Uneasy with the Times

By Neal Windham

When I grow weary with the poverty that surrounds us, I remember one fact about the One whose birth we celebrate: When Jesus came to earth, he chose to be poor.

Defining moments often arrive without warning. Back in my college days, somewhere around 1977, I was returning from work during a pelting thunderstorm when I came across a man who was wandering around in a ditch near the road. He had no raincoat or umbrella, and his hat and clothes were drenched, head to toe. I pulled over, invited him into the car, and asked what I could do for him. Nothing could have prepared me for his reply: “Just take me to the police and let them kill me.”

There followed a long, awkward pause.

Finally, I responded, “Wouldn”t you rather get something to eat?”Â 

And he shot back, “Yeah!”Â 

So I took him to Bob”s Roast Beef, a favorite local fast-food spot, where he downed a large pork tenderloin in two minutes flat. I ordered another. He inhaled it. Low on funds, I decided to forgo a third, but I honestly believe he would gladly have eaten more.

As we left the restaurant that evening, it soon became clear to me this man had no place to go. He didn”t seem local. In fact, I later discovered he was on his way south to Mississippi, where some of his relatives lived. When, after more conversation, I felt relatively safe with him, I went back to the dorm and asked permission to house him in my room that night. 

The dorm dad reluctantly granted my request, the man showered, and the guys in my dorm found warm, dry clothes for him. It was not easy. He stood about six foot six and weighed a good 250 pounds. No one in my dorm was that tall. (I am surprised to this day news of this fellow never got back to the basketball coach!) When he had dressed, he looked a bit like the Frankenstein monster, with coat sleeves halfway up his forearms and capri-length pants.

I hardly slept a wink that night, but I think he did. Early the next morning, after breakfast, I drove him back to the highway so he could resume his trip down south. I gave him a little money, wished him well, and returned to the college.

I”m sure there are laws today prohibiting some of the actions I took back in those days, and for good reason. Who”s to fault fearful parents and students when one in four women and one in 10 men are victims of sexual assault on U.S. college and university campuses? And, having now raised two children of my own, I am the first to admit it was a really risky thing to bring him back to the dorm, not just for me, but for all of us. 

At the time, it never occurred to me to check on a motel room or a bus ticket or a homeless shelter. I had no experience with this kind of thing, and I certainly didn”t have a budget for it.

During the entire episode, I kept thinking about the words of Matthew 25:35, 36, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me.” This man fit pretty much every one of these conditions. His was very obvious need.

 

“˜Good News”

After his baptism and a 40-day stretch of temptation-loaded fasting in the wilderness, Jesus went home to Nazareth. And, almost as if he were preaching his own ordination, our Lord stood up to read the words of Isaiah 61 in the synagogue that day. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,” he read, “because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). And that is precisely what he did throughout his brief ministry. 

Of course, we”re not talking here about people who couldn”t afford cable television or Internet service. We”re talking about people who didn”t know whether they had anything to eat for supper. D.C. Innes remarks, “The biblical poor are those in terrible need. They are essentially helpless, often the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner””people without defenders and without the means to defend themselves and to provide for their most basic needs.”1

There were plenty of poor people in Jesus” day. For centuries Israel had been dominated by foreigners””Assyria, Babylon, the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, and now Rome””as successive waves of maddening alien overlords made their way, first into the north, and then into the south. These invaders pretty much gutted the wealth of the average Jew over time, and then, about the time Jesus was born, Herod the Great came along with his massive building campaigns and expensive public works. 

Craig Blomberg concludes, “The average Jew in the early first century labored under a tax burden that ranged from roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of his total income” and “70 percent or so would . . . be considered poor by any contemporary standard.”2 Little wonder Jesus taught his disciples to pray for daily bread (Matthew 6:11), and, after the feeding of the 5,000, instructed them, “Let nothing be wasted” (John 6:12).

 

“˜Always with You”

Like death and taxes, poverty seems inescapable. “You will always have the poor among you,” Jesus once said (John 12:8). We don”t like to think about it, but any one of us might one day be staring poverty right in the face: 

A man evicted from his apartment because he couldn”t keep up with the rent. 

A woman with six children whose husband is sent to prison, and she and the kids have no place to go. 

A widow whose Social Security checks simply aren”t enough to pay her medical bills (not to mention rent, groceries, and utilities), even though most of them are covered by Medicare. 

And then there are AIDS orphans and refugees in developing nations who have nothing to their name and no access to clean water and basic nutrition.

I confess at times I grow weary thinking about it. Seemingly endless cycles of poverty affect everything from employment to transportation to housing to emotional needs, mental and physical health, and spiritual longing. 

The causes of poverty range from a lack of education to a poor job market to low wages to dysfunctional family structures to addictions, and these are but a few. Basic human dignity evaporates in such circumstances, and people often give up. 

At the other end of the spectrum, there is greed, which hoards money and could care less about the poor. There is nothing about greed even remotely attentive to human need, yet we see greed, in one form or another, just about everywhere we look.

Even my prayers for the poor at times seem empty. Is there no end to this misery, Father? What more can we do? Neither religion, politics, nor ethics has solved it. If anything, endless paralyzing debates about the right course of action may have stymied any real, lasting fruit. 

So often we seem to prefer rhetoric over action. It”s hard not to slip into despair over the needs of people who are under-resourced, and many have.

But despair will do nothing to solve the problem.

 

“No Place”

Of the great teachings and traditions within the Judeo-Christian heritage””holiness movements, Word-based revival meetings, the Reformation focus on justification by faith, and many others””there is one sacred truth which, perhaps more than any other, speaks life and hope into our poverty. I speak, of course, of incarnation, of God in flesh. Jesus entered this world in an utterly humiliating manner and later chose a life of voluntary poverty. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” he said, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). In this way, he clearly identified with the very poor to whom he had come “to preach good news,” as Isaiah had prophesied. He even said that the poor are somehow “blessed,” for theirs is “the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).

In the midst of all of our stress and concern to alleviate poverty, a concern and cause entirely justified, perhaps we”ve missed one critical point. Like Jesus, some people actually choose poverty. 

Remember Francis of Assisi, who sold his father”s expensive cloth””and horse!””in a neighboring town in order to raise funds to rebuild the church, and later shed his own clothes in order to demonstrate that he really didn”t own a thing? I wonder what Francis, known to have kissed a leper, might be able to teach us about caring for the poor.

Years ago, I was privileged to teach a very special group of high school juniors and seniors who listened intently, asked great questions, were quite uneasy with the times, and, in the long run, have taught me far more about what it means to love God and neighbor than I could ever have hoped to teach them. 

Today, two of them, each extraordinarily gifted, have chosen to live and work among people who are destitute. They are raising families right in the midst of profound human need. They regularly visit the Dumpsters in the evening when restaurants are closing in order to find something to share with their neighbors. 

They are so smart and funny and could be making so much money, but they, like Jesus, have made themselves nothing by taking on the very nature of a servant (Philippians 2:7). Their families work jobs just like the rest of us, but long ago learned not to grasp for themselves that which they could share with others.

I wonder how we can choose to be like them, to be like Jesus, this Christmas, and, for that matter, every other day of our lives.

________

 

1Lisa Sharon Harper and D.C. Innes, Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Boise: Elevate: Faith, 2011).

2Craig L. Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches: a Biblical Theology of Possessions (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999).

 

Neal Windham serves as professor of spiritual formation and ministry at Lincoln (Illinois) Christian University.