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I KNOW THIS BECAUSE TYLER KNOWS THIS

"You are not your job.
You're not how much money you have in the bank.
You're not the car you drive.
You're not the contents of your wallet.

The things you own end up owning you.

What are we? We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession.

 

Murder; crime; poverty; these things don't concern me.

 

What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra."

 

-Tyler Durden

 

Finding God in the Poor and Marginalized by Thomas Crisp

In my previous article, I argued that Jesus preached a Kingdom gospel. A gospel which maintained that the long-awaited shalom of the Rule or Kingdom of God, prophesied by Isaiah and other prophets, was breaking into history and could be entered into now by anyone who would take Jesus’s yoke upon him- or herself, learning from him how to live, learning from him how to appropriate the blessings of this Kingdom shalom—the blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s sweet presence—and minister them to others. To be sure, I suggested, Jesus thought of these blessings as available at present in only a preliminary sort of way. The Kingdom, said Jesus, is like a mustard seed: it starts small.

But don't underestimate the power and goodness of this mustard-seed Kingdom shalom. For though it is now small in our midst, and we enjoy but foretastes of its blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s sweet presence, the foretastes of these things are good, deeply precious, like a pearl you might find, said Jesus, which is so valuable you'd be willing to sell all that you possess to lay hold of that pearl.

I suggested in that article that a central practice enjoined by Jesus on his followers, a practice whereby they could enter into these blessings of Kingdom shalom and minister them to others, was the practice of familial community—relating to one another as family—and that a central mark of their practice of that family life was economic sharing with the poor and marginalized. In this article, we’ll explore that theme in more detail.

Just what sort of economic sharing was envisioned by the early Jesus movement? What did it look like? What was Jesus’s teaching about sharing one’s personal wealth and possessions with those in poverty and on the margins? And what implications does it have for us today as followers of Jesus? What sort of economic sharing ought we be practicing?

Those are our questions.

Two paradigms

Toward answering them, let me briefly explain two very different paradigms for thinking about money: two very different philosophies of wealth. These two philosophies of wealth before us, we can ask which comes closest to the practices Jesus was endorsing.

Perhaps the best way to get hold of the differences between these philosophies is to start with a question: What sort of moral claim, if any, do the needy have on my excess goods (goods above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work: luxuries)?

 Put differently, what, if any, of my excess wealth do the needy have a right to?

According to the Roman view the answer is “none.” I am not morally obligated to give anything of my excess wealth to those in need. I may decide to give up some of my excess goods in an act of charity, but charity, on this view, is what ethicists call supererogatory: commendable but not morally required.

 So the Roman view of wealth: The poor and needy have no right to my excess wealth; I am not morally obligated to use any of it in care of those who suffer. I may choose to, but that falls into the category of charity: what is good but not obligatory.

The alternative view doesn’t have a widely accepted label; I’ll call it the “rigorist” view.

The rigorist’s answer to the question what, if any, of my excess wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work) is, well, all of it.

On this view, use of my surplus to care for the poor and needy is not a matter of charity—good but not obligatory—but a matter of justice: it’s what the poor and needy have a right to.1

 An interesting contemporary defense of the rigorist view is found in the writings of the controversial Princeton ethicists Peter Singer. Singer’s argument takes its start from a thought experiment:

On your way to work each day, you pass a small pond. One day, you notice that a child has fallen in and is having trouble staying afloat. You look around and see that you are the only one who can help. You can easily wade in and save the child, but after a moment’s thought, you realize that, if you do, you’ll ruin the rather expensive shoes and slacks you’re wearing and be late for work. You pass by and the child dies.

What would we think of someone, asks Singer, who behaved this way? We’d think such conduct morally abominable.

Compare though to this “case of the shoes”:

In your mailbox is a fundraising letter from the Against Malaria Foundation. After reading it, you realize that, were you to send them a regular portion of your excess income each month toward the purchase of mosquito nets for use in the developing world, you could prevent the deaths of several children who would otherwise die of malaria. But you throw the letter into your trash basket, using the excess money instead for regular and unnecessary shoe purchases.

And here is something puzzling: were someone to do this, we likely wouldn’t think such conduct morally abominable. We’d think: that’s life in America. Most of us do this sort of thing all the time, without thinking twice about it.

The reason this is puzzling is, when you stop to think about it, it is difficult to see what morally relevant difference there could be between the two cases. Put differently, when you stop to think about it, it’s difficult to isolate a feature present in the pond case but absent in the shoes case that explains why it is that, in the former case, one’s conduct is morally abominable, but in the latter, it’s not.

 1 Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on justice gives powerful and eloquent expression to this idea. See, for example, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 62ff.

 Let me give some examples of features some have cited as attempted explanations of the moral differences between these cases:

 A. Physical Distance

Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you are in close physical proximity to the endangered child, in the case of the shoes, you are not, and that’s the explanation of the moral difference between the cases.

