Reflection This Week
WHY WE DON’T GET IT

    We, you and I, Christians one and all, are rich, wealthy, and abundantly so even if we are in debt up to our ears. We have a home in which to live, food on the table, cash on hand, so many material possessions that we have to keep much of them in storage and have even forgotten that we have them. That is only for starters when we compare who we are and what we have to the rest of the world.

    A century ago 80% of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. Now 70% of the world’s Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. So why is it that Christianity is on the decline not only in Europe but in this “religious” country as well? Why is it on the rise in the poorest places of the world? Are we who are so materially blessed somehow missing something? Are we doing something wrong?

    Given all this, Joel Carpenter (as cited in Context, 01/08/A) is moved to ask: “What is it that we have to learn from these brothers and sisters in Christ…? The average Christian in the world today…is a woman from Africa or Latin America. Her family has little money. Her husband farms, and he scrounges up short-term cash jobs when he can. She tries to sell a few things at market. The children haven’t had their shots, and they get sick. She struggles to keep them in school, where there are no textbooks. The political situation is fragile, and the national government doesn’t get much done, while local officials demand bribes. Our sister reads her Bible, and its accounts of famine, plagues, poverty, displacement and exile, tyranny, cronyism, and corruption – which seem most distant to most of us in the global North and West – are immediately relevant to her. The bible is her book.”

    The Old Testament certainly speaks to those in poverty and living under some form of repression. Yet nowhere in the New Testament is anyone promised a rose garden if one comes to believe in Jesus. In fact, it is just the opposite, as Jesus seems to be constantly reminding his followers. He tells them (and us) that the only way to be true to his teachings is for them to divest themselves of their material abundance and truly live on the edge.

    That is not a message that wins converts, not in this country anyway. That is also not to say that poverty is good, that living on that edge is the goal, that one should be content with what one has – or does not have – and give thanks to God. That, in fact, is nonsense. We will, in fact, be judged by how we who are blessed take care of those who are less blessed -–the whole point of Matthew 25.

    What we do not get and what those millions of poverty-stricken converts do get is that our salvation both in the here and now and in the hereafter does not depend on how materially blessed we are but how we use those blessings. Our blessings are not a sign that God loves us more than those who are poor and the lack of material possessions is not an indication that one is somehow a sinner. Rather what the poor have learned and what we who are blessed often forget – or don’t get – is that God no one can take God’s place and nothing can or should become our god other than our God.   WJP