1. Write a novel.
2. Acts in a Shakespearean play.
3. Go on a European food tour.
4. Learn to type at least 60 words a minute.
5. Finish my history degree.
6. Do a Ph.D. or D.Th.
7. Learn German.
8. Learn Latin.
9. Brush up on my French, Greek, and Hebrew.
10. Tour the Holy Land.
11. Ski a double black diamond run.
12. Write a history book.
13. Go skidving
14. Go parasailing
To be continued….
King Lear and his fool as Lear shouts in anger at the heavens, raging against the absurdity of his situation.
Recently my plan to read the greatest work of philosophy and literature in the Western canon (the list of works and authors was posted here some time ago) brought me to a slim volume called The Myth of Sisyphus by twentieth-century French absurdist philosopher Albert Camus. The first sentence to the book reads: “There is only one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” By this he simply means that before we speak about anything else (what it means to be good, whether a person is divisible into three parts: mind, body, and soul, etc.) we need to first ask whether life has any meaning which ought to compel us to live, and if not we should admit it and have enough courage to end our lives.
For Camus, life is absurd. He defines absurdity as the difference between our expectation of the world and the way the world and actually turns out to be. Camus sees a fundamental bifurcation between humanity and the world, with the sense of the absurd residing somewhere in the middle. For example, it is most often our expectation (especially in the rational West) that the world obeys some consistent physical laws, but then quantum mechanics comes along and defies the laws of Newtonian physics. We also tend to operate under the assumption of fairness in the world, such that it makes sense when a murder is imprisoned for life, and yet his or her act of murder, perpetrated against an innocent victim, smacks of injustice, and we can do nothing but shake our fist in vain at an impassive heaven.
What we think we know very often turns out to be not true at all. I have heard a number of people in their elder years say that the older they get, the more they realize how little they actually know and how much they can no longer take for granted. The quest of the scientific community for a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or a Theory of Everything (TOE) seems in this light destined to failure, the only thing more sure being that each of us will come to a place in our lives (and usually on the most plain of all days, in the midst of the same old routine) where suddenly nothing makes sense. Camus himself describes a time when we was simply standing on the street and saw a man inside of a phone booth gesticulating wildly as he held the receiver to his ear. He gazed at the man, labouring to undesrstand his “incomprehensible dumb-show” and marvelling at the sudden and absolute alien-ness of it all, wondering why the man had even been born. I suspect many (if not most, and I include myself here) people in our society experience the alien-ness and incomprehensibleness of the outside world at one point or another, and in varying degrees.
Thus stands Camus’ theory and experience of the absurd, and he has a bone to pick with anyone tries to soften the blow by coming down on one side or the other — either insisting on orderliness and the powers of human rationality to the exclusion and denial of the inexplicable; or insisting on the mystical, subjective, or irrational element of life and the world to the exclusion of the rational faculty in mankind. This is where he objects to religion (in particular Christianity), for he experienced it as being unable to stare the absurd in the face ad therefore always defaulting to one of the two poles – either Kierkegaard and others lost themselves in the irrational nebulosity of the divine, or those heavily influenced by the Enlightenment insisted that God and his world could be reduced to a wholly rational concept. For Camus, neither are acceptable. Anything that is to give meaning must preserve this tension.
In response to Camus, I would have us consider the person of Christ. The reason I think Jesus and orthodox Christian theology may answer Camus’ conundrum of the absurd is because Jesus is both 100% God and 100% human, in the same person but without contradiction. Camus’ absurdism lies in the fact that there is a fundamental disconnect between human experience on one side and the the world or divine creation on the other. The yawning chasm between them grows wider and deeper all the time, it would seem.
But Christ is uniquely able to answer this connundrum because he is both God and humankind at the same time. He sees and experiences this dilemma from both vantage points, and can cross with ease from one side to the other and back over again. Jesus does not emphasize one factor of the absurdist problem to the exclusion of the other, but rather unites both factors perfectly in himself, thus maintaining and actually guarding that tension but then also transcending it to bring meaning.
The wonderful promise of the Bible is that when we put our faith in Christ, we become co-heirs with him, having access to all his riches and power. It would stand to reason, then, that, at least in a limited way on this side of eternity, we can glimpse his reality which transcends both factors of the absurd. We still live with this tension because we still fall on the human side of the equation, but we can, in Christ, glimpse the divine and how to interacts perfectly with humanity. We need not despair, and we need not sense the ache of meaninglessness.
