Poverty

Deuteronomy 15: 7-11

2 Corinthians 9: 6-8

Matthew 25: 31-46

Poverty

If you have a dollar bill, I want you to take it out of your purse or billfold and wave it at me. This is not an offering. Your money is safe. What can you buy with that small amount of money? Here in our country that dollar will buy you a McDouble Hamburger. Or a small order of fries. But not both. Could you live on it – if that were your total income? Yet, today, over one billion people on Planet Earth live in absolute poverty, earning less than a dollar a day. Then too, nearly one billion people go hungry and 40,000 children a day die from hunger or hunger-related diseases.

But you may not care too much about the problems of people half a world away. If not, we certainly have enough poverty here at home.  In the United States, one child in five lives in poverty, one child in five is born poor, one in three will be poor at some point in their childhood.

According to Habitat for Humanity, one poor family in seven lives in housing which is severely physically inadequate, having no hot water, no electricity, no toilet, and neither a bathtub or a shower. Here in Morgan County 40% of the housing is physically inadequate, lacking at least two of those basics, and most all of those houses inadequately heated for winter.

Approximately 43.6 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008. Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.. Poverty rates among children in single-mother families are particularly striking. 55 percent of such children under six lived in poverty in 1998. The figures were even higher for black children - 60 percent; and Hispanic children – 67 percent.

Let me add a word here about the nation's 300,000 homeless. The homeless population is 43 percent single men, 37 percent families with children, 13 percent single women, 7 percent unaccompanied minors.

Poverty is a big problem, a very big problem. And it is not out there in the distance, it is here around us. It not only means those people caught in poverty are hurting, it hurts our communities, it hurts our economy, it hurts the future of our nation, because it takes away opportunity for children to grow healthy and well educated to make the discoveries and advances we need to continue to be a strong nation.

We are raising far too many children, 3.5 million, in this country in third world conditions. 3.5 million—that is over 3 times the number of people who live in Columbus, Ohio. We have far too many children in our local schools on the free breakfast and lunch program.

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Most of us are in the same position we have more than enough food, warm comfortable homes, plenty of clothing, decent cars, and some small measure of luxuries.

Most Americans believe that a person should enjoy the full fruits of his or her labors, however abundant. Yet, how much is enough, and when does making more and more money become a social injustice? Since 1980, the average net worth of the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled (to $18.5 million), while that of the poorest 40 percent has fallen by 63 percent (to $2,200).. Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about 50 times the salary of their average employees. Now, the average worker would have to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO will bring home in one year.

We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 of one percent of the wealth, while the top 1% control 42.7% of the nation’s wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can our nation endure?  

In 1999, Barbara Ehrenreich, who holds a Ph.D. in Biology, tried an experiment. She changed her clothes and climbed down the social ladder to be a person living on minimum wage; to become a part of the so-called working poor. Being trained as a scientist, she took careful notes. She detailed her experiences in the book Nickel and Dimed. One after another she took six jobs, for a minimum of a month each. She worked as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She drove a car, but made herself live each month only on what she could earn – mostly at $6 and $7 an hour. This meant living in the cheapest lodgings--trailer parks, motels, downtown hotels and eating a narrow, bland diet.

Getting a job wasn’t all that difficult. She also considered herself to be an exemplary worker. But her first finding was that it is almost impossible to work for those wages and survive. For instance, monthly earnings as a waitress in Florida were $1,039. The cheapest rental she could find was a $500 efficiency, and food, gas, laundry, utilities and phone and toiletries came to $517, leaving her $22 for everything else. She moved to Maine, hired out as a house cleaner, scrubbing young yuppies’ houses, making $6.65, and paying $480 rent for a room, and so on.

Her second finding was that the jobs often involved exhausting effort, and overtime, and in some jobs she literally worked by the sweat of her brow so that all she wanted to do at night was watch TV over her dinner and fall asleep.

She endured humiliation, abuse, and routine violation of privacy, and sometimes had to surrender basic civil rights. As a waitress she was told that her purse could be searched at any time by management. There were rules against talking on the job. Constant surveillance, being written up by the shift supervisor, and being ‘reamed out’ by managers were all customary parts of the job; also being  subjected to drug tests (which were most humiliating to say the least.) After a while, she felt she was not just selling labor but her freedom and her very life.

I knew little of such poverty, such struggles until last year, when people started coming to Trinity for help. People who were caught in the cracks, making a little too much to get aid from the various agencies and organizations around, but not enough to make it through to the next pay check. A medical bill coupled with an electric bill all at same time, a dead battery in a car, running out of diapers three days before the next pay check. I have seen the faces of local poverty. Except for the clothes, and perhaps teeth that can’t afford a dentist, they look surprisingly like you and me. They come embarrassed to ask for help, but so in need they do. They feel too embarrassed by their clothes and situation to think of coming to church with us, because we look different, we live different. We are worlds apart from them.

When I meet with these people I so often think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But God’s grace is there for them too.  God’s love is there for them. You and I, knowing God’s love, and living with the abundance he has provided us, are his instruments for extending that love and abundance to them

As Jesus himself told us very plainly, “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” And as St. Paul later admonished us, “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.”

I hope each of you will sow generously for the least of these brothers and sisters, for if you do, you are doing it for Christ as well.

Amen