Here’s a way of showing, though, that physical distance doesn’t explain the moral difference between the cases: find a case which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is physical distance between the one failing to help and the one in need of help. If we can find such a case, that would show that physical distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

 So consider this case of the submarine:

While on the dock preparing your speedboat for a day of boating, you overhear shouting about some children on a school field trip trapped underwater in a submarine quite a long distance off shore. You are in a remote area, and your boat is the only boat fast enough to speed the rescue divers to the submarine’s location. But you were really looking forward to this outing, and you won’t have a chance to go boating again anytime soon. You decide to let someone else figure it out, go on your outing, and the children die.

Here’s a case, then, which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is physical distance between the one failing to help and the ones in need of help. This shows that physical distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

 B. Social Distance

Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you are confronted by a child in your social group (he’s a neighbor, a citizen of your city, or your country), in the case of the shoes, we are talking about children who live on the other side of the world and aren’t members of your social groups: they’re not neighbors, fellow-citizens, etc.

Perhaps we don’t have much by way of obligation to such people.

Reply: Consider this second case of the submarine.

While vacationing in a strange and exotic foreign land, you are on the dock preparing your speedboat for a day of boating and overhear shouting about some children on a school field trip trapped underwater in a submarine quite a long distance off shore. You are in a remote area, and your boat is the only boat in the area fast enough to speed the rescue divers to the submarine’s location. But you were really looking forward to this outing, and you won’t have a chance to go boating again anytime soon. You decide to let someone else figure it out, go on your outing, and the children die.

Here’s a case, then, which is morally similar to the pond case (a case in which failure to help someone in need is manifestly morally abhorrent), but in which there is social distance between the one failing to help and the one in need of help: the ones in need of help, in this case, aren’t members of your tribe: they aren’t neighbors, fellow countrymen, etc.

 This shows that social distance doesn't, all by itself, cancel an obligation to help.

C. Perceptual directness

Some have suggested that, whereas in the pond case, you see the child in need, with your own eyes, not so in the case of the shoes: here you merely read about needy children.

 Perhaps that’s the difference; perhaps we don’t have much by way of obligation to those

whose plights we don’t directly see (or otherwise directly know about by use of our perceptual faculties). But both our above submarine cases show this suggestion implausible: in each case, you can’t see the kids in need, and yet, one thinks, you’re obligated to help.

 Singer suggests, and I think he’s right, that there is no morally relevant difference between the cases, no feature present in one case but not the other capable of making the behavior in one case morally different than behavior in the other. But if so, then since one’s behavior is manifestly wrong in the first case, it follows that it is wrong in the second case as well: Spending money on needless items—on luxury and frill—when we could instead be using the money to prevent suffering and death from poverty-related causes is wrong, just as wrong as letting a drowning child die so as to not to dirty one’s fancy shoes and slacks.

 And if that’s right, rigorism is right: The poor and needy have a right to my surplus wealth, all of it. Use of my surplus to care for the poor and needy is not a matter of charity— good but not obligatory—but a matter of justice.

So far, then, Peter Singer’s argument is for the rigorist view of wealth. What is extremely interesting for us as Christians is that, as church historian Justo Gonzales demonstrates in his fascinating Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money, all of the main teachers and writers of the early Church, from the first through fourth centuries of the Christian era, were rigorists. Comments like the following are remarkably commonplace among early and influential Christian writers:

 “…it is monstrous for one to live in luxury, while many are in want.” — Clement of Alexandria

“He who is able to succour one on the point of perishing, if he fails to do so, kills him.” — Lactantius

“What is a miser? One who is not content with what is needful. What is a thief? One who takes what belongs to others. Why do you not consider yourself a miser and a thief when you claim as your own what you received in trust? If one who takes the clothing off another is called a thief, why give any other name to one who can clothe the naked and refused to do so? The bread that you withhold belongs to the poor; the cape that you hide in your chest belongs to the naked; the shoes rotting in your house belong to those who must go unshod.” — Basil

“You strip people naked and dress up your walls. The naked poor cries before your door, and you do not even look at him. It is a naked human being that begs you, and you are considering what marbles to use for paving. The poor begs you for money and gets none. There is a human being seeking bread, and your horses chew gold in their bits. You rejoice in your precious adornments, while others have nothing to eat. A harsh judgment awaits you, oh rich! The people are hungry and you close your granaries. The people cry and you show your jewels. Woe to one who can save so many lives from death, and does not!” — Ambrose

 “I beg you to remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.” — John Chrysostom

 “Not to give to the needy what is superfluous is akin to fraud.” — Augustine

 In many of the most influential writers of the early church, then, we find a Peter Singer style rigorist view of wealth: the poor and needy have a claim on all my surplus wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work); caring for them out of my excess is not a matter of charity—good but not obligatory work—but a matter of justice: it’s what the poor and needy have a right to.