I make my first post in some time by simply observing both the pros and cons of adding some structure to one’s life.
I am, by nature, someone who prefers to be very organized, but as of late I have been feeling rather unorganized and not like I am able to fit in what I really want to do and what matters to me. So I took some time this week to look at my life and plan to make room in my schedule for everything I feel is important at least once a month, from volunteering to cultivating friendships outside of the church; from spending time with my wife and family to making room for school work.
Now, few people would say there is anything wrong with that, except perhaps the extreme Bohemian types who prefer to live as free spirits, flying wherever impulse should take them. But this is where my perfectionist tendencies come out. I suddenly felt the need to schedule everything — date night on Mondays, homework on Tuesdays, dinners with parents and in-laws on alternating Sundays, dinner with pagan neighbours on Fridays, and so on and so forth. Seeing me gripped by my mania, my wife looked over and says, “You know you don’t have to schedule everything, you know”
There is in life a precarious (and sometimes seemingly impossible) balance between scheduled activities and having the flexibility to respond to those things that God unexpectedly puts in our way, or simply taking some time to take care of the needs of those closest to us. Some people may default to either side of the spectrum — either nothing ever gets around to being done, or interruptions of one’s incessant busyness throws a person off balance. And for those who are tempted to schedule things to the extreme (organization and purposefulness is good, rigidity is bad), a spiritual lesson needs to be learned. Ultimately, the Lord is the one in control of our lives, not us, and so we need to feel the freedom to let go of the steering wheel and vacate the driver’s seat, even if that means taking half an hour to speak to a distressed friend on the phone, not enrolling in that curling league, or having the occasional meeting run 15 minutes over-time. Someone once told me that John Lennon said: “Life is what happens when you’re out making plans.” Whether it was Lennon or not, there is some truth to that, aptly summed up in the old proverb: “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” We can be doing all the right things, but so locked into our schedule and bull-stubborn that we don’t know why we are doing it after a while. I would say it’s better to be purposeful and committed to a few things rather than madly rushing around trying to do everything you think you should do but without love in your heart. Where is God for you in the mix? How does he enter into your life? Is every second of every day planned, so that you can’t hear God among all the noise of activity (and I’m not talking about scheduling a 30-minute devotional time in the morning)? Does your scheduling proficiency become a matter of pride, without which you would feel lost in the world?
Humankind’s faith systems most often seems to find themselves stretched by the tension between accepting and dealing with the reality of the world around us, and being true to the higher calling to holiness or transcendence. This problem is as old as the religious instinct inside humankind, and shows no sign of going away any time soon.
For example, we have the Sermon on the Mount. This is both the most famous and the most demanding of Jesus’ teaching. Who, for example, would care to turn the other cheek to one’s enemy (Mt. 5:39), or give away not only one’s coat but also one’s shirt to someone who asks for it (v. 40)? Who really wants to beleive that anger is no better than murder (v. 22), or that lust is akin the very act of adultery itself (v. 28)? These teachings are too hard to bear, especailly because they require an attention to the internal, unseen world. Deepak Chopra, in his book The Third Jesus, asks, “Why are Jesus’ teachings [as traditonally understood] impossible to live by?” (1). The typical Christian answer would be: because of original sin and the unregenerate condition of our souls. But no, Chopra believes that what “Jesus taught is much more radical and at the same time mystical” (1), and goes on to offer his idea about Jesus’ true teaching being not about sin and salvation, as the Christian tradition has largely understood it, but about being reborn into “God-consciousness.”
And so we reinterpret Jesus teachings, claiming that we are trying to get at what Jesus really meant. In the interest of finding out what Jesus really meant, some have hypothesized that Jesus is merely exaggerating in order to make his point (and, to be fair, very few people take Jesus literally when he says “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” [v. 29]), and so we can feel quite comfortable in toning it down a fair bit. Others, such as Martin Luther, proposed that the teachings of Jesus applied only to the spiritual realm, whereas things like relationships with employers and family members remain in the secular realm and there in these we are bound to compromise Jesus’ lofty ethic. Those among the dispensationalist school see Jesus’ Sermon as giving us a glimpse into the millennial age in which it will be possible to live accordingly, but for now we must make due. And then the Catholic Church employs what has been called (perhaps not too flatteringly) the Double Standard View, wherein exact obedience to the Sermon is only for the saintly ones and monks and nuns, while other beleivers can be satisfied to live out the spirit of Jesus is trying to say.*
One the other end, there are those who accept no compromise on any point (except maybe the gouge-your-own-eye-out part). Such people or groups included the early Anabaptists, Leo Tolstoy, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For these people, Jesus’ teaching is as plain as day, and, according to some Wesleyan groups, may actually be lived up to in large measure if God should give the believer the extra grace to refrain from all acts of willfully committed sin.
