Poverty (Pt. 2)

In the previous post, I tried to tease out the way in which, if Jesus’ work culminates in preaching good news to the poor, those of us who aren’t poor (or to put it more broadly are privileged) may have a hard time hearing the news of the Kingdom of God as good news. More than that, those of us rich folks who DO hear the Good News as good news have a tendency to pick the part of the Kingdom that touches our forgiveness-poverty and declare it the only part that counts.

Now, there are some Christians I respect a lot who’ve taken this conundrum and said, “Welp, I grew up only hearing a part of the Kingdom as good news. If I’m going to learn how to hear all of the Good News as good news, I’m gonna have to get to know some poor people and let them teach me how to hear this thing correctly. To hear it fully.” So, they moved to be with poor people and took a student’s posture. A disciple’s posture. Because if Jesus was called “teacher” and identified himself with the “least of these” (Matthew 25), then we are called to be disciples of the poor. Jesus doesn’t call us to rescue the poor. He doesn’t call us to fix the poor. He doesn’t call us to ‘eradicate poverty’. He calls us to encounter himself by sharing time and meals and resources with the poor. Invite the outcasts in. Visit the exiled and imprisoned. Go be with the poor, so that we may be with Jesus.

Giving them something to eat and to drink and to wear isn’t about “charity,” it’s about hospitality. If you’re hanging out with someone and they’re thirsty or hungry or naked, it’s not just awkward and rude to neglect (or even to refuse) to share your food or water or clothes. It’s downright WRONG.

However, if you don’t actually spend any time with poor folks, then dropping off canned goods or old sweaters isn’t about hospitality anymore.

Then it’s just plain old charity.

Which is good. Sharing your extras, even with strangers, is good.

But it’s harder to think of it as essential. Making sure your companions have water and food and clothes is essential. Dropping off your extras is… well, extra. If things are tight and there’s not much extra, you can cut it out or just forget all together. I mean, we know we shouldn’t but it’s sure a lot easier.

But if your brother or sister is right there next to you saying, “shit dude, I’m hungry!,” well, then it’s a little harder for it to slip your mind.

This is, of course, very different from how other privileged Christians (who I ALSO respect a lot… partly because I’m one of them) have addressed the conundrum of trying to hear the Good News as good news without having much poverty in their(/our) lives. We grab that forgiveness part and then we carry as much of it as we can into the old kingdom, all mustard-seed grainy and slipping through our hands. And then, when we get lots of extras because of our privilege, we do our darnedest to remember to share the excess with the poor. We call this “charity.”

Charity, you might know, is the English version of the word “Caritas” in Latin. Which is itself a Latin version of “Agape” in Greek, which if you’ve heard a sermon in the last 10 years, you may have heard invoked. Agape, to vastly over simplify, is an intense, divine, personal sort of love.

Charity, the way we tend to think of it, usually conjures none of the same adjectives as Agape. At best, it’s a generous sharing of our abundance with people we’ve likely not met and in support of folks who’ve committed their lives to the kind of work we don’t really have time for. We support organizations that support and aid the un- and under-privileged. At worst, it becomes a vehicle for paternalism and a way of making our responsibility to the “least of these” as unobtrusive as possible. Also, very often the extras that we share through charity are unintentionally the product of economies that create the poverty we’re trying to help. We clean out our storage space and give clothes made in sweatshops to the Salvation Army. We donate 10% of our income earned at a company which pays its CEO more than 40x what they pay their lowest paid employee.

One step forward, two steps back.

Doesn’t that seem like a pretty thin, pale version of Agape? Of Caritas? Isn’t our “charity” not all that much like Charity?

Again, I’m not saying stop giving to charities. More, I’m saying maybe don’t be so satisfied that giving to charities is the same thing as Charity. And more than that, I think we might need to reevaluate the assumption that “charity” is the “good news to the poor” that Jesus was talking about.

See Also: This Shane Claiborne Essay

But what do we do if we aren’t feeling that mysterious, deep down call to the usual kind of poor people? What if we don’t feel like God is calling us to the urban, food-desert, minimum wage poor? Nor the rural, farm-subsidies, drought stricken poor?

What if you feel some weird kind of call to the poor who don’t know they’re poor?

And what exactly are you supposed to tell them?

And how are they going to hear it?