So which, if any, of these options represents Jesus’s view of the matter?

We get an answer to this question, I think, by reflecting on an ethical principle at the heart of Jesus’s thinking about the rule of God and its inbreaking shalom: the love command.

The Love Command

In each of the synoptic gospels, you find Jesus interacting with the question which is the greatest commandment in the Law. Matthew's version of this goes as follows:

“But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ ”This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF. ’ ”On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." — (Matt 22:34–40)

Note the bit at the end: For a devout first century Jew, the Law and the Prophets sum up the whole of morality: they lay out the basic lineaments of right and wrong. To say, then, that the whole of the Law and the Prophets hang on these commands is to suggest that in these commands, we have the heart of morality—that these commands, in some sense, sum up the whole of morality.

We’ll focus on the second command, the command to neighbor love (henceforth, “the love command”).

What does it mean? What exactly is being enjoining on us here? An answer to this question requires an answer to three preliminary questions.

1. What sort of love is in view in the love command?

2. What work is the expression ‘as yourself’ doing in the command?

3. Who is my neighbor?

The Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on love and justice is helpful here (for example, his Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2009)).

He distinguishes three kinds of love:

Love of attraction: the love you have for something when you are drawn or attracted to it, in its grip, because of some good-making feature you discern in it. Romantic love is a species of this, but there are other varieties: you can be drawn to, in the grip of, someone’s prose styling, some piece of music, a mountain, the smell of a rose, etc.

The love of benevolence: the love you have for something when you seek its good, its well-being, its flourishing. Love as attraction typically carries in its train love as benevolence: we typically seek the good, the well-being, of those things we are drawn or attracted to. Likewise in reverse. We are typically drawn or attracted to those things we seek the good of. But not always: sometimes we pursue the good of people we do not find attractive, people we might even find repulsive.

The love of attachment: the love you have for something when you have bonded with it, become attached to it. Wolterstorff gives the example of a cat: you offer to replace my cat with a better one: fewer allergies, veterinary needs, and so forth. But no thanks, I’ll keep mine.  I’m attached to this cat; this is the one I love. This sort of love typically comes with the love of benevolence: we typically seek the well-being of those things we’re attached to. It may or may not come with the love of attraction: I’m attached to a friend in the throes of heroin addiction, would miss him terribly if he died, but he has become something deeply unattractive to me, even repulsive.

So: Three sorts of love. Which, if any, is in view in the love command?

At least the second, as is clear from its original context in Hebrew Scripture, Leviticus,

Chapter 19, verses 9-18:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God. ”You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another. You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. “You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD. ”You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.  You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD. "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” – (Leviticus 19:9–18)

Plausibly, the command to neighbor love at the end of this passage functions as a kind of summing up of what has come before. The Israelites are commanded to leave extra in their fields for the poor, to be truthful with one another, to not oppress the neighbor nor rob him, to pay the poor man’s wages promptly, to care for the disabled, to administer legal justice impartially, to reprove the neighbor so as not incur guilt because of his sin. In sum, they’re to love their neighbors as themselves.

Since leaving extra in one’s fields for the poor and the stranger, paying wages promptly, treating the disabled well, etc., are ways of seeking the neighbor’s good, the love enjoined in the summarizing command—love your neighbor as yourself—is, obviously enough, at least partly a matter of benevolence.

Is it more than that? Does it also enjoin the love of attachment? The love of attraction?

It doesn’t seem so. The Israelites are commanded to leave extra in their fields for the poor and stranger, not to steal from or lie to one another, and not to swear falsely in God’s name. But obedience to these commands has little to do with attachment or attraction. One would presumably never meet many of the poor fed by the surplus in one’s fields. And one could refrain from stealing and lying to the neighbor without much by way of attraction or attachment to him. Obedience to these commands has much to do with seeking the wellbeing of the neighbor, and not much, apparently, with attraction or attachment.

Benevolence love, then, is the sort of love at issue here: seeking the good, well-being, flourishing of the neighbor. At any rate, that’s the sort of love at issue in the command as it occurs in Leviticus. Jesus gave no indication that he understood it differently.

What sort of good at issue here?

It would be nice if we could say a bit more; the notions of human good, well-being and flourishing are notoriously slippery. What sort of well-being am I to pursue for the neighbor? Maximization of his happiness? Make sure he has an iPhone? What?