Then there are those who walk a middle road, such as Martin Dibelius and Dostoevsky, who indicate that Jesus does desire us to live up to his teaching, and has given it to us so that we may aspire to become more Christ-like, but due to our polluted human nature, we cannnot become completely obedient.
I speak form a Christian perspective beacause that is what I know, but I have seen hints of this in other faith systems, and the entirely evident human fascination with loopholes would leads me to believe that all people groups and faith systems have experienced the same thing. For example, I am currently watching a program from the BBC called Around the World in 80 Faiths, in which an Anglican vicar travels the world over the course of a year to see if he can get a pulse on how people from different places and cultures interact with the divine. In speaking with a Mormon family in one episode, they endorsed plural marriage by indicating that it is not a man’s nature to be monogamous, and so why force it upon him? I cannot help but think that this merely legitimizes a man’s desire for someone other than his one wife — at least to a certain degree, because sexual contact with someone other than one of your [insert number here] wives is still bad news.
As an idealist myself, and also simply a believer in the power of the divine in the world, I am deeply troubled by this. Isn’t the very point of religion to challenge us, through the power of the divine, to live a life that is different? Isn’t the idea of a faith system to make people act and become in their very natures different than they were and different from the typical conception of humanity? Should it not surprise us when people actually do what the Lord has commanded in the Sermon or elsewhere? The behaviour of the true devotee should be abnormal and difficult. But instead, in order to make something more palatable or reasonable, we disembowel it — the take the soul and guts out, making it lifeless, a mere caraciture of what it is supposed to be. We theoligize away our shortcomings and we lay a divine stamp of approval over our foibles; we engage in grand acts of self-delusion about our own goodness or status before the Lord because we cannot believe that God might desire such sacrifice from us. ”It’s too hard!” we cry. Yes, it is! But that is our own human limitations speaking; dare I say the devil trying to keep us back from experiencing the joys of a life of obedience, dedication, and self-controle. But let us remember that nothing is impossible with God (Lk. 1:37); We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us (Phil. 4:13). Let’s be willing and courageous to take Jesus’ words at face value and see what will result.
*The above paragraph contains references from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount.
I will be preaching again at Gracepoint on September 6th on John 21:15-25. I am interested in building my sermon differently, and so am asking for the input of the congregation. Please read the relevant passage and feel free to provide me with anything that may be of interest or use to me for my sermon, but just to provide you with some guidance, I am looking mainly for (1) anecdotes, (2) insights, (3) illustrations, and (4) any questions about the text that you would care to have answered.
If you have any of the above, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. Anyone is welcome to do so; however, because this sermon is to be delivered at Gracepoint, I will only choose material submitted by those from Gracepoint. To indicate that you are from Gracepoint, simply place a (GP) after your name.
Thank you in advance to everyone for your submissions. I look forward to our building sermon together.
In my city, there is a street corner that always amazes me as I drive by. Of the four corners of the intersection, three are home to three differnt religious buildings. On one, there is a non-denominational, charismatic church; across the street, there is a synagogue; and across the street the from the church in the other direction is a Sikh Temple.
If this is not a testament to the multi-ethnic, multi-faith Canada that we have become, I am not sure what is. And this is fine with me — I love living in a country where people may worship as they so choose, but I can’t help wondering what the relationships are like on the corner. Do people who frequent the different religious establishments ever take the time to converse with one another, or do their obvious differences burn any bridges before one attempts to cross them? Are we charitable toward one another, or do feelings of restentment toward “those people” embitter us? (I ask these questions of all three parties). What are our (mis)conceptions concernging these other groups that could possibly be challenged as we come to know these other people in friendship?
This three-corner set-up is an ideal location in which to pratice the work of reconicilation and cross-cultural engagement. Would there be a possibilities of bringing these communities together somehow? Are there events that could be held to encouarge dialogue, conversation, and a better understanding of one another? A prime opportunity for creating cross-cultural communities and beginning spiritual conversations has presentesd itself, and I believe that the church specifically (for I can only speak from a Christian standpoint) is neglecting its duty to God and the world if it does not seize it. Let it never be that the gurdwara and the synagogue might say that they never experienced the radical love of those Christ-followers next door.
