The Persistent Problem of Poverty

A Sermon by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday June 11, 2006

Reading

My first reading is from the sociologist Robert Bellah, who knows quite a bit about religion, too, or at least religious communities: 

Freedom of conscience and freedom of enterprise are more closely, even genealogically, linked than many of us would like to believe. . . They are both expressions of an underlying ontological individualism. It is no accident. . . that the United States, with its high evaluation of the individual person is nonetheless alone among North Atlantic societies in the percentage of our population who live in poverty and that we are dismantling what was already the weakest welfare state of any North Atlantic nation.  Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing.  And this is in no small part due to the fact that our religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which. . . ultimately knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. . . What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body.

And from a much earlier prophet, Amos {2:6-8}

Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, And for four, I will not revoke the punishment; Because they sell the righteous for silver, And the needy for a pair of sandals –  They who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, And push the afflicted out of the way; …they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.

So end the readings.

Meditation and Prayer

With words from Carlos Mugica

A Catholic priest murdered in Argentina in 1974, worked there with poor people.  He wrote a lament – a prayer not to save the people, but to save himself;  to save himself from losing his compassion.  His prayer is addressed to a particular image of God as Lord.  That may not be an image that you or I would use.  His feelings, though, his deep concerns, we may be able to hold in our hearts.  Let us be in the spirit of prayer and meditation.  The prayer of Carlos Mugica:

Lord, forgive me for getting used to seeing children who seem to be eight years old and are really thirteen.  Forgive me for getting used to sloshing around in the mud.  I can leave, they can’t.  Forgive me for learning to put up with contaminated water.  I can get away from it, they can’t.  Lord, forgive me whenever I switch on the light and forget that they can’t.  I can go on a hunger strike but not they; how can the hungry go on a hunger strike?  Lord, forgive me for telling them that “not by bread alone does man live” and not fighting all out for their bread.  I want to love them for them, and not for me.  Help me.  I dream of dying for them; Help me to live for them  Lord, I want to be with them when the light comes.  Help me.  AMEN

The Persistent Problem of Poverty

A Sermon by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday June 11, 2006

A couple of months ago, Mark and I spent a service answering your questions – our “Ask the Ministers Anything” service.  Which you did.  And we did our best to answer.

I came away unsatisfied, even uneasy, about one of my answers.  I had combined two questions – I’m going by memory here, so I may not have them exactly right, but one asked how to eliminate poverty, and the other how we can help the members of our own congregation who are in financial distress.

So forget whatever it was I said that day.  This morning’s sermon will serve as my real answer to the questions.  Not that I expect to answer these questions definitively   Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic, but my reading of history strongly supports Jesus’ declaration that “The poor you will have with you always.”  To say that blithely, though, as if it settles the matter, is not only callous but simplistic and misses Jesus’ point entirely.

There are many lenses with which to examine the phenomenon of poverty.  Economically, there are forces which help to create and perpetuate poverty.  John Cobb, the Methodist theologian, has vividly described the effect of global monetary policies, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere.  Take a family, for example, who lived in an isolated rural area, growing their own food, raising a few animals.  Policies supporting agricultural exports force them from the land, and they go to the city, building makeshift housing from cardboard and scraps and finding no work.  So, they forage junkyards for cast-off metal to raise a few pennies to buy less food than they used to be able to raise themselves.  Their quality of life has nosedived, but their actual income has increased because they have moved from a barter economy to a money economy.  The stats look great, the overall picture not so good.

That’s one example of how economic analysis comes up short on giving us a thorough depiction of the world.  Arguments over minimum wage and living wage, creating savings, encouraging productivity, limiting inflation - - all these are economic arguments where it’s important to remember the limits of economic analysis.  Not to dismiss such analysis but to recognize it’s not enough.

 Poverty can be analyzed sociologically.  Economic mobility or the lack of it is grist for the sociologists.  In the 1980’s they began talking of a “permanent underclass,” a term that now has been applied to a wide assortment of folks – poorly educated black men, welfare mothers, and lately, illegal immigrants.  Amateur sociology is used and abused in political discourse, the left advocating for a strong safety net and the right for self-reliance and economic growth - - all laudable goals.  Yet, without care, a safety net can become patronizing and crippling; self-reliance can become abandonment; and economic growth can become a mythic Utopia.