The material in Leviticus 19 leading up to the love command suggests an answer to these questions. Once again, the Israelites are commanded to:

• leave extra on their fields for the poor and stranger

• not steal from or lie to one another

• not swear falsely in God’s name

• not oppress their neighbors or rob them

• pay their laborers promptly

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• do no injustice in juridical matters, showing no partiality to rich or poor

• not slander the neighbor nor take his life

• not hate the neighbor in one’s heart

• reprove the neighbor so as not to share in his sin

• take no vengeance nor bear any grudge against the neighbor

These commands can be classed under three broad headings:

1. Commands concerned with meeting the neighbor’s sustenance needs.

The commands to

• leave extra on their fields for the poor and stranger, and

• pay their laborers promptly

2. Commands concerned with the neighbor’s security against harm.

The commands to

• not steal from or lie to one another

• not swear falsely in God’s name

• not oppress their neighbors or rob them

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• do no injustice in juridical matters, showing no partiality to rich or poor

• not slander the neighbor nor take his life, and

• take no vengeance nor bear any grudge against the neighbor

3. Commands concerned with protection of the neighbor’s dignity.

The commands to

• not curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before the blind

• not slander the neighbor

• not hate the neighbor in one’s heart, and

• not bear any grudge against the neighbor

Imagine, now, a community in which the commandments falling under these three headings are adhered to. What sort of community would it be? What sort of community is such that the sustenance needs of all in the community are met, all are safe from harm, and the dignity of all is respected by all? We saw the answer in the previous article: a shalom community. Shalom: the communal state of well-being or wholeness, described throughout the Old Testament, in which there is material sufficiency (the sustenance needs of all are met), security (against violence, attack, enslavement), and the dignity of all is respected by all.

It is this vision of human well-being that unifies the disparate commands of Leviticus 19.

Communities in which practice of these commandments predominates are communities in which there is enough food, for everyone, including the poor and sojourner. The members of such communities don’t lie to, cheat, slander, hate, steal from, take vengeance on one another. Poor laborers in such communities are paid promptly so as not to go to bed hungry; judges judge in accord with justice. Neighbors do not hate one another, but help and care for one another. Such are the ways of shalom. The commandments of Leviticus 19 mark the pathways of shalom.

The summarizing command, love your neighbor as yourself, then, is a command to behave in these ways toward the neighbor, a command to do the things that make for the neighbor’s shalom. It’s akin to Psalm 34’s:

“Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? 13Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek shalom and pursue it.” — (Psalm 34:14)

Says the love command, then: Seek your neighbor’s shalom; pursue it. Or, since shalom is perhaps best thought of as a property of communities in Old Testament thought, maybe a better way of putting it is: seek the neighbor’s inclusion in the shalom community.

What is the force of the “as yourself ” bit of the command?

So we get this answer to our first question, the question what sort of love is at issue in the love command: it’s benevolence love, seeking the neighbor’s good, where the good at issue is shalom. We’re to seek the neighbor’s shalom.

This takes us to our second question, the question what work the “as yourself” part is doing in the command.

Note in this connection just how demanding Leviticus 19’s commands are. Leaving one’s fields partially unharvested in times of scarcity; never stealing or lying; always paying one’s laborer’s promptly; never bending the rules of the legal system; never hating one’s neighbor in one’s heart; never taking vengeance or bearing grudges against the neighbor: living in this way would, no doubt, have been difficult. Serious obedience to these commands would have required putting a high value on the neighbor’s well-being.

Here, I propose, lies the force of the command’s “as yourself” clause. For that is how we pursue our own shalom: with serious resolve and intensity; we put a high value on it.

Leviticus is urging us, I think, to put that same value on pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom, to put pursuit of her shalom on a par with pursuit of one’s own.

So we have this picture forming: The command to neighbor love, as it first occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, is concerned with the things that make for shalom. The command is to pursue the good of the neighbor, where the good in question is shalom, and we are to put pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom on a par with pursuit of our own.

Who is my neighbor?

Finally, there is the question: Who, from the point of view of the love command, is my neighbor?

Jesus famously takes this question up in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke, chapter 10:

“On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”  In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” —(Luke 10:25–37)

The lawyer’s question, then: who is my neighbor? Who is the neighbor I am enjoined by the love command to love? Jesus’s answer: do what the Samaritan did. It didn’t matter for the Samaritan that the robbed man was a member of a hated, rival ethnic group who had ostracized and oppressed his people. It didn’t matter that he was ritually unclean because covered with blood (which is why the priest and Levite passed him by). He was a human being in need and in reach of the Samaritan man’s love, so the Samaritan helped him. Do what he did, says Jesus. Love anyone in need and in reach of your love.

That’s your neighbor.

Jesus is radicalizing the love command here. For the average first century Jew, the neighbor whom the love command bids me to love is a fellow Jew, or maybe just those in my clan or village. Jesus here blows open the category of neighbor to include anyone in need and in reach of my love: even members of hated, enemy ethnic groups, even those deemed unclean by my culture’s purity code.

In some Gospel passages we’ll discuss later, he further blows it open to include even my enemies: even those who attack my country, occupy it with a hostile military force, burn my cities, crucify my countrymen, and drive my family and I into poverty and degradation by oppressive taxation: these, even these, are my neighbor. These, even these, are to be the object of my love. But more on that in my next article.

