First Parish Sermon Archive

“THE POOR”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On March 7, 2010

 

The poor. That’s my assignment. Every year both Erin and I have a sermon title or topic put up for auction to help raise money for the church. I thank Barbara Buell for her generous bid and for having thought of a title for me to take on. In all the years I have been doing this, I think she has proposed the shortest subject: just seven letters. The poor.

 

The poor have always been with us, as Jesus pointed out several millennia past. But a review of the history of America’s response to that fact shows two fascinating fluctuations. First, care for the poor has varied between what the seventeenth century distinguished as indoor or outdoor.

 

In the small communities where folks from England settled from 1620 on, care for the poor was provided outdoor, before that was the name for it. Which is to say, care was provided to a person in need, whether from illness, hunger, or poverty, at their home, as still happens to some degree in the small community that we are as a congregation. People were taxed for this purpose, and congregations and charities helped out, too.

 

But in time care was also provided indoor, which is to say, in facilities like poorhouses, almshouses, and poor farms. Polly Oliver, who grew up in Concord, can remember they still existed in some neighboring towns. Many a town still has a Poor Farm Road.

 

A similar fluctuation has occurred with the care of the mentally ill, treated locally or in collective facilities. To some degree the treatment of prisoners has fitted the same pattern.

 

To return to the poor farms, though, and the county homes for the needy, they also fit into a second and even more powerful fluctuation, between two different views of poverty. Because one of the functions of communal homes for the poor was to insure that these people were not simply too indolent to work. To stay in the poor house, or on the farm, required that you work. Society was not ignoring your need, it just wanted to guard against rewarding and thereby encouraging lax behavior.

 

Of course, in most cases exceptions were made for the poor who could not, with any sense of fairness or decency, be expected to work the farm or go to work, the most common case being women with children who had been widowed or abandoned. But society in this swing of the pendulum takes care to notice carefully and judge narrowly just who qualifies for its support. A fund here at First Parish, created a century ago, allows Erin or me to make donations to “the worthy sick and needy of the parish.”

 

That same concern finds expression in our current national welfare policies, adopted during the long period of conservatism in American politics that has prevailed since 1968, following the previous, liberal era that began in 1932, from the programs of the New Deal through those of the Great Society, before Ronald Reagan immortalized the welfare mother driving her Cadillac to pick up her check.

 

This swing between caring and expecting relates to the more common, easier characterization, between liberal and stingy support for the poor; but it is more fundamental. It has to do with how we understand poverty, its causes, and its alleviation. And I will tell you right now, on that score I think neither side is altogether right.

 

And that is why I think we fluctuate, in a free society where ideas compete and there is no cultural consensus that prevails — as it can in other, less diverse societies. We have a tradition of caring for those in need. At the beginning of this current, long-term conservative national mood, there was still serious talk of a negative income tax, where people of a certain income paid no income tax, those who made more paid more, increasingly, and those who made less were given money by the IRS, the more the less they made.

 

That arc of the pendulum swing reflects an understanding of poverty as something one is born into, or falls into, through no fault of one’s own, or maybe through fault, but after all, we’re only human, all of us, and those of us who can need to alleviate the want of those in need.

 

And then we also have a tradition of individualism, of expecting people to earn their own living, to take care of themselves and their family by showing up at work and putting in the labor. Some people credit our small religious movement with being a strong supporter of liberal political views, including generous welfare benefits; but others can cite one of our erstwhile ministers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with giving a strong philosophical foundation for conservative economic policy, as in his essay on “Self-Reliance.”

 

That arc of the pendulum swing goes with an understanding of poverty as something people bring on themselves through lack of ambition and effort, or just by failing when society for its smooth operation needs to reward success and not shortcoming.

 

Either answer, taken alone, is wrong. Rewarding effort and success serves society well to a point, but punishing the poor with disrespect and neglect is unfair and cruel. Relieving the burdens of poverty and seeking its end is virtuous, kind, and also relieves social tension; but underwriting indolence and unnecessary dependence can heighten tension of an opposite sort, on the part of providers, and it can serve poor people badly.

 

So we go on grappling to find the balance. The Bible itself has some ambivalence on the subject, and when it comes to a phrase like “the poor,” the Bible springs quickly to mind. There are few subjects on which the Bible has more to say. You have to look long and hard to find anything the Bible has to say about homosexuality, contraception, abortion, or stem cell research, anything at all. Whereas one list of all the quotations in the Bible regarding the poor takes up ten pages, and I found a few that the listing left out.

 

As I say, among the writers there are some who regard poverty with a matter of distain, although they are few, and all in the book Proverbs: “Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty; open thine eyes, and thou shalt be satisfied with bread.” [Prov. 20:13] Likewise, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep: so shall thy poverty come….” [Prov. 23:33-34a]

 

I have been reading Ben Franklin, who would surely concur; although one might worry that a critic of the poor could turn things around to suggest that if a person be poor, it is because they sleep too much. Maybe they do, maybe not – just like many a rich person. Just so, in Proverbs we read that “the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty” [Prov. 23:21], but surely that is not the only or even the main way people get there.

