THE BLOSSKDNESS# OF BRING POOR
Matthew 5:1-3 Ephesians G.10-12
March 10, 1968

"The smells inside the tenement — Number 18, 342 Bast 100th Street, Manhattan, were
eeee ambiguous. They were a suffocating mixture of rotting food, rancid mattresses, dead
rodents, dirt, and the stale odors of human life.

"This. was to be home. It had been home before: for a family of eight -— five kids,
three adults. Some of their belongings had been left behind. Some of their life had, too.
"The place altogether was about 25 x 12 feet, with a wall separating the kitchen
sections from the rest. In the kitchen was a bathtub, a tiny, rusty sink, a refrigerator
that didn't work, and an ancient gas range. In one corner (of the kitchen) was a toilet
with a bowl without a seat. Water dripped perpetually from the box above the bowl. The

other room was filled with beds: two double-decker military cots, and a big, ugly con-—
vertible sofa. There wasn't room for anything else. The walls and ceilings were mostly
holes and patches and peeling paint, sheltering legions of cock—roaches.

"This was to be my home.

"I wondered for a moment, why.

“Then I remembered that this is the sort of place in which most people live, in most
of the world, for most of the time. This or something worse.

"Then I was home."

(William Stringfellow, My People Is the Dnemyy p. 2) ;

That is the prologue to Wm. Stringfellow's autobiography, My People Is the Enemy:
it puts flesh and blood into the word "poverty": and however you respond to these words,

and the reality they describe, there is one position that rudimentary human decenoy
eliminates. That is that poverty - this poverty - is "blessed".

Poverty has been romanticized in literature. John Bunyon, in Pilgrim's Progress,
portrayed the poor man as a careful, simple, happy individual, grateful for his meagre »
belongings. That may have been true: that may have been true in this country in the
past. But it is not true today. Poverty is a domonic, dehumanizing, destructive force,
amplified by the visible affluence of our culture. Whatever poverty used to be, today it
is bad. It is, without any doubt, the most serious threat to the fiber and being of
our nation. Poverty, regardless of the wars declared upon it, looms as the strongest
enemy the American people have ever faced. It is, in no sense, blessed to be poor.

Yot we have before us, for our consideration, the first beatitude. In Luke it
reads simply: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Ged." And Matthew -
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." I+¢ is of some .
interest that the orthodox Marxist always refer s to the first beatitude to reinforce
his position that religion is the "opiate of the masses". The Marxist sees here an
emphasis on an other-worldly kingdom that anesthetizes men from their very worldly problems.
Of course, that is a ridiculous conclusion if one takes at all seriously the total life
and ministry of Jesus Christ. That, however, is the job of the Christian and not the
Marxist, and we might begin by puncturing the fantasy that Jesus glamourized and roman—
ticized the life of poverty.

Now having said that, it is necessary to acknowledge that he did, in fact, proclaim
a benediction for the poor or poor in spirit; and that he did, in fact, become a friend
and hero of the literally poor. That is one of the abiding, disturbing truths of the New
tvstament. He seems simply to have preferred the company of the poor rather than the rich.
He identified with the dispossessed, not the wealthy. He made his home among the peasantry,
not with the aristocrats. He was more comfortable at table with common men than at the
banquet table of a Pharisee. He went out of his way to identify with the poor: he was
one of them. But before we come +o any conclusions from this, it is necessary to under—
stand that when we talk about poverty and affluence in first century Palestine, we have,
moved into a social and economic structure entirely different from our own. sae

In the first century, a man was either rich or poor. If he owned property, he
was rich, and a member of a very select minority. ; . . i,

3 Be ~~

If he owned no property, but made his living working on land which belonged to
someone else, he was poor, and a member of a vast majority. In short, there was no
middle class: there were only a few rich men: and multitudes of poor .men.

The more important pursuit, however, is to discover what it was about these porcr
-osple that he found blessed? How was a poor man, also a "poor in spirit man?

- Would suggest three poesible answers.

First, and very basic, is the fact that material wealth -— particule ly in a
situcition where most people are poor — very naturally becomes the source of pride.

If If am rich, and everyone else is poor, it follows logically that I've either been
extremely lucky, or that I am better than everyone else. Human ego, of cov-se, is
inclined toward the latter. That is, pride is our problem, and being wealiay simply
makes it easier to be proud. The people Jesus was talking about had nothing. That
is, they had nothing - no reason <|Geparate themselves from their fellows: nothing
visible about which to be proud.

That is basic. A little more subtle is the fact that the poor man, by reason
of his poverty, is freer than the wealthy man. The poor man is free of the social
niceties, the rigid formalism, the oppressive rules of the’ wealthy. Jesus was a great
enemy of pomposity and phoniness. He detested the way the wealthy practiced their
religion, making sure all saw their piety, conspicuously giving their alms, keeping
every letter of the law and in the process forgetting its intent. The rituals and
liturgies of the rich can become an obsession. But the poor man ~ eats when he is
hungry, where he is hungry. ‘The poor man weeps when he is sad, and laughs when he
is happy and courses when he is angry. And I like to feel that Jesus found that
freedom “blessed".

The poor are certainly more aware of their dependence on each other than the
affluent. Part of the motivation behind collecting wealth, is to achieve independence -
to be dependent on no one. That, of course, is impossible, but it isn't even an
option for the poor man. He is dependent, and knows it, and therefore is better able
to acknowledge and express a genuine oneness with his fellows, than the man who
stands alone.

I believe it is a combination of these three characteristics that found favor
in Jesus' eyes. I believe that is why he could look out on a motley crowd of dispossessed
poor men and say, in effect "Congratulations! God's Kingdom belongs to you."