Poverty has psychological dimensions, as well.  There are people I know who objectively are poor who would cringe at the term, swearing that they’re fine.  There are others whose economic indicators are positive who feel poor and deprived.  Our personal histories shape our responses to our own place and our evaluation of others’ place.

The lens I want to use primarily, though, is the spiritual and religious lens.  No doubt all the others - - economic, sociological, political, and psychological - - affect what I say today, but the religious and spiritual approach is the core of this sermon.  After all, where are you going to get that but in church?  When I apply the spiritual and religious lens, I ask the question, “What does this mean in my life and in the lives of others?”  and “What am I called to do on account of this meaning that I discern?”

So, I begin with what I know personally.  I have never been truly poor. Sure, when I was in college, I had to hustle for every dollar I could find to keep from calling home for money (No one wants to ask my mother for more money.)  In my first job after college, I can remember saving up Coke bottles so I’d have spare cash at the end of the month.  But I had a job, I had a townhouse apartment.  I had parents who would provide a safety net, heck, I even had health insurance.

But I’ve known people who were poor, and the diversity of them surprises me when I lay their stories end to end.  Note, you do not know these people; they are not from here, and I am changing their names.  These are anonymous snapshots; or maybe you do know them, or at least someone like them:

Carrie, a middle-class professional, confessed to me that before she divorced her husband and went to college, she had lived through hell in a middle class suburb, when her utilities were shut off for six months before the bank finally reclaimed the house. Her husband, ashamed of his layoff, had forbidden her from seeking any help. She defied him to get food for their children from a food pantry.

Sonya, born and reared in poverty and a single mother of three daughters, left he welfare rolls when TABOR replaced AFDC, so she couldn’t continue in college. Instead, she found a waitressing job. Her desperation increased when her eldest turned up pregnant. Reluctantly, after trying for months to make ends meet, she pushed the teenage girl to give up the baby for adoption to her friends in her church.

Lyle’s mental illness began with his abuse of drugs and became so severe that anyone interacting with him knows immediately that something’s wrong. He tries to survive on a Social Security disability check and ends up begging in front of the grocery store until they run him off. He’s looking for money for beer, and really has no goals in life beyond that.

Cindy’s father died when she was eighteen. She’d spend the last couple of years nursing him, dropping out of high school to do so. Her mother had left them years before. After her father died, Cindy swore that her relatives had cheated her out of the house and any inheritance that was there, though in truth, the hospital bills may have eaten it up. On her own, she struck out for the city where she scraped by at fast food jobs, living with whoever she could to find to put her up for a while.

Micah couldn’t use a payday loan place because he didn’t even have a checking account. Norma told me how maliciously people looked at her when she paid for a birthday cake for her son with food stamps—she was trying so hard, and he never got a treat. Edward was bankrupted by his partner’s AIDS drugs; Bethany by the custody battle for her son. Jean fed her children by collecting cans and bottles on the road. Betty kept hers alive with oatmeal the last few days of every month.

Half of these stories are of Unitarian Universalists. All of them are true. You may know other stories of people in poverty. You may have your own story. What looking at the stories requires is a move away from abstraction. Then, we can find and name the realities and the wealth that all people have: the wealth of wisdom, the resource of survival skills, the currency of experience.

By the way, I assume this congregation—the people I’m talking to--  has a breadth of class representation, with the concentration in the upper-middle class, more professionals than one would find in the general population. I assume that I am talking to people who include those who have been poor, and some who are now.  I assume that many of the people in this room are struggling financially, but that most are comfortably secure, and that a few are quite well-off. I assume that at least some of you are in different economic circumstances than you grew up in. If I drift into language or assertions that sound like I’m suggesting that you are something that you are not, please forgive me, because this is so important to discuss and so rarely discussed, that I want to take the risk.

Poverty affects more people than we realize.  Economic mobility is not just upwards; it goes down, too. As Mark has said more than once, almost all of us are vulnerable.  How long could you last if the wrong combination of three or four circumstances hit you? Sickness, disability, accident, divorce? These are the things that most often lead to bankruptcy in this county.

