“He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” -Proverbs 14:31

In the verse from Psalm 82 in particular, I feel we are called to do more than just feed the poor. Feeding the poor is necessary; we must provide for their basic human needs so that we can then consider their spiritual ones. But if we support the corporations that force the poor deeper into poverty, if we ignore the huge problems in our public school systems, if we turn a blind eye to the ways in which many of our government’s policies keep the poor from prospering, we are defending the unjust and showing partiality towards the wicked. I don’t believe we can just feed the poor and feel we have done enough. In ways that we are too blind and comfortable to realize, we keep the poor in poverty, and this is not kindness. We keep the poor in pain and prevent them from imagining a better future, a luxury we likely take for granted.

What do we do? I don’t know. I think that the church (like, the big worldwide church) has become really comfortable with feeding people. It’s not hard. You feel as though you have done a tremendous service afterwards, and you have. But I think there is more that the church must do. They must be willing to be–and I am reluctant to believe it, but I believe it–political. I don’t think this means the church should endorse particular candidates, but I think it means they should recognize their role in the creation of a greater and more just social order. The problem of poverty, rather than its symptoms, must be addressed by the church and its members. Poverty is a social problem, not an economic one. For the first time in this country’s history, we have enough resources to keep everyone fed, with proper healthcare, housed, etc. There is enough to go around. But our attitudes and misunderstandings nature of poverty, and particularly our own greed, keep people without hope or resources.

“Love for the unlovely is part of the Christian ethic. Nothing short of a nation-wide surge of love for persons who are poor, not because they are poor but because they are persons; nothing short of a tremendous, nation-wide emergence of deep love between prosperous and poor will save the poor and the prosperous. In the final analysis we are not engaged in a war on poverty. Poverty is not the enemy. The enemy is the socially structured pattern of attitudes in the larger community of the prosperous. The attitudes of the prosperous, more than anything else, make people in poverty stay there as outcasts, ranked as indecent, hostile in deeply sullen ways, hopeless and without high dreams. These are the unlovely, whose redemption waits for love generated in the hearts of the prosperous.” -J. Edward Carothers, Keepers of the Poor

The love we must have for the poor is not the kind of love that will necessarily give us immediate, feel-good rewards in return.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.