5 common objections to serving the poor that are anti-Christ

For followers of Jesus Christ, serving those who are poor or on the margins is not something we might choose to do because we have a particular passion for it as individuals. It’s not something for us to do on the side when we feel like “giving back.” It’s not something Paul lists alongside personal charisms like the gift of prophecy or of speaking in tongues, which some might possess but not others.

Serving those who are poor and on the margins is synonymous with being a Christian. Actually, if we don’t do it, it gets very cloudy what exactly we’re talking about when we say we are Christian. In fact, we can light candles, and start a prayer group at work, and sing songs at church, and read our Bibles at a coffee shops, and join a small group, and wear crosses over our hearts, and teach kids about Daniel in the lion’s den, and hang a cross stitch of the “Serenity Prayer” over our beds, and make spiritual pilgrimages, and sit through (bleckk!) church regional gatherings, and any number of other things that are conventionally recognized as “Christian” and, as far as we know, still have not done a single thing that Jesus ever did.

That doesn’t mean that those are bad things to do. I can and have done most of them (not so crazy about cross stitch hangings), because at some level I believe they’re important. But the tether linking all of that to Jesus is admittedly convoluted as I loop and weave it through all kinds traditions, preferences, cultural traits, and customs. Not so with serving someone who is poor or on the margins. It characterizes almost every healing story, teaching, or action of Jesus that we have in the gospels.

It’s wacky that so much of American Christianity talks so much about evangelism and so little about serving those who are poor and on the margins. Because if we’re not doing the latter in some way, nobody knows or cares what exactly we’re talking about when we call ourselves disciples of Jesus.

Serving those who are poor and on the margins is a way of interpreting the meaning of the word Christian. If not for that, our cultural paradigms will be quick fill the void and interpret that word for us. And those interpretations are almost always exactly wrong—like, not a little bit, two plus two equals five off but, like, opposite day, forward is back, hot snow falls up, Ryan Leaf should have been drafted over Peyton Manning wrong.

Jesus, as far as we know, focused on just about everything but the family. He didn’t support “Christian” radio. He would apparently choose a party over piety every time. He was neither meek nor mild, and there were a lot of people to whom he wasn’t even particularly nice. And Ricky Bobby’s preferences notwithstanding, the gospels are notably short on stories of Jesus as a child beyond the two mentions in Matthew and Luke that don’t go much beyond suggesting that he was one once. Jesus, as far as we know, was silent on contraception, masturbation, and homosexuality, despite the fact that these were all hot button issues in the holy book of his religious upbringing. He seemed to hate adultery on principle, and yet, we only have stories of him forgiving and standing up for adulterers, not a peep about him condemning one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A0-u85aAYg

What we do know, beyond any doubt whatsoever, though, is that adult Jesus had a huge heart and a tireless endurance for serving those who are poor and on the margins.

So why is it that in church councils and annual meetings everywhere, when an idea comes along for how to serve the ones whom Jesus specifically calls blessed, the burden of proof is always on the idea person to show why that would be an appropriate thing for a church to do? Shouldn’t the burden of proof always be on the naysayers to show why serving them wouldn’t be an appropriate thing for a church to do?

If the burden of proof can be shifted in the other direction, then maybe my five favorite board room objections will be seen for what they are and discredited. With any luck, maybe we can just ban them from the Christian lexicon altogether and go about serving those who are poor and on the margins like disciples do.

1) “We need to take care of our own first.”

The person who raises this objection seems to have no interest in Jesus’ way of doing things. You would think, at the very least, they’d be curious why he takes every opportunity to contradict them.

2) “Why are we traveling to [x] when there are people to help here in our own backyard?”

I’ve met many people who have raised this objection. Never has one of them ever been caught serving the people “in our own backyard.” This is not unexpected. People who actually extend themselves to serve anyone beyond their own inner circle in significant ways are operating out of a worldview of grace. And people with a worldview of grace don’t draw geographical either/ors.

3) “We would love to give to [x] but someone has to pay the bills.”

The average Christian in North American gives away about 2.2% of their income. I’m sure it wouldn’t work out quite this neatly, but the mathematical fact is that if every Christian worldwide gave 10% (which isn’t Jesus’ ideal for us but is just a somewhat arbitrary biblical benchmark) hunger, water insecurity and lack of education would be solved across the globe overnight. That we would sit there in a council meeting and mince words about how to divide up 2.2% of the pie to balance the budget rather than asking why anyone in the world is still hungry while we all sit here with hearts of stone, is a disgrace to the Gospel. Sure we will always fall short of the radical self-sacrifice to which the Gospel calls us, but at least repent for that and trust in God’s grace for crying out loud, don’t try to justify it with sensible sounding words about the electricity bill. You feed them. What? You mean you only have two fish and five loaves? Uh huh, uh huh, sure…Hey listen, you feed them!

4) “Well we would love to open up our campus to something like that, but then wouldn’t we have them you know…loitering around?”

Firstly, people don’t usually just want to hangout around your church property for no reason. Just trust me, they don’t. But if they should happen to, hypothetically, congratulations! They’re people. And you’re a church.

5) “But won’t somebody please think of the children!”

