Throughout sacred scripture, we read that the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable hold a high place in God’s eyes and heart. In Hannah’s Song, she sings of God raising the poor and the beggar from the ash heap and setting them on the thrones of the princes. Centuries later, in her Magnificat, Mary praises God for casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly and vulnerable. She extols God for filling the hungry with food, while the rich God sends away with empty stomachs. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus begins with the words, “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” God’s Kingdom is so counter-cultural in a society where we vilify the poor, the hungry, and homeless. We accuse them of being lazy, living on the public dole, of not “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
We often associate the word ghetto as a phenomenon of the big city. You don’t have to live in the city to live in a ghetto. We isolate ourselves in our own ghettos, be they small towns, rural communities, suburbs, parishes, associating ourselves only with those among whom we feel safe and fearful of those who don’t look like us, talk like us, or worship like us.
Have you ever talked with someone who is poor or homeless and heard his or her own story? I have. Many of them lived in homes and communities just like ours. At St. Stephen’s, many of the men who spent the night in the parish homeless shelter are war veterans. What they experienced in war tore apart their souls, so much so, they find it impossible to return to their families and their former lives. Many of the homeless suffer from mental illness. Many have been bankrupt by an illness. Rather than repugnant or fearful, I found many homeless living heroic lives considering the suffering they have experienced.
St. James reminds us in the second reading to not make distinctions between those who have and those who have nothing. For it is the poor who are often “rich in faith” and the wealthy who are not. If God makes no distinctions as to who enters the Kingdom of Heaven, nor should we, as disciples of Jesus, make any distinctions.
