Christianity is as faithful to Christ as it is to the poor

[The Great Open Dance]

Any church that follows Jesus must work with the poor to liberate the poor. The church is as committed to Christ as it is to the poor. Jesus’s identification with the poor is absolute: “The truth is, every time you aided the least of my siblings, you aided me” (Matthew 25:40). Despite this statement, the church has more often tried to convert the poor than convert itself to the poor. It has preferred allying with the powerful who are rich in resources, to the neglect of the powerless who are poor in resources.

Jesus was powerless and poor in resources. This status enables him to see society the way God sees it, as basic equality distorted by an illusion of rank. We separate ourselves from one another so that we can exploit with indifference. This separation creates injustice: social stratifications that do not cohere with our universal status as children of God. Some social stratification is inevitable, but for certain persons to starve while others waste, for some to live in palaces while others are homeless, for some to consume needless “medical” care while others die from lack of basic medical care, is unholy.

Psychologists and sociologists have accumulated evidence that the rich practice emotional distancing techniques in their relation to the poor. This distancing plays out at crosswalks, for example, where expensive cars are less likely to yield to pedestrians than inexpensive cars. By blaming the poor for their situation (“poor people are poor because they’re lazy”), the rich justify their lack of compassion.

The Christian tradition calls this practice sin. Sin justifies its refusal to love by cultivating separation, then justifies separation by disparaging the objects of its indifference. Sin scorns for the sake of convenience, refusing to see itself in others or others in itself. Sin dehumanizes itself by dehumanizing others, forgetting that others are the sacred mirror in which we see ourselves.

Distorting our perception for self-advantage distorts our self-perception, turning ourselves into idols. Either everyone is cherished, or no one is. Recognizing this truth, the church sees Christ where society sees no one, loving those who have lost the game of success or can’t even play it. Through this love we free ourselves from the harsh gaze of judgment, so we can see and be seen with the merciful eyes of God. For this reason Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who show mercy, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5 ).

While we work for justice, we must practice charity. The practice of charity is a legitimate response to social suffering, but it can also deceive. Being charitable feels good. Some people profit from social suffering by exploiting labor, underpaying workers, denying benefits, and demanding unethical behavior of their employees. Then, these same people get to help the poor, whose situation they created, by practicing charity. They get to be bad but feel good, ensconcing themselves in pretentious self-satisfaction.

Because we cannot create a utopia, charity will always be necessary, but it must be practiced alongside social criticism. Charity must ask, “Why is this charity needed? Instead of feeding the hungry, could we eliminate hunger?” Charity must actively seek to be replaced by justice, the very same justice that Jesus envisioned in the kingdom of God.

In their liberating, healing ministry, churches co-create the kingdom of God with God. Each local church is an incubator of the kingdom of God, where we gather to imagine and enact what the world should be like. We do so freely, in the confidence that God lets us be us and lets the world be the world, so that both can offer surprise to divinity. Without freedom there is no community, only coercion and control. Hence, coercive power is expelled from the triune Godhead, and all church doctrines that thirst for power over are lies.

God is love, which acts upon us in the same way that the beauty of a painting or the magnificence of a symphony acts upon us; that is, by acting with us, not against us; by fulfilling us, not restricting us.

By co-creating the future with God, we feel the truth of Jesus’s assurance that “the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), a latent presence among the powers and principalities of the world. The kingdom of God is ahead of us as the goal of human progress and among us as we work toward that goal, dealing fairly with one another and working for the universal well-being that God intends.

The Christian tradition teaches that God is unifying love, and the Christian church strives to express the unifying power of God as Abba imagines it, Jesus defines it, and Sophia inspires it. Therefore, to paraphrase Paul, if the church speaks in the tongues of humans and of angels but does not have love, it is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if the church has prophetic powers and understands all mysteries and all knowledge and if the church has all faith so as to move mountains but does not have love, it is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).

God loves people, not the church. And God has a special preference for the powerless: the widow, orphan, immigrant, and indigent (Psalm 68:5, Deuteronomy 10:18, etc.) . Having confused themselves with the kingdom, and the kingdom with themselves, too many churches become committed to self-preservation even when they are no longer involved in kingdom creation. But a church committed to itself can no longer be committed to God, as we have seen: sexual abuse cases are kept quiet and the abuser is sent elsewhere to abuse again, while the abused are shamed and silenced.

The manufacture, concealment, and perpetuation of suffering by an institution created to disseminate the love of God constitutes apostasy. The Church of the Healer must commit itself to healing, in every way, but most importantly, in humility. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 226-228)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Felten, David, Jeff Procter-Murphy. Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2012.

Epperly, Bruce. A New Pentecost for Progressive Christians. Florida: Energion, 2025.

[surfered]

1. The poor, the sick, the imprisoned, and the stranger.

That’s pretty clear in Matthew.