June 30, 2024
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Lamentations 3:22-33; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
The Christ of our Poverty
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
With this statement, Jesus began his Beatitudes. We don’t associate blessing with poverty, and poverty with blessing. Poverty – whether it be of the spiritual variety or the financial kind – isn’t something we seek after. We try to avoid it if we can. But to Jesus, there’s something blessed that accompanies poverty.
Our three scriptural readings today all contain poverty of some sort or another.
The book of Lamentations was written during the Israelite’s exile in Babylon. They’d been forced from their homeland and now they lived as captive people in the land of their foreign conqueror. Would they ever return home? Israel was a brokenhearted people. They were poor in spirit.
But in today’s reading, we hear such sweet words of comfort. They’re words of blessing! “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases! His mercies never come to an end! They’re new every morning! Great is your faithfulness!” Blessing in the midst of their souls’ poverty.
Paul writes to the Corinthians about the poor believers in Jerusalem. The temple system in Jerusalem collected alms to help the poor – the widows and orphans. But the followers of Christ had been cut off from these funds. So now they had no financial safety net. Paul was collecting an offering from the Gentile congregations he’d established to provide aid for these impoverished Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.
And in the gospel reading, we encounter two individuals. At first blush, it seems like they’re polar opposites. But under closer examination, what they have in common – what most matters – is their poverty.
The first person we meet is Jairus. He’s an influential man. Jairus is the leader of the local synagogue. As such, he carried prestige and privilege. He was highly regarded by his community. And probably, he was fairly well off financially. Not hurting, anyway.
But something occurred which stripped him of all the ways he’d been rich. This event showed him just how poor and powerless he was. Jairus’ beloved daughter was ill, to the point of death. None of his social and religious influence, none of his wealth, could change this cold, hard reality one bit. Jairus was empty-handed. He was poor.
The second person we encounter is a nameless, chronically ill woman. We know Jairus’ name; we don’t know hers. Jairus had status and power; this woman flitted among the margins of society. In the synagogue, Jairus was the leading man; this woman’s sickness rendered her ritually unclean, unable to enter the synagogue. Jairus was continually surrounded by people; this woman was an outcast. She had no financial resources to speak of as she’d spent everything on futile cures. In so very many ways, she was no stranger to poverty.
When Jesus comes to town, both Jairus and the woman seek him out. And they both come to him in their poverty. And it’s in their poverty that Jesus meets them.
Poverty comes in many forms:
• We can be financially poor
• We can be morally bankrupt
• We can be fresh out of options
• We can lack companionship
• We can have poor health
• We can be tapped out of energy
• We can run out of time
So many ways to be poor. We don’t like being poor – in any way. We run from it. We try to pad our circumstances so that we can build a wall against it. Poverty reminds us that we are finite. Our life is a bucket, and eventually, we’ll expend everything in it. We’ll be left without a drop.
As an extreme example of the steps we take to deny our poverty, there’s the story of the rich Texas oil baron. With all his wealth, it troubled him that he couldn’t take it with him when he died. And then one day, he seized upon an idea of how he could, actually, take his money with him.
Eventually, he died. And at his gravesite, an enormous hole was dug, much larger than for any ordinary grave. Next to the pit, a crane suspended a solid gold Rolls Royce. The rich Texas baron was grotesquely propped behind the driver’s seat, his cold hands secured to the steering wheel.
And as the solid gold vehicle was lowered into the hole, a voice from the crowd could be heard saying, “Now, that’s living.”
We want to deny our finite nature, our poverty. But the problem is that there is a blessing, a kingdom blessing, that we can only receive in our poverty. In denying our poverty, we lose the blessing.
And that blessing is compassion. Our English word means, literally, “to suffer with.” Compassion is something that’s born of pain, it’s born of poverty. In our own suffering, we come to recognize the need of others. We can empathize with them because we’ve been there ourselves. We know what it is to be tapped out. And so when we see it in others, our hearts join with them.
This compassion allows us to approach our impoverished neighbor with understanding rather than judgment. Instead of pretending that all is well, we can dwell with them in their vulnerability. Compassion borne of our own poverty allows us respond with tender compassion rather than cold pity.
The Christian writer Henri Nouwen put it this way:
“Compassion means to become close to the one who suffers. But we can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable ourselves. A compassionate person says: ‘I am your brother; I am your sister; I am human, fragile, and mortal, just like you. I am not scandalized by your tears, nor afraid of your pain. I, too, have wept. I, too, have felt pain.’”
In recognizing our own poverty, we’re filled with the blessing of compassion. Our emptiness creates a space, a void, which divine compassion then fills. Poverty becomes the foundation for a community sustained by the wellspring of Agape Love.
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul framed their giving in terms of our Lord’s poverty. He reminded them of Jesus’ generosity to us. Jesus had been rich, rich with the abundance of heaven. But for our sake, he poured himself out. He emptied himself of all his divine privilege. He entered our reality. He took on our finite, limited, impoverished form. And it was through his poverty that we have gained the riches of heaven: endless forgiveness, healing for our every ill, life without end, the restoration of all things in the harmony of God’s love.
In coming to dwell among us, Jesus embraced our vulnerability. He experienced want and homelessness, pain, grief and sickness. All this was so that he could extend his compassion to those he encountered in his ministry: like Jairus, like the nameless bleeding woman, like the dying daughter. In his divine compassion, he embraced them and blessed them with the healing that only he could give.
A cynic may point out, that, yes, he healed them, but at some point, they all died – Jairus, his daughter and the woman. All of them died and were buried.
This is true. And in this life, the one certain thing is that all of our life buckets will eventually become fully emptied. We are finite. All of us will die. Our lives will end with the full poverty that death claims.
But, as with all other poverty, this is not something that we deny. We don’t run from it. Rather, we call to mind the words of the Ash Wednesday blessing. As the ashes are smudged on our forehead, we hear the words, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
As the writer of Lamentations said, we shall all put our mouth to the dust. We have come from the earth, and to the earth we shall return.
But our hope, even in the face of this last greatest enemy, is in our Lord Jesus Christ. In his own final destiny, he didn’t run from his cross. This was his last and final generous act of love, to pour out the last of his vitality, the last of his breath. He, too, put his mouth to the dust, and died. He died in complete poverty: condemned, naked, scorned, and buried in a borrowed grave.
But in his poverty, we have become marvelously rich. He took our sin and gave us his righteousness. He took our death and gave us the life without end. He took our alienation from the Divine and gave us his perfect union. In his poverty, there was blessing, blessing in abundance.
This is the Christ of our poverty. Poverty brings with it profound blessings that can only spring from it. In facing our own poverty, there we discover the hidden blessing: compassion for our neighbor. The compassion wrought in poverty brings the blessing of community. Here we find that we are not alone. We were never alone.
And mostly, Christ comes to us in our poverty, and he brings with him the abundance of heaven: life, forgiveness, and most precious, HOPE. Hope that, beyond every empty bucket, there is a wellspring that will never run dry. His mercies are new every morning.