We don’t like to accept that we’re vulnerable. One of the spiritual issues around poverty is judgment. If she’s so poor, what’s she doing wasting money on cigarettes?  If I give money to the guy begging on the street, will he blow it on drugs and alcohol? How dare she spend food stamps on a cake!

Our Calvinist impulses push us to search for what poor people are doing that go them there. Calvinist, you say? We’re not Calvinists! Be we as a religious movement—and we as Americans-- are descended from Calvinists. Remember those Pilgrims and Puritans. Their theology posited total depravity of human beings, and unconditional election by God for those who are saved, and them alone.  As Unitarians, long ago—both historically and personally—we rejected the depravity of mankind. Too often, though, I’m afraid we apply that rejection to ourselves. Well, we know we’re not depraved, but we’re not really that sure about the rest of humankind. Instead we search for what depravation in others led them to their fate.  We search in the misplaced hope that somehow if we know what they did wrong, we are protected from their destiny.

Be we’ve distorted the Calvinist idea. Not even Calvinists—at least orthodox Calvinists—say that some folks have done something bad to get them disliked and condemned by God, which shows up in the terrible things God inflicts on them, such as sickness or poverty. There’s a perversion of Calvinism that says rich people deserve their destiny, as do the poor. But, in real hard core Calvinism, not one of us deserves the goodness we have; we are all depraved and sinful creatures.  God has smiled on some, for no reason but that God decided to save them.  People smiled upon by God are no more deserving than the most hideous sinner on the planet.  That’s what real Calvinism says. 

This is where we get the wonderful saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Though I may have worked hard for what I’ve earned—there’s that Calvinist residue raising its weary head—I still don’t deserve it. If we lose sight of the gifts we are given—I don’t care who or what you think gives them—God, Nature, your family, dumb luck—but if we do not acknowledge that we have relied on something outside ourselves to be where we are and to have what we have, then we risk rapidly lapsing into judgment against those who have less. When we start saying , “If I did it, so can they,” we are denying our own vulnerability and casting aside the humility required to be a whole ethical human being.

Am I saying that people in poverty do nothing to create or continue their situation? No. Some of them do.  Some of them have made incredibly unwise choices. Choosing the wrong marriage partner can be one of them. Getting addicted to drugs may be another. Dropping out of school may be the clearest. Yet in particular circumstances, I might understand why someone would make those choices.  Cindy shouldn’t have left school to take care of her father, but I can see why she would have.  Sometimes the wrong choice looks like the least bad option. Other times, it’s just stupid. In any case, my second guessing and post-mortem judgment of someone else isn’t going to help anyone. 

We can overreact, though, and move from dismissing judgment against poor people to romanticizing poverty.  Unitarian Charles Dickens was the master of it, though he created important social criticism as he did so. However, by extolling the nobility of the Tiny Tims of the world, while flogging the rich Scrooges of the world for their greed and oppression, he flipped the social equation of degraded Calvinism so that poverty equaled goodness and wealth evil.  This is no more true than the contrary. We cannot condemn poor people simply for being poor, or rich people for simply being rich.

Let’s be real in this endeavor, and not be tempted into an exercise of romantic vision, even if that vision backs up our political ideals.  There are noble poor people—though Tiny Tim was a bit over the top—as there are selfish, greedy Scrooges, or Ken Lays.  There are also poor people who are angry, bitter, manipulative and difficult to be around, and rich people who are contented, fulfilled and generous. And there are a whole bunch of people, neither rich nor poor, who find various satisfactions in their life, some based on financial security, and some having nothing to do with money.

One of the things that religion calls us to do in response to poverty is to remain humble, to strive not to judge anyone, but to realize instead our commonality with all people, regardless of their economic status. That great challenge shapes what we do in response to poverty—it shapes how we give and withhold gifts to charity and even to our friends and family, particularly if they have less money than we do.

The call for humility also changes the public policies we embrace or reject for the betterment of life conditions for people. Without making decisions solely on anecdotal evidence, we must keep real the stories of real people in front of us as we balance statistical analyses and sociological and economic theories. Barbara Ehrenreich, the columnist and writer, reflected solidarity with the working class poor people when she immersed herself in their world, working as a waitress, house cleaner and salesclerk and documenting her life there in her book Nickeled and Dimed. She considers some of the policy implications. More, she discovered how challenging that life was for her as well as for others, and what desperation it created.

