A Biblical Response to Multidimensional Poverty

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Transcription:

Good afternoon, it’s such a blessing to be here and I think the thing that that gives me so much energy, right now in in addressing you is I feel like I’m talking to a group of people who are on the edge of their seat they really want to know what does the Bible say, our responsibility is, in the area of poverty. And I feel like I’m at a disadvantage having spent the last ten years of my life working in Haiti. It’s a unique disadvantage because it’s easy to become hardened. You would think it would develop compassion. But it’s easy to become just kind of dull and almost hardened to the bone-jarring poverty, that we live with. But also recognize that maybe some of you are at a different kind of disadvantage and so we’re just going to lean into those disadvantages together. I don’t presume to give any kind of final word on this topic.

The thing that’s unbelievable, it’s fascinating to me, like, we’re 6,000 years into history human, human history and we’re still wrestling with the question of poverty and how do we respond to it.

Poverty. It’s a word we don’t like to hear unless we make our living by it. I don’t think any of us really like to hear the word poverty any more than we like to hear the word cancer or any of the other forms of human suffering. It’s a form of human suffering. We don’t know what to do with it. And so, it’s just easier if we don’t have to. It’s not something we like to think about or see and often don’t have to unless it won’t leave us alone, like Ashley and Sue from last night. Sometimes it just won’t leave you alone it gets your phone number and won’t stop calling and you give it somebody else’s phone number and then it calls you back, and we and we have to face it.

We don’t like to think seriously about it, poverty is something most of us will never think seriously about unless we’re surrounded by it. Surrounded by bone-jarring, mind-blowing, relentless poverty for months and, and even years, and then you have to think about it. Like, all the pat answers, all the simple solutions, you’ve tried everything, and now it’s time to like, now we have to think seriously about this topic.

Poverty is a terrible thing. Poverty is a horrible thing. Poverty is something that happens to you. I’m speaking of the kind of poverty that I plan to focus on in this short time. The kind of poverty that I’m thinking of, and plan to talk about, is something that happens to you, it’s more than just a series of bad decisions, financial decisions, and here you are, you’re in debt. Like poverty is something different than even just being in an amazing amount of debt. Poverty is terrible and I hope you can feel that in some way through the course of this conversation.

Poverty that we see here—and I had the privilege yesterday of driving by the slums of Mount Etna. Does anybody know where the slums of Mount Etna is? Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It’s, it would easily fit inside this this room here. Lebanon County is a unique economic bubble, but anyway, poverty that we see here occasionally, and I’m sort of touching on the disadvantages that both of us have some if you if you’re from Lebanon County, I feel like you’re at a unique disadvantage, just like I’m at a unique disadvantage. It’s that kind of poverty that we deal with in our rural communities, it’s usually the result of an addiction of some kind or homelessness such as they deal with in Hagerstown, Maryland. The next of kin to poverty. Sometimes a result of mental illness and, and we’re not going to explore all of those, it’s not our goal. We hope to do um is just talk about what is the Christian community’s response to poverty?

And I know several of you are like, keyed in on that multi-dimensional word like, wow okay this is going to be fun, it’s going to be exciting, we’re talk about multi-dimensional poverty and I hope you’re not disappointed we do hope to talk about it some, but the kind of terrible poverty that I’m talking about is, is a little bit different. Like I felt like I needed to set the boundaries of what do we even mean by poverty before we can get into the nuances of multi-dimensional poverty and then there won’t be time for that.

So, is there a solution to Poverty?

I think that’s what we would all like to know, is there a solution like just give us the solution to poverty we can all go home and it would be wonderful. Why are we still wrestling with this issue after 6,000 years of human history? Isn’t that strange? We’ve been working on this for 6,000 years and here it is a topic at Kingdom Fellowship Weekend. Will it ever be resolved? Just like many other forms of human suffering will poverty ever be resolved? Is it something that can be eliminated? Can poverty be eliminated or is it merely a matter of alleviation? We talk about poverty alleviation. I don’t know that anybody is coming out with a poverty elimination plan or program.

