rich are given the benefit of the doubt as to their merit and godliness without ever having to prove otherwise, since the sins of the rich are deemed subjective and off-limits to questioning. Yet we fail to recognize that while a life of absolute destitution may be indicative of certain vices, or at least increase their likelihood, so it is with the lives of the wealthy and comfortable. How many warnings does the Bible, and Jesus himself, need to give us about wealth to clue us into this concept? How can we hear the words of a God who almost always uplifts the poor and frequently warns the rich, and then go about inverting our suspicions and critiques? If the poor have an issue with bad stewardship because they have too little, biblically speaking, the wealthy likely have a bad stewardship issue for having too much. The world is God's, and if we've collected more manna for ourselves than needed, or if we have two coats while our brother or sister has none, then we're wicked stewards. I think all of us probably fit that bill.
Part of our problem is that we are a culture of despair. I know we don't think that describes us, but Walter Brueggemann makes an observation that I think fits us very well. Brueggemann says that the opposite of hope is despair, which I think we'd all agree with. But Brueggeman also says that whereas hope produces generosity, greed is a product of despair. When we believe we live in a world of scarcity in which we cannot or will not be provided for, it drives us to be greedy and to horde, which are indicative of our loss of hope. Why don't we keep the Sabbath rest as an eternal ordinance of blessing, which Jesus himself identified as a good gift from God? Why do we horde resources? Why do we have such difficulty giving our money away? Why are we gluttons? Why are we overly comfortable and unconcerned about the poor and needy? Why have we turned our pet sins into sins of subjectivity that we can either ignore or excuse ourselves from? I think it's because we are living lives of despair, worried that God's world is a world of scarcity, and that God's benevolence and generosity is like ours - shallow and lacking.
I wonder what our world would look like in the U.S. if we, the church, were to get our hope back and live lives which reflected that hope. Not only would our generosity increase and our communities be transformed, but such a thing would only occur because our hearts would be transformed and properly oriented. We would live as though we really believed our lives were a gift of a gracious, loving, and generous God. We would begin pulling the logs out of our own eyes and culling our lives and churches of the sins which are actually running amok - sins like greed, gluttony, and a lack of justice. And if Evangelicals who are 20% of the United States population were to live rightly before God and humanity, maybe our warmongering empire of a nation would gain some hope, and in so doing, begin to do justice. For as the church has long declared, it is usually our despair of resources as seen in jealousy and greed, that wars are waged. Our despair is killing us, killing those around us, and exploiting the most vulnerable. We have horded bushels and bushels of goods as we store up our treasures here on earth, but in so doing, we have placed a bushel over our light.
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