Luke 16:19-25, 26-31

Encountering the Real World

Two blocks from where I lived in Karachi was one of the many mohalla sections that pocketed the sprawling city.  These were shanty-towns that housed the thousands of people who crowded into the city each year, victims of floods or drought in their former homes who were hoping to find work, to become factory workers rather than farmers.  This particular one was home to more than a thousand people who lived in shelters cobbled from scavenged sheet metal, wood, cardboard.  There was no plumbing or electricity.  We passed it every day.

Downtown the streets were filled with beggars of every description – blind, crippled, deformed, needy.  They were a stark contrast to storefronts and shops that catered to the Westerners with their luxurious carpets, gleaming brass and intricate wood carvings.  The further back into the market you went, the more pathetic the beggars seemed.

Everywhere there were the children.  Their distended stomachs, discolored hair, and malformed limbs were testaments to malnutrition.  Their puss-filled eyes and open sores were evidence of diseases undiagnosed and untreated.  It was a crying shame, and I did.  I once wrote a friend, “you see with your eyes but you cannot let your heart see or you would go insane.”  However, those tummies, those eyes with their blank stares still haunt me.

Recently I saw a page of the St. John’s Bible, a one-of-a-kind project initiated by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN.  It is hand-lettered by a British calligrapher on calfskin parchment and wonderfully illuminated by various artists.  The Abbot of St. John’s was asked if the money used for the project couldn’t have been better used to care for the poor.  His reply, as quoted in Christian Century  (8/09/05), was “God’s commitment to the poor is embedded in scripture…The deeper we are drawn into scripture, the more we will be driven to address these issues in our lives.”  Read the Gospels and see this truth.

Poverty is a justice issue and economic justice is one of the concerns of MFSA.  Usually when we think “poverty”, we think in the aggregate – the issue overwhelms us both on a local level and on a global scale.  The issue is one, not of eradicating it, but of seeing poor people as God’s people – not as “untouchables” to be dealt with by government agencies or mission societies, but as people like us who happen to not have the same resources we have (money, education, opportunity), people whom God loves equally as much.  How can we share our wealth?

We have just celebrated Christmas, the fulfillment of God’s promise to send a Savior.  Let us read the Gospels and learn how to use our riches.