Another question as we think about this topic: Is this just something, is the answer heaven? And I hope you can grasp what I mean by that question: is the answer to poverty, heaven? In some sense ignoring temporal social issues with an escapist attitude. I think some of our theology really kind of plays into an escapist; like, well, you know, we just kind of get by here and we sort of do the best we can but really, it’s just all about the next life. And I think here at Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, we’re looking for something different. We’re looking for: how does “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”?

So let’s talk about it. I hope to talk about the problem, the people, the precedent and the price, poverty. What is poverty? That seems like a good place to start, what is poverty? so what, what I’m not just, what I’m not talking about and I already tried to lay a little bit of a foundation for that; I’m talking about the terrible miserable poverty that people get trapped in. Generations are trapped in. I’m not talking about voluntary poverty, that’s a different topic. If you’re wealthy enough to experiment with voluntary poverty, you probably don’t know what poverty is.

I read an article as I was preparing for this called—the title was “Poverty as Violence,” and it’s seen from the inside, poverty is like a prison or slavery or some other form of repression. I want you to get a sense of the kind of terrible poverty we’re talking about. Not just like a financial difficulty, but I’m talking about poverty that feels like prison or repression or slavery. We’re not talking about some vague poverty imagined out there in developing countries, we’re talking about real poverty. What is poverty? I can’t remember—maybe it was Dwight that just mentioned this—poverty is the practical test of every economic system. Poverty, even in our scriptures, poverty becomes the test of our economics. What will we do with the least of these? True religion, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” Poverty in the bottom is the test of every economic system. What do we mean by economics? Let’s define that quickly because this is going to be essentially an economics course, Economics 301, I think.

Economics is a form of social behaviour. But I don’t want you to be confused by that. When we talk about economics we’re just talking about how people behave. It’s the system for producing and distributing wealth, literally housekeeping. So, so as we think about an economic system and we all have that we have a culture of economic affluence, that kind of dictates how we behave, and how we think about people, as they walk in, and the way they dress, like we’re we’re not doing it intentionally. But we kind of put people, we rank them. And the test of our economic system is how we treat the least of these. So, we’re just establishing what is poverty. It’s a practical test. There’s lots of ways that poverty gets measured. Most of those ways, statistics that you might look up online, they’re fascinating, but they’re tremendously impersonal, and that’s the part of poverty that we want to sort of take away, like take away the impersonal part of poverty. For example, global multi-dimensional poverty indicator has identified over a billion people as living in poverty, how many of those do you know personally? Um, there’s a lot of danger in statistics because they’re malleable and we won’t get into that, but so, of high importance is the fact, I think—I forget who I was talking to, one of you—who did a study on the causes of poverty and that’s, that’s a really important study because how we define poverty determines our solution, or our response. How we define poverty determines our response. It’s a given. So there’s all kinds of ways of defining it we, we’ve probably heard people talk about critical poverty and chronic poverty. You may have seen charts where they talk about the cause of poverty and our response to poverty. You may have heard poverty referred to as a mindset. It certainly is that, and then here we get into multi-dimensional poverty, where I’m just going to define it quickly, as we’re trying to get our bearings here on this this topic.

Multi-dimensional poverty and this is where I might ask you to put a couple things up on the screen. Multi-dimensional poverty is defined in a couple ways, so I’m just going to give you two of them and then it’d be great to have a breakout session sometime and explore them more deeply.

The MPI, the Multi-dimensional Poverty Indicator, goes beyond income and measures poverty using three dimensions: health, education and security. So, so we take poverty and we say; poverty expresses itself in different ways. It’s more than just not having enough money, but obviously if you had enough money then issues of health would not be a problem for you. You could deal with them because you had the money to deal with health problems. You would have the money to deal with education. And it’s kind of a bad cycle because without money you can’t get education, and without education you can’t get money.