Summarizing

Pulling it all together, then, we have this read of the love command: Seek the shalom of the neighbor (anyone in need and in reach of one’s love), putting pursuit of her inclusion in shalom community on a par with pursuit of one’s own.

Such is the fundamental principle of the shalom of the inbreaking Rule of God; such is the basic moral fabric of the Rule of God. When we are living under the Rule of God, drinking in its inbreaking shalom, we will be living in the love command, living in love.

Application of the love command to question whether Roman or rigorist view of wealth

Return, then, to our question: which comes closest to Jesus’s view of wealth: the Roman view, on which the poor have no right to my surplus wealth (wealth above and beyond what is necessary and useful for life and work), though I might choose to direct charity toward them (morally good but nonobligatory help), or the rigorist view of the early Church fathers, on which the poor have a right to my excess, all of it—on which giving away one’s surplus is not a matter of charity but a matter of justice: it’s what those in need have a right to?

The Love Command suggests an answer: Suppose I know of someone in dire need, someone at risk of suffering or death from lack of food, shelter, or medical care. I can do something to alleviate her plight, but I don’t, because I’m committed instead to the project of living like the rich man in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, “dressing in purple and fine linen, joyously living in splendor every day.” Then I am not loving this neighbor as myself: I am not putting pursuit of his inclusion in shalom community on a par with pursuit of my own.

The love command is demanding! I am to put pursuit of the neighbor’s shalom on a par with pursuit of my own. So long as I know of neighbors in reach of my love but without the enough of shalom—enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc., and I have the means to help them without thereby sacrificing my inclusion in the shalom community, the love command enjoins me to help. Else I am not putting the needy neighbor’s shalom on a par with my own; I am not loving him as I love myself.

Should I give to a point at which I am sacrificing my inclusion in the shalom community —at which, for example, I or those in my household don't have enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc. (the Scriptures recognize special obligations to family and one’s close community)—I will have gone too far; at any rate, I will have gone beyond what the love command requires. (I will, in effect, have put pursuit of neighbor shalom above pursuit of my own rather than on a par with pursuit of my own, which is more than is required by the love command.) But putting pursuit of neighbor shalom on a par with pursuit of my shalom does require a level generosity and sacrifice up to and including the point at which, were I to continue sacrificing, I would be putting the shalom of me and mine at risk—we’d be threatened with not having enough food, clothing, shelter, safety, etc.

The love command is demanding!

If so, if all this is right, then the love command suggests the rigorist, not the Roman, view of wealth. Divesting oneself of surplus wealth in care of the poor is not a matter of charity; it is not a matter of what is good but not morally required. It’s a debt of love owed to those who suffer. To withhold it is to wrong them. Divesting oneself of surplus in care of those in need and in reach of my love is not a matter of charity; it’s a matter of justice.

And this explains, I think, why Jesus said these sorts of things to his followers:

“So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.” - Luke 14:33

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. … ”No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." - Matt 6:19–24

"Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the

heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” - Luke 12:32–34

“How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” - Luke 18:24–25

And why immediately after Jesus’s resurrection, his disciples were living as described in Acts, chapter 4:

“And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them. And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all. For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds of the sales and lay them at the apostles’ feet, and they would be distributed to each as any had need.” -Acts 4:32ff

Jesus thought of the love command as the heart of the law and the prophets, and the heart of the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God. To appropriate that inbreaking shalom, experience its blessings, and minister them to others, one must live in love.

And that, he thought, means living in radical simplicity and generosity: divesting oneself of surplus wealth, not storing up extra whilst others are hungry, but giving it away in care of the suffering, to whom it belongs by right anyway—to whom it belongs, as a matter of justice.

In my previous article, I suggested that a central practice enjoined by Jesus on his followers for appropriating the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God and ministering its blessings to others was familial community with other Jesus followers. Now we’ve another: radical simplicity and generosity.

To lay hold of the inbreaking shalom of the Rule of God and minister its blessings of forgiveness, peace, justice, healing, joy, and God’s tender presence to a hurting world us, we must live in loving, familial community with other Jesus followers, and together we must live in radical simplicity and generosity, divesting ourselves of surplus wealth, so that, as Acts 4 puts it, there is no needy person among us.

In closing

As with yesterday’s talk, let me close by imagining with you what this might look like in practice. Imagine with me, then, that you eat together weekly with a group of twenty or so brothers and sisters in the way of Jesus: twenty or so men, women, and children living in the teachings and practices of Jesus. It’s a group of all ages, old and young, a group of differing economic backgrounds—some come from the ranks of the rich, others from the ranks of the poor—and a group of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, black, white, and brown, men, women, and children living in the teachings and practices of Jesus.

You live near enough to one another that you see each other frequently throughout the week. There is time to talk deeply with each other, to play hard together, laugh hard together. You worship and pray together often, studying the scriptures and great writings of the church together. Your children participate in all of this, and are known well by all the adults in the group.

