“In 1999, after nearly a decade of unprecedented economic growth and well into the latest overhaul of the nation’s welfare system, one in six American children - over 12 million youngsters - lived in poverty, according to the latest available figures from the Census Bureau. That’s the good news, because in 1993, more than one in five children were poor. The bad news is that the nation today is roughly where it was in 1979. And compared to the rest of the industrialized world, this country remains at the bottom of the heap. Today, as the good times begin to wane and policy makers begin to evaluate what welfare reform has wrought, the question emerges: Is this the best the United States can do? Must so many children in the nation grow up poor?”   
-- New York Times, July 8, 2001

Our focus today is poverty, the poor. Not just the destitute and homeless, but the millions of people who struggle to get by day to day, often holding down two jobs, often with spouses and children. People who are unable to fully support themselves for a wide variety of reasons: corporate layoffs and downsizing; accidental injury; illness of a family member; lack of education, health care, or the kind of support from our families and community that most of us take for granted. Nowadays, of course, it’s not just the poor who are poor. Thousands of middle and upper middle class homeowners (i.e., former employees of Enron) are discovering what millions of Americans have known for generations: the feeling of not knowing where your next meal will come from, where you will live in six months, what will you do; the feeling of being poor.

 Our reading from the Gospel contains that strange and familiar passage where Christ chastises the disciples for considering the needs of the poor, saying that we will always have the poor with us. What a perfect example of how easy it is to mislead by cleaving to the literal sense alone. Without knowing that the real subject is spiritual poverty, we might think Christ was saying the same as some economists, who tell us that a certain degree of unemployment (i.e., poverty) is needed to keep the free market system in balance. Or we might even be tempted to invoke this passage to excuse ourselves from giving to the poor. But the Lord’s subject, here and throughout scripture, is our spiritual life, and we know that he is speaking about the poverty of spirit that burdens all people, rich or poor; the poverty of spirit that each of us lives with at all times. Technically, it is known as sin, but it also has other names: selfishness, pride, greed, fear, lust, envy, etc. He reminds us that it is our own sins, whether of commission or omission, our own spiritual poverty, which we must always acknowledge, that leads to economic poverty, to homelessness, to suffering and division, injustice and conflict.

Swedenborg made no reference to this passage, although it occurs in three of the Gospels. When he does discuss poverty, he makes it clear that any references to the poor, in scripture, must be understood as referring to spiritually poverty, the lack of truth and understanding, love and compassion. Among those who are spiritually poor are those who will inherit the kingdom, for they acknowledge their need of God. But they are also spiritually poor who dwell within themselves, who reject God and neglect the neighbor, who seek their own good from their own perspective. Poverty is used in scripture to describe an inner state of emptiness. But the symbolism is not arbitrary. Natural, material poverty corresponds to inner, spiritual poverty because it is spiritual poverty, a lack of compassion and justice, that is the cause of natural poverty. And natural poverty, the unnecessary lack of basic material needs, is the effect of spiritual poverty.

One should not be confused for the other, but neither should they be seen as unrelated. All too often, because we can mentally distinguish between the two, we tend to forget that they are always two sides of the same coin. The imbalances in society merely reflect the imbalances within the people who make up that society, individually and collectively. And we fool ourselves if we believe that we can alter the outer world without first addressing the root cause of our divisions, both individually and collectively.

Despite all of the emphasis in scripture on the Lord’s love for the poor and disdain for the wealthy, Swedenborg insisted that literal wealth or poverty did not matter too much in regard to one’s own spiritual growth. Both the rich and the poor can make it to heaven, or hell. What mattered was one’s commitment to place God over self, and the needs of the neighbor over our love of possessions. Apparently, there are plenty of Swedenborgian sermons on how the rich are allowed into heaven, and quite a few on the idea of spiritual poverty. But there doesn’t seem to be many on the subject of the church’s role in addressing natural poverty.

In the 19^th century, Swedenborgian thought was widely influential in promoting a new vision of American culture and community, and in challenging the reigning structures that supported slavery, child labor, and a host of other practices that allowed for and even promoted poverty. Still, the Swedenborgian Church, like many Christian denominations, often followed a middle path, unwilling to risk their integrity by fully naming or confronting the demon. Of course, it takes one to know one: we are historically white and middle class, and our efforts at social justice have been largely paternalistic (remember the Harlem mission?) Why do we get uneasy when the discussion is poverty, or racism, or justice? Because the proprium is always on!

