The other side of “Eden,” as Belize is so often described: Rum in Belize is dirt cheap and sold everywhere and takes a heavy toll in a country where the unemployment rate has been stuck around 50 percent for 10 years while more of the well-to-do and rich keep coming to play or live. (And then there’s the famous Belikin beer, which saturates Belize as thoroughly as Budweiser saturates the U.S. at every turn.) This is my friend in one of the villages, who wants to “be a better guy,” as he says. He deserves friendship and emotional as well as spiritual and some material support, as much as anyone wealthy and addicted to alcohol or drugs would deserve it.
(This is the first in a week’s worth of “Noon Wine” postings concerning the biblical poor.)
SCRIPTURES:
Luke 14: 12-24 (The Great Banquet)
Matthew 14: 13-21 (Feeding the 5,000)
KEY VERSES: (Luke: 13-14) “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
(Matthew 14: 14) “When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.”
My frequent home-away-from-home church, St. Andrew’s Anglican–which I featured a bit in Sunday’s posting–shares breakfast with the area’s homeless folks on the last Wednesday of every month.
Father Juan always makes it a point in the Sunday worship announcements to emphasize that the breakfast isn’t only about the food we cook and share. Just as important as the meal is being in communion with the homeless–meeting their emotional and spiritual needs as well as the food and material needs–and learning what other needs they may have.
“We sit down and eat breakfast with them and listen to them,” Father Juan reminded congregants last Sunday morning, as he always reminds them. “The homeless are hungry for someone to talk to. They are lonely and we need to know them.”
Handing over a plate of hot food and chatting a bit with a homeless person might make a church member feel good about himself, but it’s half-discipleship. Just giving someone a free breakfast is doing a sort of drive-by ministry for the poor. Complete discipleship is ministry with the poor–giving real time and attention to the homeless one that you cook for, eat with and spend time with.
The fullness of discipleship requires that the giver validate the humanity–the very personhood–of one in need.
Serving the poor or homeless requires nothing less, really, than honoring the one who has no place to lay his head and no guarantee of another hot meal any time soon. And never mind, as Jesus said, that “they cannot repay you,” because “you will be blessed” and “repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
And never mind the issue of whether the poor or homeless one is deserving of free food and your time.
In healing and feeding the 5,000, Jesus didn’t feel compassion for those “deserving” of healing or feeding. In fact, the puffed-up religious elites that Jesus rebelled against believed that the “lowly” people that Christ stooped down to be with deserved nothing.
As Dorothy Day put it, “The gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
This is beautifully written. Thank you.
Thanks, Reverend.
From today’s Daily Office:
Mid-morning reading (Terce) 1 John 3:17-18 ©
If a man who was rich enough in this world’s goods saw that one of his brothers was in need, but closed his heart to him, how could the love of God be living in him? My children, our love is not to be just words or mere talk, but something real and active.
__________
This reminds me that the poor are a metaphor for us all.
Are any among us deserving of God’s grace? No! Not one.
As we humbly receive the grace of God, we must then, with joy in our hearts, share it with His other children.
We are not as much lights in the world as mirrors, reflecting HIS light to shine into the darkness.
LK
Amen, mystic one. The bible with all its deep-running metaphors certainly recognizes the spiritual “poverty” of us all. Our love and compassion for others, or lack of us, would get some poor grades from the ultimate “teacher.”