But we would all agree that, that health is important, right? This is just one of the ways that we look at poverty and we look at, beyond just the income, like how much money do you make, but how are you able to deal with questions of health, education, and what is your standard of living? And it breaks out further, but here’s another one this is from Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s book, “When Helping Hurts.” And that’s where, I think we’re most familiar with multi-dimensional poverty from their book and I would just refer you to, that it’s a great read.

There’s four dimensions of poverty.

• There’s poverty of spiritual intimacy. It’s, it’s a broken relationship with God.

• Poverty of being. It’s a broken relationship with myself. I may think too highly of myself or I may think too low of myself. It’s a poverty of being, it’s a brokenness in my relationship to myself.

• The third one is poverty of community. It’s relationships one with another. A brokenness, inability to function with each other.

• Poverty of stewardship. That’s when we have no regard for the world around us, and the resources that God has given to us and made us responsible over.

So here’s a really important question I want you to consider.

Why are some people poor and others rich? Why are some people poor and others rich?

I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, the reason I think this is important, why are some people poor and others rich; there is a myth that because I am rich therefore someone else is poor. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, hopefully that can generate some conversation later.

Another question. And I want you to write this down in somewhere. I want you to write your response to this down wherever you can.

What is the opposite of poverty?

Poverty is a thing but what is the opposite of poverty? Because if we can’t define that, then we’re hopelessly lost in some kind of spiral of just pushing things around. And we can’t ever go beyond, to like okay so what are we headed for. What is the opposite of poverty?

What is it? what would you put up here if I said we’re going to just take things from the audience. Is it prosperity?

• Community?
• Sufficiency?
• Satisfaction?
• Stability?
• Security.
• Abundance?
• Salvation?
• Contentment?
• Wealth?

(audience interaction concludes)

Good. Good answers. The knowledge of the truth, thank you. Those are great answers and I think if we had time we could just spend the rest of our time just dealing with that and kind of grouping them in categories and, and push in exploring that, like what is the opposite of poverty?

I’m suggesting that it’s wholeness. I’m suggesting that the opposite of poverty is wholeness, regardless of what kind of brokenness you’re experiencing, the opposite of poverty is wholeness and it might look like contentment, it might look like the knowledge of the truth, it might look like community, it might look like whatever your area of brokenness is. But if we can’t define what we mean then we don’t know what we’re aiming for.

There’s another, I’m not sure how helpful this word is: shalom. I wish it was more helpful because it is a rich word but it just kind of goes over our heads. Shalom. And we spend 40 minutes defining it and it’s like well let’s find another word that everybody knows. And that’s why I’m going with wholeness. It might be empowerment.

So who are the poor?

The poor is a label that we use to put on other people. It’s a stigma. It’s a label, “the poor.” The poor.

And brother Dwight quoted the words of Jesus, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I can work with that, it’s the other one in Luke that’s even more challenging. In Luke it just says “blessed are ye poor”, without any qualifier. That, I think, is a little bit harder for us to deal with because we can work around all these blessed are the poor in spirit and we can talk about that and whatever, but to say that there’s a blessing, blessed are you poor, that’s a little bit harder for us to wrestle with.

Who are the poor?

How many of you know someone who is poor? I need to see your hand, quite a few of you know someone who is poor. Would it embarrass you to write their name down on the paper in front of you? You’re thinking of somebody, would it embarrass you to put their name down, like this person is poor? Would it embarrass you if they knew that you thought of them this way?

The person that you’re thinking of, like this person is poor, like when I think about poverty I think about so and so and if you put their name down and they happen to be sitting behind you or they walked by and they’re just like looked over and like oh they, what I’m, I’m poor?

It reminds me of that story of the family that ate potatoes for a month so that they save money to give to the poor family in the congregation. I’m sure you’ve all heard that story and they were shocked when the deacon showed up.

In the collection what they were given they knew 80% of it had been their own donation to the church. They didn’t know they were poor. Other people had decided that for them and given them that label. Do they see themselves as poor? This person you put down, do they see themselves as poor? How are they poor? In what way?

Are they poor like Donald who seemed to be doing pretty well, prospering, and then his favourite car was dented in the parking lot of his favourite restaurant. Amazon quit caring in his favourite candy and a tree fell on his favourite wing of the house all in the same day, poor Donald.

