APRIL 2002                                                    Return to NCC HomePage  

 

PREACHING ABOUT POVERTY
'We All Get Healed'
A sermon by Jim Wallis, Convener and President of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches, community development and other faith-based organizations working together to overcome poverty.   Delivered: January 13, 2002, at First Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, GA.

Text: Isaiah 58.

Let me begin with a story.  It’s about a young man who was studying for the priesthood.  He was nervous about his task, especially about the liturgy around that altar where he would have to do his parts and say things like, “The Lord be with you,” and the congregation responds, “And also with you.”   He was afraid he would get his parts wrong and they would get their parts wrong and the whole thing would fall apart and he would be a failure as a new minister.  So on that Sunday morning, he approached the altar with great fear and trepidation.  And then, he just panicked when he realized the microphone had gone dead.  So they’re waiting like you are and here is this young priest tapping frantically on the microphone.   He says, “Something is wrong with this microphone.”  The congregation responded, “And also with you.”

I suppose you don’t have Urban Ministry Week and Urban Ministry Sunday if there isn’t something wrong.  That’s why we have events like this.  And indeed, there is something wrong.  I had the joy this fall of doing a preaching mission in Sweden of all places, with my son Luke and my wife, Joy, who is an Episcopal priest herself.  And while we were there one of our hosts said to us, we have a new effort here in the country to work on child poverty because we discovered one in 60 of our children are poor.  One in 60.  So I did some research.  In Belgium it’s also 1 in 60 kids poor.  In Germany 1 in 25.  In Britain where we went right after Sweden, it’s 1 in 10.  But in the United States of America, the richest nation on the face of the earth, and though we are now suffering through a recession, we have enjoyed in these last few years a time of record prosperity.  Despite that, in this nation, 1 in 6 of our children are poor.  And for children of color, double – 1 in 3.  One out of every 3 children of color are poor.

The politicians are now saying to us – you faith-based organizations, you’re the answer to our problems.  We used to be just church folks, in the streets, in the trenches, now we’re FBOs – faith-based organizations.  And they’re looking to us for answers.  There are no easy religious answers to hard questions, nonetheless, we are being looked to for answers.   So what does the faith community have to say?

The Isaiah text points us in the direction I think we need to go.  I love working with students.  I teach, I speak on college campuses almost every week, and I find students are volunteering in record numbers.  They’re tutoring inner-city kids, they’re building houses for low-income families.   In fact, at Harvard, my students would take off between semesters, go down to Georgia, to Americus, and join the Easter Build with my friend Millard Fuller at Habitat for Humanity.  And they’d work hard for a week, then go back to Harvard and return to work.  They give up a beer-drinking week in the sun and they do all this service. 

I have students who go to the Middle East war zones, they’ve been to South Africa, and I ask them why.  Why are you volunteering more than is necessary for a balanced resume?  Which they are.  And as they struggle to answer, I always hear two words coming back at me – meaning and connection.  They’re looking for meaning, they’re looking for connections.  And our best and brightest young leaders are stumbling onto the wisdom of Isaiah.  Listen to the prophet:

Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.

And the prophet’s call for direct personal involvement is as contemporary as if it was written yesterday, or tomorrow on the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to bring the homeless poor into your house (or your Sunday morning church for breakfast.  I wish more churches had breakfast for homeless people on Sunday morning.)  When you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin.  The words are critical here – your own flesh, your own relatives, your own family, says Isaiah.

And here’s the good part.  We social justice types like the parts about breaking yokes and bringing in the poor, but here’s the part that really is interesting: Then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up speedily. 

Oh, Isaiah, I must have read that wrong.  He must have meant "then their light breaks forth like the dawn and their healing" – the folks who came for breakfast this morning – it’s about getting them healed, right?  It’s about those of us who have been blessed offering a blessing to the unfortunate.  That’s what we’re used to, that’s the old paradigm.   That’s what we mean by social action.   Isaiah got his words mixed up.  But that’s what he says.  Then will your light rise like the dawn and your healing will come quickly.  This is about our healing, says Isaiah.  It’s about our wholeness.

You’ve seen all the books and tapes about how to be whole, about how to be healed, about how to be balanced, how to be prosperous.  But Isaiah is saying, save your money.  Isaiah says quite directly that the path to genuine healing and self-fulfillment is the journey that connects us to other people and especially those in the family who have been left out and left behind.  When you help connect them back in, you get healed.  The conventional wisdom is the opposite.  It says, well, I got to get my life together, get my security straight, and then if I have some time left over, I’ll do some community service.  Isaiah is saying, and the college students are finding, that the best way to get your life together is to do something for somebody else.  Then will your light break forth and your healing spring up speedily. 

