An Open Letter to Belteshazzar Concerning Our Call to the Poor.

Dear Belteshazzar,

I hope this letter finds you well and blessed with a fruitful ministry. When last I left you things were so different than now when uncertainty and the dailyness of life are in such conflict. A mutual friend sought me out recently and during our many and varied ramblings it came out that you have taken a rather surprising position. So now I seek to relate what little I know in hopes that it may be persuasive in your Christian praxis. This issue goes beyond you though friend as I have heard ideas close to this whispered and shouted by others. This position of peculiarity is as follows, Christians should only work with and minister to the poor/sick/oppressed/aliens of this world. And no I will not begin my argument or even reference Jesus statement that there will always be poor as I revolt against such cliché arguments.

First off let us consider that often “poor” in the New Testament speaks to one of two ideas, either “poor financially” or “poor spiritually”. In verses like Matt. 11:4-5 and Matt. 5:3 Jesus refers to the poor in terms of our deficit of spirit not physical poverty like Luke 19:8. I choose to see the gospel as being spread to cure the sinful poorness we all suffer from and not to bring about an end to our physical poverty.

From the above idea we can then move into our great commission where Jesus calls us to spread the gospel to all nations and disciple them. This commission is void of any type of delineation that would have us focus our gospel ministry on any one economic class above another. We see what our true focus is to be in Matt. 26:11, and look then I suppose I have come to the aforementioned cliché verse. In the preceding verses a woman has poured expensive perfume on Jesus and the disciples are indignant because they feel that the perfume could have been sold and the considerable amount of money given to the poor. Jesus next statement is less an argument for us having a fatalistic notion towards the poor and more a call by Jesus to realize that He is the focus of everything and not our acts our alms and charity. In this way if we were to place on a great scale golden blocks adorned on one side with Gospel and the other side with Social Ministry I believe the Gospel block must fall below the level of the other side and in this way be our most apparent and necessary mission. But the other side would not elevate too highly and in this way we must be active and humbly persistent in our social ministry including working with the poor. This work should come naturally as we work out our salvation becoming disciples of Christ. To summarize this drawn out point. We are called to all the nations and not to a specific economic class or sub-culture and past this we see that Jesus and His good news are the center of our ministry and from this we move out telling the gospel and doing good works.

Finally dear friend let me comment on the following idea. When one states or believes that we are called to only minister and work with the poor/downtrodden/etc. this places us on a logic trail towards a sort of “election of the poor”. If we minister only to the poor then is the bible calling us to only seek disciples from the poor (economically)? In this way are we not narrowing Gods atonement to a select few? And past this are we not stating then that the elect are to not be decided upon by our sinful state or our inability to be saved by any act we perform but by which socio-economic class we are born into, fall into, or decide to stay in? In this case my friend then I am inclined to delay my search for employment immediately and indefinitely. Would not scripture give us then a schematic for which we could discern who was poor and who was not poor? I knew many farmers who survived off their small rice paddy and were content and lived a happy life in Kampuchea but would this person be a target for us as we consider them poor? What then of someone who was born in poverty but was raised up through Christian charity to a place where they made enough to live a comfortable middle class suburban existence?

This raising up of the poor in defiance to the wealthy, middle class, and others seems to be more liberation/Marxist dogma Belteshazzar than any proper understanding of the call of our Christian lives. If we keep Jesus as the center of our faith/focus/ministry then we will naturally seek to work with the poor and those poor blokes on that island that have not received the good news yet that we hear about so often. I sympathize with your thought though because how life-consuming the needs of this world can be. How often in my work in the shadows of the Mekong was I overwhelmed with the needs of just my neighbors alone that would have easily possessed my entire energy for years. I hope this pithy attempt at an argument above will be persuasive with your thoughts on the subject, the CEO’s of America would be thankful if you changed your mind. I often wonder if our current fervor to serve the poor is more a fantastic outpouring of our desire to see the gospel spread, or a guilt reaction to our own comfortable Americana existence and I would think that the two are in no way similar catalysts.

I will leave that to you my fellow worker in the land of the two great rivers. I hope you are in good health and that you have found comfort in the CD’s I sent you. While Free at Last may get back to the basics of the hip-hop scene I am confident in your minds eye that their later work will offer you much more.

Your devoted fellow laborer,

Diesel

The Pursuit: The Fight Against Myself and This World