So, I’m sort of hesitant to ask this question, but I want to ask it anyway. Is there anybody here that’s poor? Is there anybody here that’s poor?

I see a hand in the back. Would you, would you stand up and set self-identify as like I am poor?

But what would you mean by that? Like do others know that you’re poor? Like, I’m just trying to get into the psychology of what it means and what it feels like. Do they know? What if they found out that you’re poor? Do you do you see yourself as poor? What does it feel like to be poor? What are some of the words that you hear people who are poor saying about themselves? What does it feel like to be poor?

Some of the words that I’ve heard are shame. Or powerless. Or invisible. What are some of the words that you’ve heard? Quickly.

• Discouraged.
• Hungry.
• How do the poor describe themselves? What does it feel like to be poor? Let’s hear it.
• Depressed.
• Victim.
• Left out.
• Proud.
• Dependent.
• Stuck.
• Powerless.
• Shame.
• Stuck.
• Hopefully we got some of those up there um.
• What does it feel like to be poor?

And I think this is a really important exercise because if you don’t know what it’s like, what it feels like to be poor, so just for example, I never had so much fun hunting down poor people because my experience they always hunted me down and lined up and waited for me to come out my office door and talk to them in Haiti. They lined up waiting for me and I never had so much fun hunting down poor people as I did last Saturday night in midtown Manhattan with a man named Greg. Why was that so fun to hunt them down? It was fun because Greg had been homeless for a year and he knew exactly what it was like to be that homeless person that we were hunting down, to give them a sandwich. He knew what it was like and so I felt safe there. I knew that I wasn’t going to be hurting them in the way that I talked to them. Greg knew how to talk to them because he knew what it was like, to be there and that made all the difference. It made all the difference in hunting down these poor people.

So, what would wholeness look like in the life of the person that you identified that, that you maybe did or did not write down in your notes? That person. What would wholeness look like?

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So, the next few minutes here we are going to rush through a historical, theological, biblical view of what has been done in the name of poverty, or as a response to poverty, in the word of God. So, we’re going to look at the Hebrew story and we’re going to look at the apostolic period. Really we should, should have a couple hours to do this but I, but what I hope to do is just like, whet your appetite, get you thinking, get you asking good questions so that good conversation can happen.

The Hebrew story, so the God’s word comes to us as a story, not a policy manual. It’s a story. It’s up to us, whose minds unfortunately are already full of the fads and philosophies of our generation, to renew our minds by understanding what things meant in their proper context and applying them faithfully and appropriately to our own. That’s the kind of exercise we’re going to engage in briefly. Is that not what the men of Issachar were known for? So the Hebrew story, was a social experiment. We’re looking at the story of the children of Israel with specific attention to the topic of poverty. The story has a plot. In the very beginning God has created people and a place to live, you’re familiar with the story. He seeks a community. If you’re going to write anything down, like this is the big picture. God seeks a community living in fellowship with himself and in harmony with the world around them. That’s God’s goal, that’s what he wants, so Kingdom whatever, gospel whatever, the goal, the thing that God wants, is he wants a community of people living in fellowship with himself and in harmony in the world around them; the problem is in every story there’s a plot, a conflict, there’s setting, and so forth. The plot I’ve just given you. The plot is God wants a community of people living in fellowship with himself and harmony with the world around them. The conflict is that the people continue to fail at the one thing God is looking for.

The setting, that we’re looking at now with the children of Israel, is God’s third attempt. This is, this is God’s third attempt to have a community of people living in fellowship with himself, in harmony with the world around them. We’re talking about the children of Israel coming out of Egypt and dwelling in the land of Canaan. It’s an agrarian society. That’s something that we probably should spend more time thinking about if we’re going to be honest in our exploring these concepts. It’s an agrarian society.