I was horrified this morning to learn that, late last month, a church in my area hosted its second annual Mixed Martial Arts Amateur Championship inside their church building. I have since learned that this has happended before: a few times in the US, and also in Latin America.
The driving force behind holding this event, it seems, was to get more young men into the church — and from what I hear, it worked: 80% of the audience were non-church-going people. However, it does not follow that getting unchurched people together into a church is automatically a good thing. Getting them into a building will not change their spiritual life, especially if they are engaging in activites that are fundamentally antithetical to the Good News of the Gospel.
In my estimation, allowing this kind of event inside of a church is a poor example of how to do cultural theology. As an Anabaptist believer, I would say that the way of Jesus is the way of peace, love, and edification. But you don’t have to be Anabaptist to understand that violence is not a desirable pattern of beheaviour. The pastor of this church attempts to theologize his way out of this dilemma by speaking about aggression versus uncontrolled violence, and then attempts to demonstrate that this fighting actually demonstrates respect and care for the other combatant, instead of malice. In this pastor’s estimation, MMA is an example of appropriate male aggression, while tackling someone in the street and beating them is not. But just because the former is better than the later, does that mean the first is good? He then says that this sport demonstrates respect in its highest form, but how can you respect anyone when trying to injure them and/or make them bleed? Certainly these men are not out to kill one another, but they are using their bodies as weapons in order to harm the other combatant, so that they may swelled with pride at the triumph of their physical prowess. Is this the “healthy purpose” that the pastor speaks of? The way of Christ is not in domination.
Now I realize that at various times and places, certain things were frowned upon the church, only to be embraced later. For example, rock ‘n’ roll was the “Devil’s music,” and allowing it in the church would corrupt the youth, but today in many churches we think nothing of pulling out drums and a guitar. The only problem here is that there is not enough said in the Scriptures about this matter to make any kind of prohibtion normative. In fact, the Israelites used all manner of instruments to make noise unto the Lord. But what about violence? This is something the New Testament forbids in daily interactions (putting just-war theory and the Old Testament aside for the time being).
Yes, the world is a violent place, and violence in the media titlates and amuses those who watch it, but the community of Christ is called to be a society of those who give the rest of the world a glimpse into what heaven will be like by how they live on earth now. Can violence possibly be a part of this? To injure someone, whether in war or sport, does not resonate with the heart of Christ. As “the church renounces the way of violence people will see what the Gospel means, because then they will see the way of Jesus in the Church….If we live in obedience to Jesus’ command to renounce violence, the church will become the sphere where the future of God’s righteousness intersects–and challenges–the present tense of human existence” (Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament–Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics [New York: Harper Collins, 1996], 343-44).
I am sure that this pastor desires much good to come out of this, but the ends do not jusitifuy the means. For example, I do not think that anger over injustice is a bad thing — we should be furious over the issue of children in (sex) slavery. But it does not follow that I therefore have liscence to go out and incapacitate those who are holding these children in bondage. We are not called to be arbiter of who deserves life and death, no matter how heinous their actions. In the same way, one cannot say that aggression unleashed on the innocent puiblic is a bad thing whereas in a controlled environement it is okay. Aggression directly toward other human being is never acceptable.
To read the thoughts of the pastor regarding this, read his blog post at http://pjhburns.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/why-have-a-mma-event-in-a-church/. To be clear, the above picture was not taken at this event.
I watched a program on TV Monday night called Revealed: Hip 2B Holy. The one-hour documentary explored the burgeoning neo-evangelical movement in Canada. This is, as host Kevin Newman said, “a kinder, gentler evangelicalism.” I was impressed with the entire tone of the piece: it was very congenial toward this movement.
The documentary explored how the Canadian evangelical movement is trying to find its voice and identity in the midst of three major factors that each have the potential to heavily influence it: 1) the louder, brasher evangelicalism of our neighbours to the south, 2) our pluralistic Canadian context, and 3) residual negativity toward the church from former generations.
The question of what evangelicalism in this country will become is a a good one. As Canadians generally, I sometimes think we have an identity crisis — we define ourselves by what we are not (namely, Americans), but rarely could we tell people what we are. Even if we claim, as we often do, that we are a mosaic rather than a melting pot, this does not truly describe for us what we as Canadians have in common, but simply that we are able to embrace difference. Canadians, as the documentary pointed out, are also far more ’polite’ than perhaps the Americans are known to be, and so in the face of religious pluralism, it is easy to refrain from being vocal about one’s faith. On this point, I believe that one of the people interviewed made a good point: “It is clear that as 10-15% of the population, evangelicals do not have enough clout to impose their will on the rest of the country, but there is no good reason why they can’t speak up and add their voice to this conversation that is going on among different groups.”
