Blessed are the Poor - A Meditation
In a few weeks time many of us will be walking around the ambiance, the smell and the harsh reality of poverty. It will be palpable. We will feel it. There will be all kinds of feelings to deal with. There will be fears, uncertainties, surprises, challenges, inspiration and hopefully, by the end, satisfaction. Our prayer as staff members is that it will be a life changing experience. It has been for many of the hundred plus who have gone before. It has been for us as leaders. Personally it has changed my life and I expect that change to be depended even more over the next weeks.
I want tonight to meditate in the decadent luxury of a Church that is situated on the trendiest shopping street of our country. Yesterday on the Lisburn Road there was money spent that could transform the townships that we go to work in. That money was lavishly thrown away on a label or a needless product or an extravagant meal. It is hard on such a street to ponder the words of Jesus… Blessed are the poor… That in itself is our first problem. We have removed ourselves so much from Jesus environment that to understand, never mind obey, his words becomes more and more fraught with difficulties for us.
Derek Webb who we’ve listened to a lot this year sings: -
“poverty is so hard to see
when it’s only on your TV and twenty miles across town
where we’re all living so good
that we moved out of Jesus’ neighbourhood
where he’s hungry and not feeling so good from going through our trash”
But I want to try and get inside this phrase of Jesus. So that it might do two things. Give us an empathy with the poor that we might join God is his mission for their justice, liberation and salvation… and more importantly be challenged by the poor so that we might join God in his mission for our justice, liberation and salvation.
Let me read a poem. I have wrestled with these two poems for two years. When you meditate on this verse it throws up all kinds of dilemmas and near irreconcilable contradictions. So I haven’t put one on the web page before I finished the other. Blessed are the poor is a two edge sword. Both edges are needed and we need to respond to both…
POOR MAN’S RENT
There’s a mist across Table Mountain
Like a veil to hide the hell
Beast’s ransack of such beauty
It’s a hard truth to sell
The wind howls too worldly wise
Trying to blow the knowledge away
The rain drives like freezing tears
Making desolation more desolate today
When he said “Blessed are the poor”
I’m sure this isn’t what Jesus meant
Fama’s baby being laid to sleep
In the sandy grave of a poor man’s rent.
Black crows crowd on death barbed wire
Like the devil is signing his art
Evil despises his neighbour’s child
As he pampers his own wealthy heart
And I think if I stared any longer
The sacred sadness would blind my eyes
Or maybe I’d see the cry of God
Condemning my own deluded lies
When he said “Blessed are the poor”
I’m sure this isn’t what Jesus meant
Fama’s baby being laid to sleep
In the sandy grave of a poor man’s rent.
Me and my friend Gordon spent an afternoon in the cemetery on the Njanga township just a few hundred yards where we built houses for Mandisa and Mrs Umte. It was a bleak day. The mountain, always so strong and awesome, was shrouded in mist and the rain was blowing in. The cemetery was bleak at anytime and we bumped into Barrington who was digging graves. Tens and twenties were marked out in rows and he was digging them out. He explained the depth of adult graves and then more harrowingly the depths of the children’s graves. That is where we were stood as we chatted to him. There were rows and rows of still births, children a few days old, a few years old. It was sombre. It was tragic. And I meditated as I had been doing on “Blessed are the poor.” “No!” I silently screamed a God in this Biblical landscape and Psalmist moment. No. This is not what Jesus meant. This I thought was the place of Amos’s poor; the prophet’s poor.
AMOS 3 v 13
"Hear this and testify against the house of Jacob," declares the Lord, the LORD God Almighty.
14 "On the day I punish Israel for her sins,
I will destroy the altars of Bethel;
the horns of the altar will be cut off
and fall to the ground.
15 I will tear down the winter house
along with the summer house;
the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed
and the mansions will be demolished,"
declares the LORD.
AMOS 5 v 11 You levy a straw tax on the poor
and impose a tax on their grain.
Therefore, though you have built stone mansions,
you will not live in them;
though you have planted lush vineyards,
you will not drink their wine.
12 For I know how many are your offenses
and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes
and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.
13 Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,
for the times are evil.
14 Seek good, not evil,
that you may live.
Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you,
just as you say he is.
21 "I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
I cannot stand your assemblies.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
There are 2000 verses about God’s interest in the poor and oppressed in our Bibles and if I can confess a sin on behalf of the preachers of my denomination we have been lax in preaching the word of God with any kind of prophetic power or challenge. I stood by children’s graves and prayed to God that he would hold me by the throat if I didn’t pray and preach and live my life for those who have no voice or no nothing at all.
In the in between time U2 who loom large in my pathetic little legend wrote a song called Crumbs from Your table which asks keeps hold of throat…
“Would you deny to others/what you demand for yourself…”
This line moves our engagement with the poor away from charity, or development even, to revolutionary justice. If the 4 year old up your street had no food to eat tonight would you do something about it. Well justice declares that the children of the poorest countries on earth are equal to the kids on your street. God loves them as much and demands we do too. Amos has shown us that God gets angry when we live in our decadent splendour at the cost of the poor who lives in hard board, cardboard and tin.