What is an agrarian society? It’s a society that makes all of its living in agriculture. There might be some side gigs, making pottery or crafts that support the ag industry, but the children of Israel as they settled in the land of Canaan was an agrarian society. Everything was based around farming. And it was before the agricultural revolution, it was before the industrial revolution, it was before the technological revolution, so there was a really kind of a ceiling to their economic possibilities.

So, we’re trying to get the setting, it’s a community of emancipated slaves. They have layers and layers of ideas and attitudes that they’ve learned in Egypt. What about the community? The community, who were the community? I’m not going to be able to develop all this, so I’m just going to move on. I will say this: how did the children of Israel model community? Who is us? When we’re talking about community we’re talking about who is us, when we say us, who is the us? In a  

Community, the way the children of Israel modelled community, and the way they were and existed as a community, is they were a kingdom of priests, the holy nation. We’re familiar with that. They have a common history. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? That’s what one of the things that defines a community, and one of the ways that the children of Israel defined a community, was that they had a common history; they had also individuality.

So anyway, one of the questions that I think is fascinating with regard to poverty is what about people who are in the community but not part of the community or outside of the community all together—what’s our obligation to them if they are living in poverty?

I hope to get back around to that, but if I don’t, I would love to have a conversation with you about it. What is the community’s responsibility to those outside of the community if there’s a question of poverty?

What are the essential elements of community? We’re going to have to move on, so I want to talk briefly about the economy of the children of Israel and where we get this is from the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy gives us an outline of what economics looks like, so what’s fascinating and exciting to me about the book of Deuteronomy in terms of economics and poverty, the question of poverty. Remember, I’m coming from a context where it was overwhelming, like you just kind of get glazed, and you’re like what are we doing here, like nothing’s working. What are we, I’m looking for solutions, I’m looking for something solid I can get a hold of because I’m drowning, in this whole question of poverty. And the book of Deuteronomy, it was kind of there for me at an important time, because it gives us some basic things. And I’m going to give them to you quickly, there’s five.

1. The economics that God prescribed for the children of Israel was based on law that’s number one. We could put it up, here number one. The economics of God for the children of Israel, it is based on law and I really should take the time to tell this story.

In one of our plain communities, there was a family that joined this group, this plain community from the outside. They weren’t raised Anabaptist. They were a large family, they moved into a community that had chosen to not use electricity or power equipment, they made their living growing vegetables and selling them in a roadside stand. The question had been decided in this community that the members would not use gas-powered pumps for water supply, not to have running water in their house, not to do any irrigation, just no powered pumps, no pumps for water. So for several years this family spent a good amount of their time during the growing season hauling water. Some for irrigation, some for operations and household use. Later they learned that other families in the same community who lived closer to the city water system were connected to it and benefiting from the running water. They had water pressure from the city water system. That wasn’t breaking the rules because they didn’t have a pump. When they came to the bishop with this question, which seemed like a glaring inconsistency, it was brushed off as inconsequential. That doesn’t make mountains out of mole hills, it’s not a big deal. They’re not using pumps, they’re not using electricity, it’s okay.

Well, it wasn’t okay, this disregard for justice and not having a law that applied equally to all constituents cost this family and that community dearly. And I don’t know if you can see what I’m trying to illustrate here with that story. Economics as God delivered it to us, is all about law. What is just? So our first item: biblical economy is based on law, what is just?

2. Secondly, it is based on property rights, and this might surprise you. I don’t have time to develop any of this but what is just with regard to assets?

The question that the Bible answers in the book of Deuteronomy, the biblical economics is based on property rights. You have the right to your property and this seems to be evidently a basic human right, guaranteed to us by the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not steal. Clearly, property rights are important.

3. Resources is the third one. So, every economy is dealing with natural resources. So, what does the bible teach us about that? How will resources be distributed justly?

That’s the question, how will resources be distributed justly. Remember I said if I’m rich therefore somebody else is poor, is that true? If I have more than somebody else is that unfair? How will resources be distributed justly?