People under 30 especially are far more willing to listen to the Christian message than we may think. This is a generation that has often discarded any negative views toward the church that their parents may have had, and are willing to make decisions for themselves. But in order to make decisions, one needs knowledge, and this is a generation that, while they may not be prejudiced against church, also have very little knowledge about it. Christian faith may be totally off their radar and many may have grown up without ever setting foot in a church. I myself, though baptised as an infant, went to church only once or twice a year, and as was amazed to find out, around 10 years old, that there was more to Easter than the Easter bunny. Another person interviewed for this documentary said: “Most people never attend church not because they are hostile to it, but simply because no one invited them.”
Strangely enough, I take this to be a blessing. It is, in many respects, a chance to start over. Rather than scrambling to repair the damage done by the modern church, we post-modern Christians, living in an increasingly post-Christian world, have the chance to once again present the Gospel for the first time. And it is beginning to work, as some churches and denominations are experiencing double-digit growth.
How will we do this? I think it is key that we do it in a way that is uniquely Canadian — one that is polite and respectful of other belief systems but without being afraid to state humbly the truth as we have recieved it (I think this makes hospitable and open-minded dialogue a hugely important tool); one that takes to heart the commnandment to love one’s neighbour, such that the church becomes an advocate for peace, for the poor and the oppressed, and for other vulnerable members of society in our own country and around the world; and one that has a sense of anticipation and excitement for what may yet be — an excitement that is contagious and draws people into a divine adventure. Remember, Christians need not be a bunch of dour-faced, reserved people sitting on uncomfortable pews. We know the Lord of the universe and are in his hands, which is the most exciting and thrilling place to be. Do others see that in us?
I just finished a challenging and provocative volume called Models of the Kingdom by Howard A. Snyder. In this book, Snyder evaluates eight discrete models for understanding what the Bible means when it speaks about the Kingdom of God. These models are as follows:
The Kingdom as Future Hope — the reign of God is yet to come; the faithful believer is to help people flee the wrath to come, waiting for the descent of the New Jerusalem at the End of the Age.
The Kingdom as Inner Spiritual Experience — the Kingdom has already come and consists of God’s reign in our hearts as we align ourselves with him in relationship
The Kingdom as Mystical Communion – the Kingdom consists in our experience of the Lord and our participation in the communion of the saints down through the ages
The Kingdom as Insitutitional Church — the reign of God is entirely manifest in his Church, which is his body on earth
The Kingdom as Countersystem — the rule of God consists in all those forces that serve to subvert the existing social order, which most often upholds evil and promotes injustice; the truly authentic and radical community of Jesus’ followers serves to point people to the bigger reality of God.
The Kingdom as Political State – the kingdom of God is best expressed in the form of a theocracy or “Christian nation.”
The Kingdom as Christianized Culture — the kingdom of God comes in its fullness as society at large is more fully transformed into the likeness of Christ. Economic policies and political decisions can begin to create the shalom that God desires.
The Kingdom as Earthly Utopia – the former model taken to the extreme: God desires to create a perfect society here on earth; this is the complete opposite of the Kingdom as Future Hope.
In assessing these eight models, Snyder considers six polarities that he sees are present in some respect in each model. These are:
Present Kingdom / Future Kingdom
Individual Kingdom / Social Kingdom
Kingdom as the Church / Kingdom as greater than or not the Church
The Kingdom coming gradually / The Kingdom coming in cataclysm
Heavenly Kingdom / Earthly Kingdom
The Kingdom brought about through divine action / The kingdom brought about through human action
Though it is clear even from a cursory investigation into each of these models that all, to some extent, resonate with what the Scriptures means when it describes the Kingdom of God (therefore making the truest picture some combination of the all of the above), some are by themselves hit closer to the mark than others. Interestingly, Snyder identifies certain systems as more biblical or helpful than others based on how well they maintain the tensions present in the above polarities. For example, a model that sees the kingdom as entirely future — such that Christians can do nothing but form little enclaves to wait for the rapture — or one that sees the kingdom as entirely present — such that Jesus’ eventual return turns out to be of little importance — has allowed the pendulum to swing too far to one side or the other on the present / future axis, and therefore falls away from the truth of the kingdom. Preferable to either one of these is a models that recognizes that the Kingdom is both ‘already’ and ‘not yet.’ This becomes true, then, for all eight models along all six axes, so that the most biblically faithfuil model is one that holds all six of these factors in tension.
