Home of Parrish W. Jones

Becoming Servant Leaders:
Being with the Poor
By Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.
©2005 All rights reserved.

 

2 Corinthians 9:6-9
Psalm 82
Isaiah 58:6-11
Matthew 25:31-46

 

This morning we come to consider what it may mean for us to be with the poor. This concept may be new to you. You have heard of charity and giving to those in need. Some of you have, on occasion, had an experience of actual contact with the poor through a food bank, clothing closet or being pan handled on the street. However, living in the suburbs means that unless you intentionally seek out the poor you can spend nearly your whole life without ever seeing a poor person and certainly without forming a real relationship with a poor person.

Jesus tells us that when we minister to someone who is poor or in need that we have ministered to him. We often do not get the point that he continues to say that our failure to minister to the poor is failure to minister to him. It is important to recognize that Jesus is not asking of us anything that he was unwilling to do. One of the primary themes of the gospel is that although Christ was God, he surrender every divine privilege to become human, to live among us and to suffer all that we suffer including abject poverty, rejection, persecution and death.

I have always preached sermons on the poor and the need of Christians to be more charitable. I have been involved in one way or another with programs for poor people and in advocacy for the poor all my ministry, however, until my first summer working with Summer Youth Employment in Tallahassee, I had never known any poor person very well. Then when I moved to Appalachia to serve my first Presbyterian Church, I got to know intimately some very poor people. I met a woman and her family that lived in an old coal company house that barely had windows, had no in door plumbing and no door knobs on the doors. She locked the house with a chain and pad lock.

We became friends and I never tired of hearing her wonderful testimony that had the rhythms of a primitive Baptist but the theology of liberation she learned from her pastor and my friend, Don Prange. What I learned from her and many others in her community was that poor people are persons of amazing dignity. While life is hard, they still live with joy and hope.

One of her hopes was to become a homeowner. Eventually, after a very taxing struggle with the owners of her home and those of her neighbors, she and her neighbors bought the houses they had rented for years and received a community improvement grant for water and sewer infrastructure.

We all have prejudices and most of us who really do not know many poor people very well have many prejudices. Perhaps, they are prejudices taught us at the dinner table, reinforced in church, and by our culture. Poor people we are told are lazy, unmotivated, alcohol and drug addicted, violent, dumb, dirty and out to get something for nothing.

My 6 year old grandson even has a few prejudices. One day we were waiting with my sister on a bus when I said something to her about our work with the homeless at our church and mentioned that Patrick had been with us to help serve them breakfast. He said, "Grandpa, I've never seen a homeless person." I said, "Maybe you just didn't know the persons were homeless. How would you know a homeless person?" He responded that they are dirty. Such is a common perception. I told him that I would let him know when we saw a homeless person which I knew we would because we were going to the church as part of our tour. Sure enough in the bathroom at the church one of the homeless men was bathing. When we left the bathroom, I asked Patrick if the man in the bathroom was homeless. He said he didn't know. "Why not?" I asked. "He looks like everyone else," he said.

I can tell you the facts about homeless people, but facts seldom dispel prejudices we have about the poor. Real life experiences will. That is why Jesus told us not just to give money for the poor, but to minister. Then we will discover that many who are poor work hard for what little they have, love their children and are relatively good parents, are faithful to their churches (NYAPC has at least ten members who are homeless), and often more honest than most well off persons we know.

But prejudices die hard and mine were hardest to kill. Even after meeting the few truly poor people I had met in Appalachia, I went on thinking of poor persons as being abject and sad people. Then I went to Mexico for the summer in 1992. Like most Gringos, I went there to help the poor. I came home transformed in heart and mind by my experiences.

I met men and women and children who lived in, at best, a cinder block home with a tin roof. They may have had a hose pipe run into their yard but were just as likely to have to carry water a block or more from a public water faucet. Many lived in homes built of two by two's, plastic, and cardboard. They all worked or tried to work hard. Many worked harder every day than I had ever seen but a few Americans working. Yet, at 7 on Wednesdays. 9:30 on Sundays and 6 on Sunday nights they were in church singing praise to God for their lives.

The church in Agua Prieta provided many ministries that churches in urban America do: food pantries, clothing closets, women's support groups, self-esteem groups, alcohol and drug rehab programs, job training, libraries, computer labs, and so on and so forth. They tried to create a family away from home for the hundreds of young adults who had come there from the south to find work in the factories, got married and lacked the family systems to deal with becoming parents of infants. Mary Ellen, Jason, Christy and I worked with the medical ministry, construction projects, mission groups and the like.

One night I was having dinner with a mission group from Ohio that was about to leave. I asked those at the table what they would take back with them. One of the women shared the characteristic response of so many of us, "I'll never feel sorry for myself again." I had to bite my tongue not to say, "At least, until the next time you do" because no matter what our experiences, at times we feel sorry for ourselves. Instead, I told her that I hoped that was true. However, I went on to say that I hoped that it would change the way she lived, shopped, gave her money, and most importantly, how she thought about poor people. Then I hoped she would also do something that would bring lasting change to her community to bring justice to the poor.

That is what my experience taught me. It was not until several years later that I met Pedro and Miriam, a father and teenage daughter who came to Agua Prieta to work and hopefully make some money and then return home to Chiapas, the southern most state of Mexico. They ended up staying and the whole family has come to Agua Prieta. One brother eventually returned home to Chiapas. Pedro and Flor began building a house. At first it was a 12 by 20 cinder block house with no windows or doors in the openings. They often housed 20 family members. When it wasn't raining, which it often isnÕt in the dessert, some slept in the yard. There was no electricity or water.

One son came to the U.S., an undocumented worker. He has been working in a restaurant for about five years now. Because of his undocumented status he had to miss his sister's wedding four years ago. As is the case for 99% of undocumented foreigners, he came here to help his family. He lives with several other men, works in the restaurant, goes to church where he spends all his free time and where he plays in the music ensemble that leads worship. He sends money home for two purposes. First to finish his father and motherÕs house that now has a nice bathroom, kitchen, electricity, heat and air conditioning and exterior doors and windows. Their son is also building a house next door to them that he hopes to go back someday to live in. Like most Latinos, he dreams of going home.

These are the reasons Jesus taught that we should minister to the poor and that we should see them as if they were he. Then we would never look again on the poor with disdain and through them we would know him. I wish I could share with you all the wonderful poor people I met this past year while supervising the income tax preparation program. There were some disappointing persons, but I have met enough middle class and rich freeloaders to know that not just poor people take advantage of the system. The majority are hard working people who simply earn too little doing jobs the results of which we enjoy but seldom appreciate: cleaning buildings, cooking our meals, tending our lawns, repairing our cars, constructing our buildings and highways, cleaning our streets, collecting our trash, and so on and so forth. I could tell you more stories, but Jesus calls you to experience your own.

So justice is not just how we treat but also how we think about people. The discipline of being with the poor in some concrete way that permits us to get to know real poor people is about knowing the poor and knowing JesusÑwhat their life is really like and what they really want. It is about a deeply spiritual relationship that binds us to Jesus and helps us to live the Proverb: "The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern." (Proverb 29:7).