 

Otherwise, the Bible is a rich resource for the view that society and its members are to be judged by their generosity to those who are poor. There are numerous rules that make the point, although sadly they often do not apply in obvious ways to how we live today. In that agricultural society, the demands included not using your land every seventh year, that the poor may get food from it [Ex.23:11]; not going over your vineyard a second time or picking up the grapes that have fallen – “Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God.” [Lev. 19:10] The list goes on and on. It demands justice for the poor, and their care.

 

And when poor Job tries to justify his life, saddled mysteriously with disaster, he says, “Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor?” [Job 30:25]

 

I quoted Psalms before in one way. I could do it twenty times over in defense of the poor, as in Psalm 82: “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy from the hand of the wicked.” [82:3-4]

 

Another recurrent biblical theme is that God acts on behalf of the poor. “I know the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy,” [Ps, 140:12] it says in Psalms, and “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” [Ps. 113:7]

 

As I say, this is what the Bible cares about, far more than about what many conservative Christians have focused upon. They even pretend that the Bible is against homosexuality because one explanation of why Sodom was destroyed was because a mob of men demanded that Lot turn over two male travelers to them for sex, despite Lot’s attempt to offer them his two daughters instead. It is not a pretty story.

 

But it is only one story, one of two accounts that explain Sodom’s destruction. In the book of Ezekial it says, “Now this was the sin of … Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned: they did not help the poor and needy.” [16:49]

 

That is what the Bible cares mostly about. In the book of Jeremiah, God, describing Josiah, King of Judah, says to Josiah’s son, “He defended the cause of the poor and needy…. Is that not what it means to know me?” [22:16]

 

Eventually we get to the Jewish upstart Jesus and the quote I referred to at the outset, “you have the poor among you always.” [Mt.26:11;John 12:8] It has been used in one odd and regrettable way. It sometimes gets cited as if its import were, there is no point trying to do anything about poverty – it has always been here, it always will be, don’t give it a thought. There is no justification for that outlook in the Bible, which cares a whole lot about poverty and wants us to give it many a thought.

 

Here’s the story: It was almost Passover. The climatic events in Jerusalem leading to Jesus’ execution were near. To quote the Gospel of Mark, “Jesus was in Bethany, in the home of Simon the leper. As he sat at table, a woman came in carrying a small bottle of very costly perfume, pure oil of nard. She broke it open and poured the oil over [Jesus’] head. Some of those present said to one another angrily, ‘Why this waste? The perfume might have been sold for thirty pounds and the money given to the poor‘; and they turned upon her with fury. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone…. It is a fine thing she has done for me. You have the poor among you always, and you can help them whenever you like; but you will not always have me. She has done what lay in her power; she is beforehand with anointing my body for burial.’” [14:3-8] The same story in much the same form appears in Matthew [26:7-12], and in John [12:1-8], although there the challenge comes specifically from Judas Iscariot.

 

I have always taken the words, “the poor you shall always have with you,” to mean exactly the opposite of the interpretation that says, “why bother?”, but then again both my parents trained as social workers and worked in that field. To me it means, people will always have work to do, as the Bible itself demands, to protect people when they are poor from predation and oppression, and to tend to their needs.

 

Right before the episode in Bethany, Jesus tells his disciples that on the day of reckoning, when the Son of Man comes to judge people, he will tell those destined for heaven, “When I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home, when naked you clothed me….” [25:35] When did we do that?, they ask. Whenever you did it to anyone, however humble.

 

The Book of Deuteronomy puts it plainly: “There will always be poor in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded … toward the poor and needy….” [15:11]

 

But that is not the full or only answer. There must be as well a passion for ending whatever it is that causes the hunger, the thirst, the homelessness, the nakedness. Eastern religions do well to raise compassion up as a goal, but the belief in karma and reincarnation can justify indifference to structural injustice, just as can a wrong interpretation of the reality of poverty’s persistence.

 

To imagine the war on poverty can ever be totally, lastingly won requires more optimism than I can muster personally, although I love the dream and I will work toward making it come true as I can, and urge others and the world to do likewise, while in the meantime we try to do what we can for the poor with us now.

 

A few final thoughts. First, I apologize for using the word “we” as if it were impossible that anyone here in this room today could be poor, as though if you are poor, you don’t belong here. I don’t know how to solve that and still keep the sermon to twenty minutes; the best I can do is to say I don’t mean it that way. One of the side benefits of our housing homeless families four weeks a year is the confirmation it provides that folks who find themselves in a bind for a while are folks like us, and any of us may find our self in the ranks of the poor some time.

 

Second, the very term “the poor” is open to challenge, if it fortifies the notion that there is some permanent group of people who are different, like in a caste system. But there is a class system in the United States, as elsewhere, and some people in it are particularly deprived and vulnerable for lack of assets or income. The Hebrew Bible points out that they exist, and wants them cared for and protected. I was talking with the husband of a colleague of mine about this topic. He grew up Jewish and said, it never occurred to him growing up that poverty said anything negative about a person but only about a society.

 

And finally, I need to cite last Sunday’s eye-opening editorial in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. He notes that most of us have not noticed that over the last decade, American evangelical Christians “have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues” involving injustice and inhumanity around the world. “The largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization [is] World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has nearly tripled over the last decade. [It] now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries.”

 

Kristof says “Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.”

 

He concludes, “If secular liberals can give up their snootiness [about faith-based organizations], and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.” Maybe poverty, too.