Popular or not, helping the poor is what our Jesus taught. My response was that popularity is irrelevant. However, I was speaking to a very wealthy congregation, and repeatedly I received the question of whether or not I found the topic of helping the poor to be very popular. Recently I shared with a congregation what I considered to be a very mild presentation on our responsibility to the poor. People were to prioritize each other over and above power, property, profits, possessions, prosperity, and privilege. He called the rich to redistribute their wealth and inspired the poor to share or pool what meager resources they had among themselves for their survival. He came announcing the “rule of God” which Jesus repeatedly defined as people taking care of people. He came in the wake of Hillel’s golden rule and applied it to the poor. In the 1st Century, Jesus emerged among the Jewish economically impoverished and politically oppressed. We’re going to stand up amid tear gas! We’re going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!” (Sermon in Selma, Alabama Mathe day after “Bloody Sunday,” on which civil rights protesters were attacked and beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.) We’re going to stand up right here in Alabama amid police dogs, if they have them. We’re going to stand up right here in Alabama, amid the billy-clubs. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. The cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
He’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he’s 80. And if a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, some great truth stands before the door of his life - some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right. “Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they’re worth dying for. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. “Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. “There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.” ( Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam ) We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” ( Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence ) “And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” ( Letter from a Birmingham Jail ) “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. often spoke negatively about “keeping silent”, too. At this moment, Jesus calls them not to fear but to boldly speak out “from the rooftops.” This reminds me of how Dr. Jesus is seeking to inspire his followers as opposition mounts and their courage is starting to wane. In Matthew’s gospel, this saying is in chapter 10.
I truly do hope that truth and light will ultimately win, and I think Matthew’s and Luke’s use of this saying has much to offer us this week. I find great encouragement in the words of Thomas Carlyle: “For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever” ( The French Revolution, A History Part 1, Book 6, Chapter 3). This passage is one that I return to often.
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