And so we have things like land. We have land tenure. How long you can be on a piece of land. We have lease agreements in the Old Testament and how long those lease agreements, and a lot of rules about lease agreements and how land is going to get used. Why? Because it’s an agrarian society, and if somebody here had the capacity to eventually own all the land around here, it would put the rest of us in a bad spot, but God had made provision for that, so that land was distributed and it was redistributed occasionally.

There was a fiscal cycle, there there’s the question of human capital. there were labour laws, labour and leisure choice, there was a question of servitude and how long you could serve someone and how long and when that terminated and all these kinds of laws that were supposed to help protect how resources were used and distributed and made just. How will resources be distributed justly? All kinds of laws about trade and commerce. Weights and measures. There was regulation.

It’s exciting to read about money, investments, loans, debts, interest. All of this is there in the book of Deuteronomy, and it helps us answer the question how will resources be distributed justly.

4. Another thing that, that all economic systems have to deal with is liabilities. So in any community, in any society, there’s going to be liabilities. The three that I’m thinking of is war.

War is a tremendous liability to a nation. Poverty is another liability and it’s a liability in the Hebrew economic system that God, he anticipated it and he prescribed how to deal with it. Poverty.

One of the things that’s fascinating in the same book of Deuteronomy, the book of the law: “There will be no more poor” is one of the phrases. So, God had instituted certain laws about poverty and he says specifically, “There will be no more poor among you.”

So, God’s saying it’s possible to not have any poor among us. But there’s always going to be somebody at the bottom, like there’s always the youngest brother, right? There’s always the youngest child, so the question about whether there’s always somebody going to be the poorest. But if that poorest person’s standard of living is good, then we may not have what’s called poverty. I don’t know if that makes any sense or not.

Another liability that’s interesting to consider, that the Bible treats, is non-producing members of the community. Nobody’s going to stand up and say that would be me but the Bible says here, they’re orphans, they’re widows, they’re foreigners, and they’re Levites, or your ministry. Your paid Levites. Levites figured as non-producing members, they had specific rights under the law, supposed to help deal with them as a liability. How will liabilities be shared justly? That’s the question that we’re answering.

5. And fifth item last for the Hebrew economics is economic growth. So that’s like, we could spend a day on that one. How will justice prevail given, the differences of opportunity and capacity among individuals in the community? That’s probably where we live. How will justice prevail, given the differences of opportunity and capacity among individuals in a community?

And the way that the Hebrew economics had that set up was a periodic reset. Just kind of hit the reset button every seven years, and again every 50 years, and just kind of level that playing field out again. And it’s fascinating to think about how that would change your economic behaviour, if you knew that two years from now

everything’s going to get reset and that piece of land is going to go back to that other family, the Brubachers, are going to get that piece of land back and I won’t be able to do anything more with that, it’s over it goes back to the Brubachers and whatever improvements I made on it, I don’t get to enjoy that, just goes to them.

Praise God. There was a way of dealing with this and it, it’s the, the liability of non-producing members and it was basically a tithe. Tithing, the only real practical thing that we have other than a bunch of laws that we should think about is tithing. So the tithe, the thing that I want to say about tithing in this context quickly, is that it was relational. It wasn’t just a like a check in the mail, it wasn’t just, make sure that you give your donation to those people and they will see that the Levites get it. It was, “Save up your grain from the third year.” Save it up, put it in a special place, and then invite the Levites over to your house and have a meal together. It’s relational and I think that’s one of the missing pieces of a lot of our poverty interventions, is the relational aspect of it. It’s just something that like, let’s just write that check, praise God, and get it and then we don’t have to do, sit down and talk to them.

Economics has always been an ethics question. Addressing poverty is a justice issue. And apparently that code: I want to say this before we move on to the apostolic period, apparently that code of justice is universally understood because Jesus said in Matthew 25 that it is by that code of justice that he is going to judge the nations. Matthew 25, that part that we quote about doing this to the least of these. Who is there at that judgment? It’s the Nations, it’s the judgment of the Nations. So apparently the nations are all going to be gathered in, in front of King Jesus and he’s going to use the standard of the least of these to measure their practice of justice. And every nation will be judged based on that. And you’re either, you either get to go into the Millennium or you don’t. So I just gave away my eschatology.