You practice simplicity together: Not every family needs to own a car, so your community bought a couple cars to share among households. Not every family needs its own set of tools, so you share tools: one centrally-located family keeps the community tools in its garage. Not every household needs a washing machine, so you wash your clothes together at the two or so homes in the neighborhood with washing machines. Not all food needs to be bought, so you share produce from several gardens in your backyards. You forego lavish vacations, camping together regularly instead. You forgo buying new things when quality used things will do. You forgo fancy new clothes when quality used clothes will do.

These and other practices of simplicity free up quite a bit of money in the community, which you pool together to care for the vulnerable: You run a regular grocery ministry at a local motel, where a number of food-insecure families live, families in the ranks of the working poor who work but are unable to save enough for the first- and last-month’s rent required to rent an apartment. Your community shows up there the last week of each month, the time each month their food stamps tend to run out, with a truckload of groceries.

Several folks you’ve met at this motel have moved out of the motel and into spare rooms in several of your homes—“Christ” rooms, as the early church called them, rooms where the poor are received as Christ. They’ll live here until whatever was causing their homelessness is resolved. It might be years. In the meantime, they’ll participate in the warp and woof of your community life, be enfolded into your faith family, and minister to you by helping you to see what real and daily dependence on God, for everything, looks like.

A few business-minded folks in your community have started small businesses to employ those in transition from prison and homelessness. They run a Christmas tree lot, a T-shirt company, and a small restaurant, all of whose employees are either ex-prisoners or ex-homeless, transitioning back into mainstream society. Most of these folks are regulars at your weekly community meal. They do great good in your lives, showing you how to depend on God for everything, every breath, how not worry about the unimportant things in life, how not to get caught up in the very un-Kingdom-like quest for worldly status and power.

Quite a bit of your money goes overseas to the desperately poor, those living on just a few dollars per day, where you send thousands of dollars each year to micro-lending organizations who lend the money at low interest, mostly to poor women, who then use it start businesses to support their families.

The spirit is palpable in your midst: there is a powerful love and a powerful sense of God’s presence that pervades your common meals, your celebrations, and your common work, that can only be attributed to the spirit of God in your midst. Your experiments in caring for the broken of the world come to you as a kind of adventure, and have been, for the most part, deeply fun.

This picture, I want to suggest, is in the vicinity of what Jesus envisioned when he spoke of the inbreaking shalom of the rule of God and urged his followers to enter into it, to lay hold of it, by practicing familial community, not storing up earthly treasures, but giving them away in love, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless.

It’s a main way of drawing near to God, moving into ever-increasing, intimate experience of his sweet and tender presence.

And it’s for us today. It’s doable today. It’s being done by Jesus communities around the world. I’ve tasted it in part, and can report that it’s good, deeply good. I want more.

Next, we’ll further develop the picture by thinking some together about Jesus’s invitation to extend the love of the love command to even our enemies.

-Thomas Crisp

Billy Graham on Social Injustice

"As long as there is one man who should be free, as long as slums and ghettos exist, as long as any person goes to bed hungry at night, as long as the color of a man's skin is his prison, there must be a divine discontent. We Christians have no right to be content until the principles of Christ are applied to all men." - Billy Graham

JIM WALLIS: The American Bible

At an Evangelical Seminary in 1970, a man named Jim Wallis met in his dorm room with eight other new students and made a startling discovery. Although they all had been raised in mainline Evangelical Christian churches, not one of them could remember a single sermon about taking care of the poor.

“One of my colleagues decided to try an experiment,” Wallis remembered. “He took an old Bible and a pair of scissors and began to cut, literally, every single reference to the poor. So, when my friend was done, this old Bible was in pieces. It was literally falling apart in my hand.” Soon after this, Wallis started publishing a magazine called Sojourners to specifically address the biblical mandate of Christians to serve the poor and help the oppressed.

“If the Bible is the word of God, if Jesus is Lord, what does that mean? We need to remember the biblical tradition that we give lip service to, but don’t often pay attention to. That first year of seminary where we made a study of everything the Bible said about poor people, wealth, poverty, injustice and oppression, we found several thousand verses on the subject. It is the second most common theme in the Old Testament. The first being Idolatry, and the two are often connected. In the New Testament, one of every sixteen verses is about this subject. In the first three synoptic Gospels, it’s one of every ten verses. In Luke’s Gospel, one of every seven verses is about the poor,” Wallis stated.

Wallis continued, “I still have that Bible, by the way. I take it out to preach with me and I hold it high above my head and I say, ‘Brothers and Sisters, this is our American Bible. It’s full of holes from all we’ve taken out, ignored, and paid no attention to. We each, might as well, get out a pair of scissors and begin to cut.’” Thirty years later, Wallis is still raising the question of poverty in the Church.

“Whatever else the Gospel may be, it may clean up your marriage, it may solve your drinking problem, it may do all kinds of other wonderful things, but if it isn’t good news to poor people, it’s not yet the Gospel.”