Now, if you happen to be poor today, the first Beatitude could be the source
of great comfort. If you happen to be poor you can be comforted by the fact that Jesus
Christ became poor: that his friends were people like you: that he favored people like
you over the wealthy: that he reserved a special blessing for people like you.

if you are not poor, you have a problem. And the fact is that no one here is
poor, or anything close to it. I know many people who are quite proud of their pil-
grimage from recs to riches, people who enjoy telling "how it used to be, and when
“y cluliuren express a premature wish for an expensive toy, I know I will fell them
that “I never had one". In fact, I already have. But you and I have never been
poor, nor are we likely ever to be poor - at least that jpoor. Therefore, if we want
somehow to crawl under the umbrella of the first Beatitude, we have a small problem.

The temptation, of course, is to interpret the Beatitudes as ethical imperatives,
which they singularly are not. Jesus did not say, "Become poor and you will then
inherit the Kingdom". Nevertheless this is how the Beatitudes are commonly employed,
in which case we have two options.

Wie can become poor. We can give away all our possesssions and assume poverty
for poverty's seke. Even tough Jesus did not ~ “scribe it as the way to achieve
blessedness, it would, at leest, put us in the category of people he called blessed.
But this is not the point: the Beatitudes were a proclamation: a statement that those
who were poor were blessed, and not an ethical imperative to be obeyed. Option number
one is noither velid nor realistic.

The second option is to interpret poor, or poor in spirit, as an idiom for a
state of mind, having nothing to do with material possessions. What Jesus meant, then,
was “Blessed are the humble-minded", and that is, in fact, the way the Greek word has

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been translated by J. B. Phillips. : That seems to clarify the matter a great deal. ae
It certainly moves the discussion into an area where we can begin to cope with it. vers
Humility is certainly easier to talk about than literal poverty. All we need to do,
then, to be remembered among the blessed,is to be humble. And yet the simplicity of
this is very deceiving.

Tumility is a universal virtue. It is difficult to become great in any real
sense without humility. But as soon as we try to become humble we find ourselves in
serious trouble. fT. S. Eliot put it this way: “Humility is the most difficult of
all virtues to ac -eve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself." Ip,

(Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca. 1927) ;

I believe that can be put in éven stronger terms. I don't think it ig possible
to “achieve” humility. Because as soon as we try, as soon as we see humility as a
goal to be attained, a funny thing happens.

One theologian describes it like this: “We must stop being proud and arrogant,
and become humble. When we recognize this, we say to ourselves, ‘We will strive with
all our might to be humble.' And what happens? To the extent that we succeed, we
become aware of how humble we are, and, try as we will, we are unable to avoid the
conclusion that it is pretty grand of us to be so humble. We really have been very
good about it - mich better than a lot of people we know. God must be pleased at
the splendid . character of our humility.

“hat has happened? We have become proud of being humble....." (Robert MoAfee
Brown, The Bible Speaks to You, p. 177-8) And, of course, it doesn't end there. ‘The
human ego is a marvelously flexible instrument. Recognizing that we are proud of
being humble only makes matters worse. For thon we are in danger of being proud of
the fact that we had the depth of perception to recognize that we were being proud
of being humble. And so on, ad infinitum,

‘The fact is that you and I cannot achieve humility in the same woy we are
able to achieve dexterity in a sport or a job. For as soon as we begin to achieve
anything, pride becomes part of the enterprise, perhaps on a motivational level.
That is the way we are. We cannot, by an act of will, become humble, or poor in
spirit.

Now where does this leave us, in respect to the first Beatitude? Our options,
obviously, have about run out. And it is precisely at this point, when wo see at
last that this is not a moral goal to be achieved; that there is absolutcly nothing
you and I are capable of doing to make ourselves humble, that the “Blessedness of
the poor in spirit" begins to take on meaning. It is at this point, after we have been
pushed to the brink of despair about our inability to do anything about our condition —
anything to propel ourselves within the blessing of Jesus Christ- that the Gospel
comes into focus.

Who were the people he called blessed? Whatever else they were, they had
become his followers. And one does not follow him far without becoming “poor—-in-
spirit". It happens; in spite of ourselves; in spite of our desire to think highly
of ourselves; in spite of our subtle tendency to feel proud about not fecling proud.

To follow Jesus Christ is to be reminded, perhaps very harshly, that there is
no such thing as a “self-made man"; that we are dependent on each othor: that regard—
less of what we have achieved on the basis of our own strengths, we are only what others
have helped to make us. ‘To follow Jesus Christ very far, is to be brought face to
face with the God who created us, whose air we breathe, in whose world we walk, and
whose very life has become our life. To follow Jesus Christ very far is to see on the
horizon the silhouette of a cross on which he died. The more we follow < the closer
we come to that ~ to that shattering moment of truth when everything we have - every—
thing we are-becomes nothing, but everything, because it was for us he died.

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me

Low Jesus ¢ Christ is to be oe in spirit.

New Testament reading this morning, from Paul's lettor Ye shes sine ae
\ished the man of faith to "be strong; to put on the whole emer of God;
of salvation and the sword of the Spirit." That seems contrary to

have been saying - but it is not. The life of discipleship is a

is a "race to be run and a battle to be won." It demands men of grea
and conviction. To be "poor in spirit" is not to be weak; it is not ero wid
-noncommittal. Nothing could be further from the truth.
it begins with an act of surrender. The life of discipleship begins in
has called a "Magnificent Defeat". It begins when, for the sake of.

- not for the sake of humility, not for the sake of our om ego-gratifi-
but for his scke ~ we become followers. ‘In that act of becoming, in that act
mder — his words fall on us;
pe enced are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven".

seein!