The rationalist and theologian in me was stimulated in the reading, but was somewhat disappointed in the end because no definitive answer was given as to which was the best of the models. But I suppose that this is exactly the point: no one model can describe the Kingdom; no human classification system can do justice to its tensions and mysteries, and the very use of models, though they can be instructive, also fundamentally disrupts the tension in which the Kingdome exists by favouring one side of each axis.
The mystery of the kingdom is often the key feature in Jesus’ parables: strangely enough, he seeks to obscure the meaning of the kingdom to some extent. And if one did a survey of all the New Testament references to Kingdom, there is some material to substantiate any of the above models. The Kingdom is a mystery — it is many things at once and therefore transcends all our classifications. The kingdom is the rule of God already here on earth but yet to be fully manifest; it is the rule of God in the hearts of individuals that then spills over into how we interact with one another; it is a stabilizing force in society that uproots our most cherished insitutions; it is a force that sneaks up on us and bursts onto the stage of human history; it is based in the spirit realm but changes our earthly reality; the Church is a Kingdom beach-head but transcends the four church walls.
It is all these things and more and is the more glorious and deep for it. Let us never reduce the Kingdom to simply some of these things as we attempt to fit God’s plan into our neat little box.
Is this the true face of poverty?
This past Sunday, the sermon was on human poverty. Often, when we think about poverty, we think of starving children in Africa or those struggling to eke out an existence in the slums of Mumbai (pictured above). And that is certainly part of it, but in order to lay a groundwork for true compassion instead of mere pity (see my past post ‘Poisonous Pity’), the preacher encouraged us to engage with our own poverty. He had us ask ourselves: “In what way am I poor?”
If we take the Gospel seriously, we cannot help but conclude — as uncomfortable as it is to admit — that, before our Lord, each of us is equally poor and wretched. Paul, a very learned and well-respected man, considered himself the chief of sinners, and had these words to say: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin (Rom. 7:18, 21, 24-25, NIV).
Lest we think that the reality of this pollution of our very selves is something evident only to those who have recieved the truth of the Bible, we can see that there are many thoughtful people throughout history who have come to the same conclusion apart from a knowledge of the Christian Scriptures. Plato wrote: ”Unless a man is born with some heaven-sent aversion to wrongdoing, or unless he requires the knowledge to refrain from it, he will never do right of his own free will, but will censure wrongdoing only if cowardice or age or weakness make him powerless to practice it himself” (Plato, The Republic I.II.4.2). In our humanness, we are, to use a Pauline term, slaves to sin.
Though we may possess material comforts, we are spirtually without two pennies to rub together, and the only reason we have any material possessions at all is because of God’s provision in our lives. Unfortunately, abundant material comforts and finances can blind us to the reality of our poverty. One of the key pieces of the sermon was a quotation from Michael Pucci from Food for the Hungry. Pucci writes: “The Gospel is asking us today to hand over to Christ what we have in our hands, not because it is as precious as we think it is, but because unless we do, we cannot empty that hand to receive what in our poverty we really need from Him. We are not attentive to the poor because we have believed a lie that we are not of them.”
This is why our confronting our own poverty is so vitally important. If we don’t, it is easy to believe the Devil’s lie that we are not one of the poor, and therefore consider the poor as other and become “arrogant, over-fed, and unconcerned (Ezek. 16:49), the very sin of Sodom herself. We are the poor, too: we are of them, and let us never manufacture barriers to separate ourselves from the unwashed masses.
That being said, those of us who do have wealth have an obligation to help those who have less than we do. Yes, we as humans are all poor and needy in some fundamental sense, but there are those who are materially poor while we, in comparison, have much more, and it therefore becomes incumbant upon us to minister to them out of our overflow. And not only that, but to be an advocate for them against those who would oppress them out of greed or selfishness. I truly believe that the one thing Jesus abhors more than all other things is injustice, and if we sit idly by and continue to believe the lie that things are not so bad or that we are not one of the needy, then we become part of the problem and fall under God’s displeasure — not that we shall be excluded from the Kingdom, but even believers will one day be called to give an account of their actions. The British statesman Edmund Burke famously said, “All that is required for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” When it come to the very thing that sets God off — the oppression of the orphan, the widow, and the defenseless — let us do something.