Simple answer to poverty is to seek first the kingdom of God and his justice. Notice I said justice? That will bear scrutiny. Seek first the reign of God and His justice.

What does justice look like? At work, what does Justice look like when you’re making out that invoice? What does justice look like if you own a grocery store? We understand what justice looks like or fairness or generosity looks like when we have a garden and we give our produce to our neighbours. But what about when we give them an invoice? Does that challenge our views of the reign of God and of justice?

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In the apostolic period—so I hopefully gave you a snapshot of what Hebrew economics looked like. The apostolic period is not large, not greatly different in the context, like it was an agrarian economy and that’s interesting to explore and to dig into what that meant. But what about us today? There’s something about the kingdom of God and I think we recognize this, that it is a paradox. The kingdom of God is a paradox. The story is goes like this.

Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom of God and this kingdom of God is a fulfilment of God’s covenants with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with the children of Israel, and with David.

We can’t forget David. The kingdom of God is a fulfilment especially of God’s covenant with David. Does everybody know what God’s covenant with David is? Was? Should be? Good. We’ll have another session on that later.

The ultimate realization of this kingdom of God is yet future, that’s the paradox we’re talking about, like he has inaugurated it, people have already mentioned it here this weekend. It’s inaugurated but it’s not yet but it is yet future. Pilate said to Jesus are you a king then? Are you a king then?

If Jesus is King, why is there still suffering?

That is the thing that when, when we’re talking about paradox, I want us to wrestle with that question.

If Jesus is King why is there still poverty? Why is there still suffering? When and how will it be resolved? What is our responsibility in the meantime?

That’s what we have to do with, so, in the story of the apostolic period, you’re all familiar with what was known as the community of goods in the book of Acts. Acts, what is it 2, 3, maybe up into four. Community of goods. So, it was a logical response to the expectation that Jesus was going to come back any day. That was what they expected, when, after the Ascension, and after Pentecost, and they began to share, every man according his means or his ability. They had community of goods because they expected that Jesus was going to come back maybe this week maybe tomorrow, so why not?

But what happened, okay, before I get to that, if you want to explore the, the nuances of the theology of the Jerusalem community, the book of James gives us that and it was my intention to, to kind of try to go through that briefly. To give you a picture of the theology of the Jerusalem community.

When we talk about the community of goods what kind of ideas were at work there that brought together that kind of a situation and scenario? We don’t have time to do that.

The things that stand out though, is he was decrying or he was, he was raising the cry against disparity. Woe unto you rich, no I don’t think that’s James’s words, but in the first chapter of James he says something like that, “Let the lowly brother glory in his exaltation.” We just see this disparity highlighted and then: “Let the lowly brother glory in his exaltation but the rich in his humiliation because as the flower of the field he will pass away for no sooner has the sun risen with a burning heat than it withers the grass, its flower falls and its beautiful appearance perishes, so the rich man also will fade away in his pursuits.” And then he deals with the question of equality, which is the temptation of the rich. He deals with partiality, which is the temptation of the poor. He deals with the question of hedonism like it the, the Bible uses for the word, from whence come wars and fighting’s among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure? That word is “hedone”, from which we get the word hedonism which is an actual philosophical position that, that believes that, let me look it up here quickly, read you the definition of hedonism. All right it’s not coming. So, hedonism maybe you know what it is? but that’s what it’s talking about here and there’s a solution given to hedonism right there in the book of James.

