The little that the righteous has is better than the great riches of the wicked. For the power of the wicked shall be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous. Psalm 37:17,18
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There are the voluntary poor. Many of these belong to religious orders like the Franciscans. They choose to live in poverty in response to Jesus’ invitation in the Gospel.
Other voluntary poor are peace activists, like the ones I met and marched with during the Obama administration who, in the infancy of drone warfare, ordered drones piloted from an air base in Michigan – drones named “Predator” and “Reaper” – to kill both insurgents and innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq. These peace activists intentionally keep their income below the federal taxable level so they don’t pay for our bi-partisan bombs and bullets.
And then there are the involuntary poor. Involuntary poverty is an evil, the liberation theologians teach us. It is a sin because it degrades human dignity, the God-like image we are created in. It limits human freedom, restricting the choices our free-will allows us to make. It short-circuits the gift of human life by causing premature death. There is nothing redemptive or romantic about involuntary poverty. It is grinding.
But it is part of the human condition. Jesus said, “You always have the poor with you.” The dual nature of Christ – Jesus being fully divine and fully human – means that Jesus’ perfect idealism coexists with Jesus’ rational realism.
I wonder if the evangelist or a later scribe misremembered the punctuation and emphasis of Jesus’ observation, “You always have the poor with you.”
What if Jesus said, “You! Always have the poor with you!” Read this way it is not an observation. It is a command. It brings the issue into sharper focus.
The liberation theologians also teach us that God has a preferential option for the involuntary poor, and therefore so should the Church. Where the poor are not, the Church is not. When the poor are absent, the Church is apostate.
God prefers the poor, as should the Church, not because they are more noble or moral, virtuous or just than everyone else. The poor are preferred simply for their poverty, for being of the same socioeconomic class that the Son of God chose to be born into.
Jesus came first to bring good news to the poor, he said in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. And to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free. Then, and only then, is the year of the Lord’s favor proclaimed to everyone – the involuntary poor and the rest of us.
God doesn’t ignore or forget the rest of us. God simply begins at what we call the bottom, and invites all to conversion.
This gospel passage, this good news, has been called Jesus’ Mission Statement, and rightly so. Jesus will reiterate this mission statement when he sends disciples of John the Baptist back to him, to tell the imprisoned John that he, Jesus, is doing these very things he promised to do.
Since this is Jesus’ Mission Statement, it ought to be the Church’s Mission Statement, too.
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Involuntary poverty is an evil. And, at the same time, involuntary poor people are a gift to the Church. They call us to conversion.
The poor are Christ’s ambassadors, said Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. The poor are the lungs which oxygenate the Body and Blood of Christ, said my mentor, now-bishop Bonnie Perry. When poor people are absent from a parish church and its ministry focus, says I, that congregation is dead – even if it appears to be alive, lurching zombie-like, Sunday to Sunday.
The Church, therefore, exists both to embrace poor people and to contend with the sinful evil of involuntary poverty, namely the systems that – and the people who – create it and nurture it and perpetuate it.
The Powers and Principalities of this world, as scripture puts it.
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We live in troubling times. Truth be told, we always have. But this troubling time is the one that befalls us. This troubling time is ours.
This is a troubling time of a profound and deepening cruelty.
This is a troubling time of oligarchy – the rule of, by, and for the obscenely-rich – that is enabled and embraced by the political powers in Washington, in our state capitols, and in our city halls.
This is a troubling time when fascism more than threatens our country. Fascism is the preferential option, the ruthless aim, and desired outcome of the present ruling class.
This is a troubling time. And so, this is the time for the Church. This is the time for the Church to stand in opposition to cruelty. This is the time for the Church to insist that obscene wealth is not the coin and currency of the Kingdom of God. This is the time for the Church to proclaim clearly and unstintingly that fascism and Christian Nationalism are not the way of Christ.
I must caution the Church, however. In these troubling times, we must not fall into the heresy – whether by subtle inference or outright assertion – that the Church is the religious arm of any political party, or that any party is the political arm of the Church.
Civic engagement and policy pronouncements? Yes. Our Episcopal Public Policy Network does just that.
The proclamation of Gospel justice? Yes. As one person commented, in response to Bishop Mariann Budde’s charge to President Donald Trump last week, the Episcopal Church was “on brand.”
“You’ll hear something like this,” he went on, “in most Episcopal Churches most Sundays, whether in the sermon or in the Prayers of the People.” Perhaps you’ll hear something like this today.
But partisan political alignment? No.
Jesus avoided this snare. When questioned by the religious authorities whether to pay taxes to the political authorities, Jesus sided with neither. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, he said; give to God what is God’s. In other instances, rival factions – the Pharisees and the Herodians, for example – joined forces to go after Jesus when he satisfied neither their individual aims nor their norms.
We must be as clear-eyed and rational as Jesus. The Church must resist the impulse to accrue political power and influence by courting and flattering the politically powerful. We must keep at arm’s length those partisans who would attempt to use the Church for their own political purposes.
I once made the conscious choice to succumb to this temptation. I was thrilled to be in the corridors of power, to stand on the dais with the mayor, to pray from the public rostrum as one of her preferred pastors, the rector representing a prestigious parish. And after I ate the apple handed to me, I was ashamed. I knew that I was naked.
We must be as wise as trickster-serpents, Jesus said, and as innocent as sacrificial-doves.
Might you undertake partisan political activities on your own, as citizens, as residents, as the baptized? Of course. That is your right, and the Gospel and our Baptismal Covenant ought to inform your conscience if you choose to participate in our political society.
But collectively, as the Episcopal Church, we must be discerning, remembering that the Church-Catholic is greater than the sum of her parts because Christ is the Church’s one and sure foundation; he is the head and the cornerstone. And he chooses differently.
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“How do we tell the poor that God loves them?” is the central question posed by liberation theologians.
Jesus didn’t tell the poor the good news that God loves them by collaborating with one partisan faction over another, in the hope that Roman or Herodian or Judean policies would shift.
Rather, Jesus told the poor the good news that God loves them directly, by being among poor people. By listening to them. By witnessing their needs. By healing their hurts. By bringing them into communion and community. By empowering them to go forth as ambassadors in his name. By building a movement not of the cruel, not of the greedy, not of the oppressors, but instead a Jesus-movement of God’s preferred, so that the rest of us might undergo the conversion of heart and of life necessary to join the Jesus-movement, too.
I’m not sure what such a Jesus-movement, ripening into maturity, might look like. We who claim to be his followers haven’t yet found the will and the way fully to accept his invitation.
Rather, the Church turns, again and again, to the Powers and Principalities of this world in the hope that this party or that faction or the other self-styled messianic leader is the one to save us from ourselves – but, of course, this not their aim. Nor is it within their power or authority.
These Powers and Principalities have always failed in what is truly important, and all-too-often they take the Church with them, because the Church all-too- often misplaces our allegiance. We forget who we are and whose we are.
So, in this small parish church with the aspirational name of All Saints, and staying faithful to our Anglo-Catholic principles of Word and Sacrament, let’s keep choosing the different way. Not the way of the world. But the Way of Jesus, which is the Way of the Poor, the Way of Conversion, the way of Liberation, the Way of the Cross, the Way of Love, and the Way of Life.
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Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
3 Epiphany C – January 26, 2025
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“You! Always have the poor with you!”
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