The Christ Of Our Poverty

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.