To do it the other way is a trap, and we may never get our life together.  I see this all the time.  Our Sojourners Neighborhood Center is in inner-city Washington, D.C., twenty blocks from the White House where children still go to bed to the sound of gunfire on too many nights.  In that neighborhood center there is a college student from Howard University, 19, and she’s tutoring an 8-year old girl from off the streets – an “at-risk” child.  And that 8-year old looks up at the 19-year old and thinks to herself – she’s a black woman just like I’m going to be.  She’s smart.   She’s in college.  She likes me, I can tell.  She thinks I’m smart.  She thinks I could go to college too.  Maybe I will.   That 19-year old looks at that young girl and thinks to herself.  This kid is the best part of my week.  The time that I spend with her makes my life feel like it has some meaning, purpose, direction.  It’s the thing I look forward to most during the week, even when I’m busy with my studies.  Because it’s what keeps me going.  In fact, I want to do something in my life that makes a difference in the lives of kids like her.

It changes the dynamic – she’s no longer somebody doing something for somebody else.  Everybody is getting changed.  A new dynamic is beginning, and what happens is we all get healed.  That’s the promise of Isaiah.  Listen to Isaiah’s description of such human fulfillment. 

If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.  The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places. 

Do you have any parched places this morning?  I do.  Isaiah wants to get them watered.  In fact, Isaiah says you’ll be like a watered garden.  Wonderful image – a spring of water whose waters never fail.  Isn’t that glorious?  Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, you shall be called the repairer of the breach, and the restorer of streets to live in.

This is powerful stuff!  It’s not just limited to college students or volunteers for one day.  It’s about gathering all the sectors of a society for change.   And let me just say, I saw the shelter this morning – I love to see churches with food inside to give away and shelters, I love to see that, and we do that pretty well as churches.  We keep pulling people out of the river. But sometimes you have to go upstream to see what or who is throwing them in.  And this morning Rev. Black gave me another image of that – sometimes you have to get in the river yourself.  Because getting in the river yourself has a healing property to it.  Now, I want to say some things this morning about where we are.

I am worried about those 12 million kids who are poor, because since September 11 we haven’t really talked about them at all.  All our money, energy, attention, is going other places.  In fact, it’s getting worse for those kids.  And I don’t want them to be the latest victims of the terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. and New York City.  I don’t want them to be victims of that.  In fact, we could see them in a whole different way now.

I was in New York just a few weeks ago.  The Red Cross took me to the rubble where I prayed on the pile with the firefighters.  It struck me that when those towers fell, America suffered together.  CEOs and janitors, stockbrokers and data processors, they died together and their families wept together.  There was a great equality in our suffering on that day.  My friends, if we suffered together, we must now heal together.  All of us.  Will the 12 million children who were not thought to be a part of our unity before September 11 now be counted as part of the family? 

I have a newspaper headline in my head for five years down the road, which would say something like this: After September 11, America was less tolerant of its own inequities than it was before.  After having our democracy attacked from without, we guarded it more preciously from within.   This is a moment for possible transformation for us, to make sure that all of us now are part of the healing.  I don’t want to hear any more faith-based organizations saying, we’re running out of money.  My greatest nightmare, one provider told me last week, is happening – we’ve got more and more need and fewer and fewer resources.

Call to Renewal is an effort among the churches to bring us together across all our boundaries to focus on this question.  At Pentecost this year, we’re going come together and call the nation to remember who is a part of the family. [ see http://www.calltorenewal.com/pentecost2002.html ] Pentecost, the time when the people of God gathered in the upper room, having the Spirit come, and then what?  They went to the streets and spoke boldly, strongly, in public.  And what happened was the formation of a new community in which the poor were included.  So in these Pentecost plans, around the country, we’re going to come together and commission people to come to Washington.  We’re going to ask religious leaders to lead by example and do what the nation doesn’t do, which is to listen to its poorest people.  In the Congress, in the Senate and House office buildings, religious leaders will invite the poor to come and talk to them and invite the Members of Congress to come and listen with us. 

Isaiah is our path forward.  Isaiah is not talking about guilt, talking about blaming somebody else.  Isaiah’s not talking about doing something for somebody else; Isaiah is talking about a vision in which all of us get healed.  Too many of our kids are in trouble and need a blessing.  When we bring them in, Isaiah says we all get the blessing.

 

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