Jim Wallis was raised in an evangelical Brethren church in Detroit. In the early ’60s, at the age of 14, Wallis began to notice that the way he lived in “white” Detroit was drastically different from the way people lived in “black” Detroit. “I asked questions of my little church like, ‘How come there are people missing meals, going hungry, without jobs right here in Detroit?’” The answers Wallis got from asking those questions sent him spiraling away from the church and into a pursuit of social justice outside of the Church. “The answers I got were ‘When you get older you’ll understand’ or ‘We don’t know why it’s that way, it’s just always been that way’ or, as one honest elder informed me, ‘If you keep asking these questions, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble’, and that proved to be true.”

Wallis soon found himself repulsed by the attitudes of those in his church and felt drawn to the people around him in need. He spent time walking around downtown Detroit and exploring a world he never knew existed. A world of poverty and struggle was just beyond his world of comfort and plenty. “I took jobs in the city at old factory assembly lines or janitorial jobs and all my money was being saved for college and all the young guys I’m meeting, their money is going to help their family survive. I met a lot of young guys my age who were just like me except they were black in Detroit, and I was white,” he said.

After making connections with people around him who needed the help of the church, Wallis returned to his church hoping they would share his excitement for this new opportunity to be salt and light. Instead he found a great opposition that was worse than he ever expected. “I was told one day by another elder that ‘Christianity has nothing to do with racism, that’s political and faith is personal.’ At that point, these questions were tugging so hard at my heart as a teenage kid, I decided that if Christianity had nothing to do with these questions then I wanted nothing to do with Christianity. My church agreed with that sentiment; they wanted nothing more to do with me either.”

Wallis found a new home in the civil rights and anti-war movement of his generation. For years he did a lot of work organizing protests at Michigan State that numbered over 2000 people. “I was into some heavy movement organizing and politics, but that still didn’t answer all my questions about why these things were still happening, and what the foundations were for all these things,” shared Wallis.

“I was reading, in those days, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh and Che Guervara and all that kind of stuff, but I didn’t find the answers there either. Then, I went back to the New Testament. During all that time, I don’t think I ever got quite shed of Jesus, even though I’d left the church. Looking back now, I’d say that Jesus stayed with me through that whole time. I was pretty angry at the Church, I felt betrayed by the Church, and a lot of young people feel that way. Not only was the Church not doing anything about these issues (of poverty) it was on the wrong side of these issues,” he said.

“I had some deep questions. I would’ve liked some Christians to try to figure out how to help. We were kids. We were young students who made a lot of mistakes, (and we) weren’t getting any help from conservative churches, or moderates or liberals.”

Wallis finally decided to take one last look at Jesus for himself and went back to the New Testament. After years of being chased by police and tear-gassed at rallies, he read the Sermon On The Mount and discovered a Jesus he had never met before. “I’d never heard a sermon on this in my entire life growing up. In my church, this was for the Kingdom dispensation, it wasn’t for now. It was for when we all get to heaven. But, I mean, ‘Blessed are the peace makers,’ what’s the point of that if you’re already in heaven? (This was) the cathetical Scripture for all new converts in the early church. It was the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the new order in Jesus Christ. This was it. This was the way of life.”

Reading the words of Jesus as an adult, Wallis found his view of Christ, and Christianity itself, transformed. “I was mesmerized by it. This was the most radical thing I’d ever read. More radical than Ho Chi Minh and Marx put together because this was going to change everything. It was meant to change the personal, the social, the economic and the political. It turned the world upside down. It turned the values on their heads. This was a whole new order of things. This was a revolution if there ever was one.”

Wallis read until he got to Matthew chapter 25 and began to understand that he and Jesus had a lot in common when it came to taking care of the poor. “My conversion text was this chapter of Matthew. Here is the Son of God standing in Judgement over all of those who think they belong to Him. Both sides name His name. He’s saying, I’ll know how much you love me by how you treat the poor. I had never seen anything as radical as that. This is the God of the universe saying that in some very special, particular way, you’ll find me dwelling ‘in the distressing disguise of the poor’ as Mother Theresa puts it. I was just blown away by that,” admitted Wallis.

“The people who had raised me were just like those who said, ‘We didn’t know it was you Lord’. I realized that they had been keeping Jesus at arms length all those years, while sincerely thinking that they were following Him. So, I hearkened back to that little talk with the elder who told me that ‘Christianity has nothing to do with racism’ and I realized at that moment, God is always personal but never private. That has been a personal theme for me ever since. If we don’t have a personal God, we don’t have any faith. I don’t want just a social teaching of Jesus, I don’t want a Liberal agenda for politics, I don’t want just a philosophy or wisdom to follow. If I don’t have a personal God, I don’t have any faith that means anything. God is always personal, but never, ever, private. When we privatize God and the Gospel and our faith, the truth is we’re committing a heresy.”