This one sounds tricky because we actually do need to ensure the safety of children, especially on campuses that double as a school or where little kids are in close proximity to the activities of the church. But, actually, it is deceptively easy to see through. I have yet to see any reliable data showing that the percentage of sex offenders is higher in the homeless population or any other socio/cultural/economic demographic you might like to isolate. To assume that it is, is nothing but naked prejudice. It’s true that substance abuse and mental illness is disproportionately high within the homeless population but the only unambiguous link between this and danger to our kids is entirely within the minds of people who don’t understand either. It’s true that the rate of violent crime is higher within certain demographics than others, but the victims of said crimes tend to be from the same demographic as the perpetrators; whereas this objection is only raised when one group is discussing whether to engage another group that makes some of them uncomfortable. And beyond all of this, anytime we are serious about ministering to people using our own facilities, vigilance and watchfulness among the hosting community tend to go up and the campus actually tends to be far safer than under normal circumstances where individuals can wander on and off of campus relatively unbothered. Suburban, middle class churches habitually use concern for their kids as a front to avoid that which actually makes the adults uncomfortable. It’s much easier to say, “I’m worried about the kids,” than “I don’t want to be like Jesus.”

gratitude: how God becomes visible

Modern debates where two opponents take a look at the universe and then try to hypothesize what God is or where God is or if God is always come to a dead end not because of what they’re seeing with their eyes but because they are seeing with their eyes. The discussions inevitably drift into red herrings about the age of the earth or the complexity of the human genome or the copyright date of the book of Mark not because of a certain set of empirical findings but because the findings are empirical. Everything becomes a red herring because they have chosen to see with the wrong type of sight. The faculty by which humans can see God is not vision but gratitude.

I’ve been on my biennial G.K. Chesterton kick lately and can’t hope to say anything better than what he already said in his book on St. Francis of Assisi. 

“It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it. He will be forever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks.”

FYI, because everything theological that you might wish to say in modern America requires a disclaimer, the “debt” to which Chesterton refers is not the dead and deadening notion that Jesus needed to take the beating intended for us by a god pictured as the ultimate grudge holder. It is the realization that occasionally graces us, on days when the sky is clear and our sciatic nerve isn’t acting up, that we had no logical reason to anticipate there would be another onrush of oxygen to our lungs the last time our diaphragm retreated, except that it’s always been there before. Logically, thought, the fact that it has always been there before should impress us more, not less. And who can say that the oxygen, upon arrival, should proceed through our blood stream and behave in our cells the way it always has? If someone wealthy of knowledge and impoverished of thought were to assert, “We know that it will because that’s how it reacts with the loose carbon and hydrogen that results when pyruvate is broken down in the Krebs cycle…” before he has finished his sentence, most small children will have already anticipated the operative question: Why? 

This is not strictly theological thinking. The 18^th century philosopher David Hume (and arguably William of Ockham before him and Zeno of Elea before him) had these same reflections and it led him to question whether there is any such thing as cause and effect. Pessimistically, he would concede that we have nothing that dependable on which to base our well being, only a series of coincidences with a strangely regular repetition. If we should walk out our front door one morning and drop right through the front stoop that had always held our weight before, it may surprise us because of a habit we’d grown accustomed to, but our logic would have no right to be upset by it. Physics just got bored with the same old and decided to behave differently that day.

The psalmists in Israel, equally thoughtful but more perhaps more spiritually imaginative than Hume, worked their way through the same premises but came to a different conclusion. If it’s not logical necessity that air should continue to sustain life as it seems to, they supposed that every breath must be a new word of life gifted from the mouth of God. 

Of course, we can’t know in any empirical sense if God commanded the oxygen molecules to behave a certain way or if they called together a team meeting and hashed out that game plan themselves. But we can make pretty strong judgments about the spiritual and psychological benefits of assuming the former.

Gratitude is finally the joyful shock we feel when it dawns on us that there is nothing we have done or can do to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and make ourselves live.

In the same way that we can most starkly see the effects of the sun by looking at a shadow, the effects of gratitude on the spiritual well being of a person maybe become most obvious when we look to where it is missing.

We’ve all met the person for whom every aspect of creation is unimpressive and every person in it a let down. If you look closely, you can almost see this person’s physical bearing shrink and wither before you as she spews venom at everything from the son who never calls, to the boss who never appreciates, to the neighbor who never helps.

This person is not lying when she says that God, the world, and everyone in it, without exception, have let her down. In a very real sense, they have. Her incapacity for gratitude will not allow it to be otherwise. There is no waterfall majestic enough, no interaction tender enough, no prayer answered enough to penetrate the dark fog that we labor under when we insist on not seeing blessing and giving thanks. 

The upside of this is that gratitude can be learned and its effects are immediate.  What else are meal time prayers, and acts of service, and communion every Sunday but training sessions in which we begin to respond to the world out of a sense of gratitude? And how difficult does it become to fight enemies when you’re thankful for their existence, to go to bed angry when you’re thankful for a spouse, to neglect your health when you’re thankful for a body, to think bitter thoughts when you’re pleasantly surprised to have a mind that’s capable of thinking anything at all?