Mark 12:38-44
November 8, 2009
We look at her with such great admiration…the widow who gave her last mite to support the church. But, I am fairly confident “admiration” was not the first word that came to the disciples’ minds that day when Jesus had them observe her at the treasury box. She must have looked weird. I mean really weird. Jesus had just told them how the church leaders “devour widows’ houses.” He was talking about the practices of taking the land – and all the income from that land – away from women after their husbands died under the pretext that the church would then care for the widows as the husband did. Knowing this, now they’re sitting on the curb looking across the street at a widow giving everything she has to the very organization that took her land and left her destitute. It must have seemed odd, to say the least.
But don’t a lot of people look odd to us? Aren’t there times when we see what choices someone makes and think, “Why in the world would they choose that?”
At the church I worked at during seminary, there was a man with whom I became quite acquainted. He had needs. Lots of them. And they were constant and urgent; he lived from crisis to crisis. And it really did seem like he had the luck of a pig in a giant hog confinement. Sometimes he came by to talk; sometimes he wanted help with this or that; and sometimes he didn’t show up for quite a while. And over my three years there we helped him a lot, though not every time he asked because our resources were limited as a small church.
One day he came and explained to me he needed $100 to pay the landlord to keep from being evicted. I knew the church didn’t have enough for that, so I gave him the money myself. The agreement was that he would pay it back. My feelings were incredibly mixed doing this, but, I told myself, I had $100 and he didn’t. I was not facing eviction, he was. So, I gave him the money.
Not too much later, he stopped by again and said he had been evicted. “Really?” I asked. “Yeah. I had to give the $100 you gave me to my friend who was really in trouble.” The mixed feelings turned into feelings of resentment. I didn’t get it. He, on the other hand, had no sense whatsoever that I would have a problem with this.
I felt like what I imagine the disciples felt like watching that poor widow – utter disbelief. He had a chance to help himself get through a crisis and keep housing – something one clearly must do to make it in this world. And he blew it. He acted in a completely self-destructive way – with my money. Not only was he evicted, but frankly he was not likely to see another dime from me any time soon. Sometimes I just don’t understand the decisions people make.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference as a part of my continuing education. The conference was put on by an organization called CCDA: Christian Community Development Association. One workshop was called, “Tear Down the Walls: Why the Poor Stay Poor”. One of the biggest walls this person talked about that kept the poor poor was a wall of misunderstanding. There is a socioeconomic cultural divide in our country, she explained, and without some understanding of it we will forever be misguided in our attempts to help people.
Now as is true whenever we talk about cultures, one must over generalize. That is always a dangerous thing to do, but I think there are some insights for us – those of us generally from the middle class culture of America – that might be helpful if we want to alleviate poverty. So, knowing we are dealing in generalizations, here are some cultural differences our workshop leader pointed out between the middle class and poor:
In terms of how one understands the future, most poor people believe in fate, while the middle class believes choice changes the future. Most of us believe you can directly affect your future with good choices. Many poor people, however, truly believe that no matter how good one’s choices are, you can’t really change your future.
Another related difference is in how we view time. For many people who live in poverty, the present is the most important. Whatever is happening at the moment has the highest priority. Everything is a crisis. If someone has a doctor’s appointment but on their way they get a call from a friend who needs a ride, the immediate crisis takes precedence over something that can be done another time.
Middle class culture is future oriented, and so time is to be managed. If we have a doctor’s appointment and a friend calls needing a ride, we realize that missing the doctor’s appointment will have future ramifications and so we don’t drop everything to go pick up the friend. We’re more likely to ask the friend to see if they can find another ride, or if they can wait an hour, or to simply say we can’t because we have a previous commitment.
With these differences in mind, think about my friend who had different ideas about how to use the money I gave him. I now realize that being evicted wasn’t the end of the world for him as it would be for me. He had friends who were used to people coming in and out during bouts of homelessness. I’m sure he had often had friends on his couch after they had failed to make rent. However, to not give a friend $100 when they are in crisis would violate a cultural value and would have put him at great odds with the community he depends on for survival. I suspect this is why he saw absolutely nothing wrong with it, and would have wondered why in the world I did.
There are many more examples. And I have, over the years, come to experience and appreciate many of these cultural differences. But here’s the important thing to remember: middle class cultural is normative. All of our institutions and systems assume it. We don’t even know it’s there, or even call it culture. Consequently, middle class culture is privileged. We judge negatively anything that deviates from this norm. We assume (without really even thinking about it) that our cultural values are better than others.
