Despising the Poor

Poor people have always been despised by the powerful ... poor people remind the powerful, I suppose, just how lucky they are, and maybe they're just one moment away from losing it all. Poor people also remind the rich of their social responsibility. The rich and the powerful don't like to consider such things, so they run away from reality, buttressing their lives with more and more things to prove to themselves how powerful and good they are, while despising the poor. 

Is it any wonder that Jesus held out very little hope for the rich to enter into the Kingdom of God? And Jesus isn't talking about something beyond death, although that's included, but the here and now. The Kingdom of God is always possible, here and now, not in totality, but in bits and pieces, and sometimes even big pieces, like when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and the Berlin Wall fell. 

With every kindly thought, every good deed, every effort to make life better for another, to make government the means of mercy, to provide good schools and decent jobs - here is the Kingdom of God. All of that, and more, is a part of God's creational intent, a part of God's reign, God's rule over time and history. Right now, yes, we can live in the Kingdom of God when we embrace the life of Christ and follow him in word and deed (here I speak to Christians). But every religious tradition, a reflection of the Spiritual Presence that creates faith, has the same option, the very same possibility.

But the rich fool and his barns, the rich man with Lazarus at his gate, the rich who despised Jesus and collaborated with Rome to kill him, will hear none of this.

It's always been this way, but these days, there's a certain and curious cache to it - what was reserved for drawing rooms and privileged conversation now has become "the American Way," and for many religious people, even a "christian" value.

The rich and the powerful have alchemized something evil into something "good." It's now virtuous, even godly, to despise the poor, to condemn them for their ways, to see them as undeserving, ineligible for even the crumbs of the table.

Something very wrong has emerged in American Culture ... and millions of Christians, bowing down, I suppose, at the altars of Mammon, have fallen into line on this one.

I don't understand how it happened, but I hope that people will awaken, that the Spiritual Presence that gives life will prod and prompt awareness, open eyes, that folks will see the evil, and reach for the Kingdom of God.