You know the reaction: I didn’t make anyone poor; I don’t want other people to be poor; I hate poverty too! These responses are the voice of a healthy proprium, our natural self-image; it’s the standard rationalization procedure. Don’t worry about it, it's part of who you are. But don’t buy into it, either. You also have a higher perspective, which reminds you that you are never an isolated individual, but always a part of a much greater whole; someone who is affected by the others, and who affects others by everything we do. Nothing we do is in a vacuum; it comes from others, and goes out to others. The issue is not about blame for the past (who did this?), but about responsibility for the present and the future (what do we do now?).

There is a tendency to note that Swedenborg spoke against helping the poor in a piecemeal or inappropriate fashion, or just to ease our conscience. And yet little is said about the other side of that equation: the enormous and unambiguous responsibility it puts on each of us to help people in ways that are both appropriate and ample, sufficient and generous. No, you wouldn’t give a drunk a bottle of alcohol or a criminal a gun and expect that to help them. But walking away doesn’t seem to help either; distancing ourselves from the poor does not help the poor, and it does not help us; calling them evil or ignorant or lazy or unfixable doesn’t help, and it is not Christian.

The New Church teaches that the world now lives with a greater degree of freedom in spiritual matters, a new age specifically identified with the Lord’s second coming. In this new age of the spirit, won for us by the Lord’s struggle against all that was false and self-centered in the first Christian era, Divine love and truth now flow unimpeded into the hearts and minds of all those who choose to receive them. But with this new freedom comes new responsibility. In 1961, Rev. Othmar Tobish, pastor of the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, wrote these words in a sermon:

A tremendous social responsibility has been assumed by the free man. Now, he must shoulder the responsibility for the wellbeing of his neighbor. He cannot any longer blame disasters like hunger and disease upon God or the king. As God has freed man from tyranny of unreasoned faith, so man must accept the duties that go with this freedom and rationality.

Thus, we who live in this century face grave moral obligations. Freedom is so much desired; but are its liabilities considered? For example, men became rich by scientifically applied truth in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. But these captains of industry forgot to share their gains with those who created them: the laborers of the factories, mines, and farms. Those laborers rose up to demand their share. The last one hundred years are filled with the struggle of capital vs. labor – or as it has become known, of Capitalism vs. Socialism.

To be sure, the new riches are part of the new age. At first only a few men had them. Out of their unwillingness to share, there arose the revolutions of Marxism, Socialism and Communism. Political revolutions convulsed the East and West. Even to this day the struggle is not ended. In the spiritual world, the laws of freedom and of social responsibility stand side by side – but not on our earth as of yet.

The Christian Church has much to do here to turn the love of self into the love of the neighbor through social reforms. We must seek to apply our Christian convictions of divine love to all men: to all in the social and economic structure of mankind.

It hurts a Christian to read that even at this day, laborers in our California fields and orchards do not receive a just hire. They must fight for a little increase in their hourly wage – instead of being given it, willingly and lovingly, as a share in the riches of God’s own property, of which we are only stewards. We are not yet acting in conformity with the ideals of the new age in sharing God’s riches according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The truth that God is the Creator, and therefore the rightful owner of what we call “our possessions,” will have to be acknowledged more fully. If we finally do confess that only our selfishness has created the social inequalities of our times, we will then want to correct them.

If we can no longer reasonably blame God for injustice or poverty (circumstances and events), then we can only blame ourselves. The system we live in is not God given, but man made. And it is only our reluctance to confront and accept change that keeps us in the same cycle. We must examine ourselves, our values and beliefs and practices, and repent; that is, we must look to our own policies and actions and then change our ways.

As Reinhold Niebuhr said, religious freedom does two things: it prevents the church from becoming a tool of the state, and at the same time frees the church to be the conscience of the state. The church is not intended to be a social service agency or an economic institution. The role of the church is seen not so much in direct support and aid, but in bearing witness to the brokenness within human experience that allows for and even perpetuates poverty and all the rest. The role of the church is to lay the axe to the root of the problem, to use its spiritual insight, wisdom, and commitment, to penetrate the illusion of money so that truth might speak to power.

 “Religion is of the life, and the life of religion is to do good.” (Emanuel Swedenborg) Applying doctrine to life; practicing what we preach; moving from abstract ideas and good intentions to concrete, tangible words and actions; bringing our teachings and calling to bear on the actual circumstances of our neighbor; bringing spiritual truth and affection into the life, giving it flesh and blood. This is how we can relate spiritual and natural poverty together, to see one as the cause and the other as the effect; intimately linked, so that we might address poverty inside and out.