But that’s just not true. There is good and bad in all cultures – ALL. We could stand some critique from the cultural of some of our poorer brothers and sisters. Our culture is much more likely to breed conformity and lack of spontaneity. Our culture tends to build relationships based on contracts and obligations, not on support and sacrifice. We tend to prize self-sufficiency more than interdependence.
The big mistake we – well intentioned, middle class church goers – make is thinking that helping someone means helping them move from the culture of poverty to the culture of middle class. This expectation completely invalidates what someone values. It asks someone to leave what they know and become something they are not. The answer to poverty is not to make everyone who is poor into someone who looks like us. It’s not fair. It’s not good. It’s not Christian. It’s not what Jesus did.
So what did Jesus do? First and foremost, he makes people see. He opens their eyes to both the cultural differences and the arrogance of cultural exceptionalism by having some people sit down on the side of the road and watch what happens at the temple. Jesus points out to the disciples the stark and embarrassing reality: the widow is being exploited by the very same people who think they are trying to help her. The cultural critique is not of the widow, that’s for sure. He is exposing the problems with the normative culture.
Jesus lays it all out and makes us stare at the bare naked truth – and it’s uncomfortable. It was undoubtedly uncomfortable for the disciples to see their institutions exposed that way, and it is uncomfortable for us. We are reminded that even though we give our money and our time to help others, we rarely stop and look at how so much of what we do in our day to day lives actually contributes to keeping people poor. We rarely think about the fact that we judge the values of the people we try to help, and we believe they would be better off if they were more like us. That part’s not so fun to see.
When Jesus says to the disciples about the wealthy, “all of them contributed out of their abundance,” the disciples and we are to still have ringing in our ears the truth about the source of that abundance: they devoured the widows’ houses. They took back the land, and then doled out help to the widows as they saw fit, now that the widows were completely dependent on the church.
It’s all laid out for us too. The bare naked truth. We give money to the poor, but why are they poor? And do we really give money, or do we send them cultural expectations tied to dollar bills? Most of us are pretty critical of the decisions people make when we give them our money. Most of us have pretty clear expectations of what “good life skills” look like and expect some display of effort on the part of the person we give money to.
This all leaves us with complicated questions and no simple solutions. How do we, as individuals and as a church, really help the poor? No one is disputing how violent and horrible poverty can be. Valuing the culture of people living in poverty should never be the same as valuing or over-romanticizing poverty itself. We need to do something.
The CCDA has three words that guide what they do: Relocate. Redistribute. Reconcile. First and foremost, they say, you have to move from what you know to what someone else knows. For many in the organization that has literally meant moving to another neighborhood, into the culture of poverty. It has meant being neighbors with people before being their benefactors. It has meant listening, being wildly uncomfortable, being humbled, being angered, and loving. It is the necessary first step. Until we have lived a week as a widow with three children, no land or income, in a country where women can’t go out on their own we are probably not going to have any idea why the widow put every last cent she had into the church coffers. It may have been magnificently generous, and it may have been monumentally stupid. We can’t know without really knowing her.
Redistribute. The bottom line of poverty requires a redistribution of wealth. I know Cal Thomas would jump all over me for that. But poverty is, by definition, a lack of necessary resources. And that is caused by an unjust distribution of resources – not just money, but fertile land, health care, education, access to power, and on and on. And it’s a redistribution, so YES, that means people with more will – after redistributing – have less. To give out of wealth and expect to always still be wealthy is probably not a long term strategy to end poverty.
Reconcile. The truth is, real reconciliation can only happen after we relocate and redistribute. We have to value our differences and stop our efforts to change people just because we think something works for us. Only then – only when we accept the validity of other cultures and reduce the disparity between people can we truly help each other cultivate the good things in our lives and cultures and change the things that keep us from flourishing – as individuals and communities.
It’s time for us to sit on the curb and watch the widow at the temple; to sit with the tension we feel as people who want to help, try to help, but often share more blame than we would like to admit for the realities of poverty in the first place. We have to be honest – name both our genuine desires to help and our inherent complicity. We have to own our judgments based on cultural exceptionalism. Then in humility, we can go up to the widow and ask her, quite simply, “Why are you giving that money? It’s all you have.” Maybe in her answer we will hear how to better live out our obligation to protect the vulnerable and marginalized. Maybe, once we are honest about who and where we are and once we have risked to be in true relationship with people who live in a different cultural reality, the sophisticated answers to the complicated questions will begin to emerge. Maybe together we can find ways to truly help not just this poor person and that widow, but help end the cycles of poverty without destroying the culture of others. Amen.