Some will ask of our Capetownship project. Is it Christian? What they mean is, is it evangelical? I would suggest that the question belies a serious error in the Scriptural understanding of Northern Ireland evangelicalism. The belief is that only preaching the Gospel is evangelistic. Anything else, particularly social action is dodgy if not unchristian. This flies in the face of following a Jesus who was quick to heal and deal with physical realities, sometimes indeed quicker than he was to preach. For Jesus there is no difference between acting out God’s love and speaking out God’s love. There is a blend and blur to his ministry and mission that we would do well to follow as that is what he asked us to do.
I don’t know what building a house for someone will do to their relationship with God though I reckon it cannot do any harm. I believe though that in the hands of the Holy Spirit it can be used just as powerfully as any words of explanation because the Holy Spirit moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Not that I will not take the opportunity to share the Gospel when I get the chance and when you put yourself in places of poverty you will find that those opportunities come up much more regularly than if you hang out on the Malone Road.
But there is something else here. Meditating on “Blessed are the poor” has much to say to us in our chains of wealth.
BLESSED ARE THE POOR
Blessed are the poor
For they have to love their neighbours
The wages of selfishness is death
Survival depends on collective labour
Blessed are the poor
For they cannot afford a fence
Their homes are nothing like a bank vault
To store up their independence.
And every day I get to meet Jesus
And be Jesus to everyone I meet
Here God doesn’t live an empty Church
Here God lives on the crowded street.
Blessed are the poor
For they aren’t torn between distractions
No internet or iPod or DVD
Just the simply joy of their children’s affection
Blessed are the poor
Without products to help safe their face
Who you see is what you see
With a higher value of mercy and grace.
And every day I get to meet Jesus
And be Jesus to everyone I meet
Here God doesn’t live an empty Church
Here God lives on the crowded street.
And the poor smile as if their happy
For the westerner that’s kind of funny
I’d don’t think that its poverty that makes them laugh
I think it’s their lack of money.
As I meditated on “Blessed are the poor” among the poor I couldn’t help but notice some things that sat awkwardly in my own life. One day we gave Xulani and Lucas, our favourite builders, sleeping bags. The next day we asked Xulani what he had done the night before. He waxed lyrical about that sleeping bag and wrapping up with his children on the settee. It was extravagant luxury for him. And I thought of the difference for Xulani as a father and me as a father. For him there is little to do but spend time with his kids. For me, my life is filled with so many options, as are my children’s. I can go to the internet, do my emails, watch a soccer match, listen to my Ipod etc etc. They are all the vestiges of wealth that keep me away from quality time with my children. Blessed are the poor!
You see very quickly on the township the lack of desire for privacy or independence. You also find the need for dependence upon neighbour. There are no stupid behavioral manners that fill life with false airs and graces. Who you see is what you see. There are no slaves to fake here. This is community. It is honest. It is relational. It is dynamic. Blessed are the poor.
Mark, our old Resident volunteer, said to me one evening, “As the man said, ‘It is not their poverty that makes them happy. It is their lack of wealth’” “Who said that?” I asked him. “You” he replied! Wow! Cool! Wealth is a dangerous thing. In its purity of course it has many advantages but it is tainted and I believe I watch it eat up the souls of my students and me more and more every year. My greatest concern these days is the great fracture that is occurring in the lives of my students. They are the wealthiest and most spoiled generation in history. The impact of that is terrifying.
They are conditioned by a monster…
• The 3000 ads that bombard them everyday with stuff
• The internet pumps out all the information or ebay bargains that you desire
• The mobile phone allow instant contact and the ability to confront whoever or whatever in the padded comfort of texting
• The ipod allows you to carry around what I needed a whole room for
• The designer labels that can allow you to save your face
• The riches that middle class western kids enjoy
• Even in the Church we are safe and comfortable and encouraged to be
That is your world… it is an antithesis of the Gospel. If we are to seriously follow Jesus in the twenty first century we need a close look at what the raw materials are that he starts with. It is of a generation pampered and given all that they ask for and given it immediately. Those things that our parents thought were luxury have become standard. There is so much talk about pensions and what pensions mean to me and to my students are in a whole other galaxy than what my Grandparents were thankful for. Self gratification is not only possible but an everyday reality.
Where it goes wrong is that it causes us to drift, blandly away from the real meaning of life. The soul gets starved with what the body can do. The soul becomes marginalized. It is about material and physical attainment that we are focused. And when we find ourselves in relationships – and I mean with God as well as friendships, families and particularly marriage – that don’t cash in the cheques of our desires immediately like we are used to then problems set in. Wealth has consequences. And I am finding them more and more tragic. I ministered last spring and summer in a Church in the west end of Vancouver where people were so materially satisfied that God is not a necessity. Indeed he would have been a hindrance. When the rich hear God’s call they ask “How much will it cost?” When the poor here it they shout, “Look what He is giving me.”
Of course I am not saying – let us all be poor. Whatever Jesus meant when he asked us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” he didn’t mean what Gordon and I saw on a Njanga cemetery. We need to live our lives to bring a Kingdom where every man is safe in the shelter of his own vine as Isaiah prophesied.
But as we deal with poverty let us also deal with wealth. Jesus was not kidding when he said that we cannot service both God and money. He wasn’t kidding when he said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to have a healthy spiritual journey to heaven. If these students are to do anything for God in their lives then the greatest danger to their achieving it is the wealth that will be available to them. It will ensnare, bland out, dull down and suck their souls dry. I pray they see this summer the blessedness of not being wealthy and will also see the cursedness of an unjust world that leaves some in terrifying danger of poverty and death.
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