Since I’m one of the “creative types” around the office, I’ve been asked to do a video project in my spare time. Let me describe one scene for you.
A woman stands before the adobe hearth in her kitchen, cooking breakfast over an open fire. She’s barefoot. The floor is dirt. There are no furnishings, save for a rough wooden table and two chairs. The morning sunlight streams through cracks in her soot-blackened walls, making silvery patterns in the smoke-filled air.
If you could look into her eyes, you’d see lumps of scar tissue, the result of standing over cooking fires all of her life. If you could look at her lungs, you’d swear she was 60, but she’s barely 30.
This could be a scene from anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, but it was actually shot in southern Mexico. It’s this sort of rampant, organic poverty that drives illegal immigration.
African poverty is staggering: 300 million without pure water; 1 million children dying from malaria every year; 300 million people living on less than $1 per day.
Somehow, though, I feel a greater embarrassment about poverty in Mexico. It seems ironic that the wealthiest country on earth shares a border with a third-world nation.
My embarrassment leads to questions about our American views about wealth, and how they may have colored American Christianity.
Certain teachings of Jesus are not so popular in American pulpits: Jesus urging the rich young man to sell everything and give it to the poor (Matthew 19:21); Jesus praising the poor widow for contributing her only two coins (Mark 12:42); Jesus warning the rich of the woes of wealth (Luke 6:24); the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19).
We Americans have made a mantra of our theory that democracy, free markets, fair trade practices, and entrepreneurialism will end global poverty. It’s a bedrock conservative principle that poverty comes from bad choices and bad governments.
Which takes me off the hook, doesn’t it? If that young Mexican woman is poor because her country has adopted a set of failed political models, her poverty really isn’t my responsibility, is it? She’s a victim of bad politics.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I wonder what Jesus would say? I wonder how Jesus expects me to respond to the world’s poor—in sub-Saharan Africa, in Mexico, in Haiti, in America’s homeless shelters? Would a modern-day Jesus criticize the poor for bad economics, or would he criticize me for loving the lush life more than the hungry, the naked, the sick?
Has my first-world church been blinded by its wealth? How should Christians respond to the enormous challenge of global poverty, and the enormous responsibilities that come hand-in-hand with wealth and abundance?