Wallis is adamant that the Church needs to do more than give money to their favorite charity when it comes to following the teachings of Jesus in regards to the poor. “It’s not enough to write a check and throw money at your favorite faith-based organization, it’s also not enough to roll up your sleeves and get on the ground and work directly with and alongside the poor. You can’t keep pulling bodies out of the river, and not send someone upstream to find out who’s throwing them in. For the last thirty years I’ve been banging the drum and brother Campolo’s been banging the drum, and Ron Sider, and John Perkins, and a whole generation that’s not so young anymore has been banging the drum, and we began talking about an Evangelical social conscience, and now I see a whole new generation of Evangelicals who are ready to apply that for a 21st century world,” he said.

Having spent the better half of his life on a crusade to awaken the Church to the needs of the poor around us, Wallis sees light at the end of the tunnel. “The audiences are larger and younger and more energetic than ever before. I think we have made enormous gains in the churches. I know younger people today can feel some of the frustration that I felt thirty years ago. But, back then we had no elders, no mentors, we had almost no one to teach us. We had to create our own communities, our own magazine, our own everything. I made a commitment a long time ago, that when the hearts of Christian young people turn in the direction of Justice, that they would have support. I want them to have mentors and somewhere to go for answers. I want them to have a movement to join and not one to begin,” vowed Wallis.

To find out more about Jim Wallis and Sojourners Magazine, go to http://www.sojo.net/

Taken from the book, [Subversive Interviews] by Keith Giles, available
HERE

OUR POOR

Poverty in our country may not be as severe as what we see in Africa or India or Mexico, but that does not mean that it is any less poverty.

For example, if you were to give air conditioning or color television to one of those families living in a cardboard box in the Sudan, would they cease being poor? Of course not. And families in America with color tvs and air conditioning are no less poor because of their level of comfort. They are still poor. And they are "Our Poor".

I belive that there is a Biblical difference between how we are called to serve the poor in other countries and "our poor". The poor in India, Mexico, Ethiopa, etc. are seriously, desperately poor. No one argues that. This is why I've served on the board for groups like Arms of Love (www.armsoflove.org), a ministry that builds orphanages in the poorest nations of the world to provide homes for street children who live in the city dumps and are forced into prostitution, etc.

So, please, let's be clear; I'm not saying don't help the poor who are "out there".

But the poor in your city, in my city, down the street from me, they are "our poor", and what we're called to do, Biblically, is something about it. Not to solve poverty. Not to cure it. Not to erase poverty forever, but to do what we can to help a few, in the name of Jesus and with the compassion of Jesus.

Actually, as I've said before, the point of serving the poor is not to "cure" or "solve" poverty, but to befriend people who are in need and to learn to love and serve them as we would serve and love Jesus. We are the one's who are most changed in that relationship, by the way.

The quote from Jesus in Matthew about "the poor you will always have with you" was Jesus referencing Deuteronomy 15:7-11. You should seriously read this passage. The point is that God, the Father, is commanding the Jews to not have a hard-heart or a closed fist towards the poor, the stranger, etc., but to give generously, freely to the poor among them. At the end of the passage, God say, "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land."

That's what Jesus means when he says what he does in Matthew.

Read Matthew 25. At the Judgment Seat of Christ the one criteria is whether or not those who call him "Lord" had any regard for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the prisoner. The Sheep almost unconsciously care for these poor, not because they think it will get them into Heaven, but simply because they have genuinely been transformed into the people of God. The Goats, who also call Him "Lord", have the same unconscious attitude, but towards the existence of the poor or their needs.

The people of God, redeemed by the Blood, saved by Grace, seem to have an inability to walk past someone who is naked, poor, hungry, thirsty, lonely, etc. and do nothing. They cannot do that. It's not in their new nature.

We have a Biblical mandate (and it's alllll over the Scripture, both Old and New) to care for the poor..."our poor"...and that takes more than writing a check.

Again, this is my very biased conviction. I've been hammered by God on this issue and I cannot let it go because it won't let me go.

Do you know what the sin of Sodom is? Read Ezekiel 16: 49. It's not what you think. "Now this is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were proud and did detestable things before me. Therefore, I did away with them as you have seen."

Wow.

How about this one?

Galatians 2:10- "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do." (Paul being sent out as the first missionary by Peter, James and John).

or...

{God is speaking of King Josiah:}
"He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?" (Jeremiah 22:16)

Wow.

"Is that not what it means to know me?"

What does it mean to "Know" God? This verse suggests that it means to care for the poor and the needy.

and of course we could also look at, Isaiah 58:6-7, Amos 5:21-24, 1 John 3:17-18, James 2:14-17, etc., etc.

God has called us to care for the poor, not to justify their poverty or our lack of compassion by comparing them to the "real poor" in third world countries.

So..how are we doing with serving and loving and befriending "Our Poor"?

-Keith Giles