So, how do people survive the desperation that poverty brings? The only answer I know to that is through sharing in community, another religious response to the challenge. Tex Sample, a United Methodist theological professor and expert on the ministry with blue collar and poor people, emphasizes that the middle class places value on individual self-reliance. Poor and working class people stress family and community.  His example was a mechanic friend of his who, working on Tex’s daughter’s car, found himself more overextended than he’d expected. He had to pull the engine and scour the town for parts. When he finally finished, Tex asked, “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” his friend answered, meaning it. “That’s what friends are for.”

Some months later when Tex, an ordained elder, officiated at the friend’s wedding, he asked, “What do I owe you?” and Tex had learned the correct response – “Nothing. That’s what friends are for.”

“That’s what friends are for,” an expression easily tossed off. Really, though, our bonds as friends, as family, even as church, if they are to be strong and durable mean that we each bring our gifts and share them with one another. Those gifts include material wealth. All those bonds are what Robert Bellah in this morning’s reading – and Paul in the Bible, for that matter- were talking about by being members of the same body. I’m not arguing for a socialist philosophy of sharing all goods and services. I am suggesting we might learn and grow more individually and as a community if we recognize and make the most of our radical interdependence, our need to rely on one another—that includes both a willingness to ask and a readiness to give when asked.  Because after all, isn’t that what friends, community, family – even church – are for?

I remember walking through Harvard Square at night with two other women, both of them younger than me. One was the daughter of missionaries. A grungy old beggar approached us and asked for spare change. The missionaries’ daughter stopped in her tracks, looked at him with an unpatronizing tenderness, opened a change purse and handed him a five dollar bill. I can’t remember what words, if any, were exchanged. Yet, I had the sense as I watched the scene that she viewed him as a manifestation of Christ. Each time I return to the words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Give to everyone who begs of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” [Matthew 5:42], I remember her and the positive regard she offered that man.

Not that I do what she did. What I try to do, though, is to muster the same respect I saw in her eyes.

Poverty challenges us to become better people—through humility and recognition of our radical interdependence. That is a religious task and a spiritual journey.

Now, what was the question? How to eliminate poverty? How to help those in our midst who struggle financially? Let me reword the question: What are we called to do in the face of poverty?

This answer may not work for you, but here’s my answer for myself. I begin by extending respect and even trust to the best of my ability. Listen well to each person’s story and the underlying emotion and issues. Sift, discern, weigh, take it seriously. When I am considering—as I often do—whether to offer funds from the Ministers’ Discretionary Fund of the church, I honor the trust I am given in the administration of those funds, but find a way to give if it can be done responsibly and respectfully—that is, not foolishly flinging money at a problem that money cannot solve; not patronizing, but expecting the person benefiting to be equally responsible and respectful. This isn’t easy.  It’s much easier to hand over money or goods without listening to the real needs. It’s easier still to refuse to offer even an ear. But we don’t help that way, nor do we grow that way.

In the same manner, I weigh the appeals from charity.  Some things are basic goods that everyone should have ready access to—food, education, health care.  These are the causes beyond the church that I direct most of my giving dollars towards.

What are we asked to do in response to poverty? One politician when asked what religious communities can do to help provide for needy people suggested not faith-based initiatives, or even charitable work, but simply to remind people to care for one another.  He was calling us back to ourselves, reminding us of what may be the only universal religious commandment: Care for one another. 

Over and over again, the Hebrew Scriptures proclaim the need to care for people: leaving grain in the fields for the widow and orphan to glean, releasing indentured servants every seven years, providing for people who are sick.  Jesus said feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked.  Islam requires the giving of alms. Buddhists fill the bowls of begging monks.

Now, as we learn caring, we also need to coax others to care, including those in government, industry, think tanks, media and labor unions. Religion calls us to care. So does poverty.

 Maybe that’s what the Mayan theologian Petal Cut Chub meant by saying “from the rich values of our poverty, we can offer elements of salvation to our brothers and sister.”

That may not eliminate poverty, but it will change our world.  So may it be.  AMEN.