So moving forward. So, the book of James was written about AD 40, maybe AD 40 to AD 44, and if you go back to the book of Acts in chapter 11, we hear about Agabus coming under the anointing of the spirit. He says there’s going to be a famine and that happened in AD, was it 43? Something like that? It was the third year of Claudius, you can look it up and Usher’s book. So, there was an economic crisis and that I think is what changed the dynamics from the the community of goods that we read about in the opening chapters of the book of Acts. There was this economic crisis, there was a famine, and when the way they were doing community of goods, a famine is going to be devastating for that economic model. That’s essentially what happened. So, Paul and the church at Antioch, they send relief and that shaped Paul’s views of the thing. And so, everything we have from the teaching of the Apostle Paul on the question of economics and how we should behave with regard to rich and poor and, and responsibilities one to another it, it is based on his experience in taking that offering to Jerusalem and seeing how that knitted the hearts of the Jerusalem community with the Gentile community. And how, yeah, I just love to explore that with you, I’m just going to put it out there. The doctrine for the mutual aid, that’s how I’m describing the later Apostolic period in their understanding of economics.

The doctrine is mostly developed in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. So my summary for that section is simply this. That our giving and our generosity is not for future reward but from past grace. This is, this is what I’m picking out briefly in a summary from 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, “Freely you have received, freely give.” It’s not about earning reward it’s about past grace. It’s a proof of our love we read that in the text. Brotherhood implies mutuality. It’s, it’s based on a relationship of equality.

Any practical methodology that Paul would enjoin would centre around tithing and there’s method to it. He gives it to us there in in 1 Corinthians 8 and 9, 2 Corinthians, I think it’s 6 maybe, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, 1 Corinthians in 11, maybe. “If the first fruits are holy, the lump is also holy.” In our tithing, it changes our attitude towards the rest of what we have.

One of the things that I found interesting is that the Bible’s teaching as I have, have in the last three months spent time trying to understand what does the Bible say about our response to poverty, it seems like the Bible’s teaching on caring for the poor is primarily in the context of those within the covenant community, like those within the community of believers. Almost everything the Bible has to say about poverty, it’s on the inside. It’s not to say it don’t say things like, love your neighbour and who is my neighbour, and those kinds of things. But the specifics are all spelled out to, to the inside. And I can give more examples of that.

So, what am I calling us to here? I’m calling us at least as we think about the price of a response to poverty, it’s going to call us to think, we need to think. And we need to think deeply, not superficially. I’m afraid that too often a very naive approach is taken to questions of wealth and poverty. I’ve heard them. Either to broadly assume that the Bible teaches capitalism, and we react to that and we think that maybe the early church practiced socialism, and I look forward to hearing some about that tomorrow morning, maybe.

This is the kind of naivety that we approach this topic. The biblical laws of justice are not always well suited for the pursuit of economic growth, whether in a socialist or in a market economy. Additionally, as we think about this, if we’re actually looking for helpful interventions that are sustainable, then I would encourage more discussions and reflection on the economics of the Hebrew scriptures.

Second thing that I’m calling us to, so the first thing was we, I’m calling us to think. The second thing that I’m inviting us to is to examine. Examine your hearts according to this text. It says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich yet for your sakes he became poor that you through his poverty might be rich.” Right inside of that text we have the opportunity to examine our attitude.

What attitude did Jesus have? You know the grace. His attitude was one of grace. We have the opportunity to examine our motives. His motive was for your sakes. We have the opportunity to examine our way of being. Jesus was rich, he became poor. We can examine our way of being just by meditating on that one passage.

And finally, I’m asking us as parents, as adults, as older people, as leaders, to teach. To teach, and I wish I could talk in depth about the analogy of the playing field. So one of the ways that we can teach our children to be compassionate and to have compassionate use of wealth, is in the way that they play volleyball, in the way that they play Monopoly, in the way that they play whatever you play, Rook or shuffle board, or I don’t know what you play, but in the way that you play it.

Do you play it to dominate the court? And you’re only going to pick the best players, in all of those dynamics? Like that is one of the ways that I think we do our children a disservice and we send them out into the world, and we wonder why they’re so crazy about being on the top, and having the best, and we’ve taught them that from when they were little when we send them out on the volleyball court, and we’ve shown them how to play volleyball. The problem is much deeper than we tend to look. The solution is much simpler than we tend to think. Poverty is a form of suffering that will not be resolved until Jesus comes in glory but in the meantime, there is something for us to do.

Here’s a quote as I close: It is not for you to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it.