Is Poverty Inevitable?
Maybe we've lost our vision of the Kingdom...
Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for Me. For you have the poor with you always, but Me you do not have always.
(Matthew 26:10-11)
A friend of mine used to serve on a parish council.
He proposed that the parish begin some outreach to their neighbors in need: a food pantry, a meal, something like that.
Sadly, his colleagues on the council weren’t interested.
Someone even quoted Matthew 26 to him in a defeated sort of way:
After all, if the poor will always be with us, what can we do to help? Why even bother?
While the poverty rate in the United States has dropped, it’s still over 11% as of 2023. That rate might sound relatively low (and, in a sense, it is; thank God). But an 11% poverty rate means that close to 40 million people live in poverty across the United States.
In the face of such overwhelming need, dear reader, I see why people might shrug their shoulders and adopt a posture of defeat. I mean, what can any of us do to help so many people?
I’d like to push back against that powerlessness with a sense of urgency. In this Substack, I’ll argue that:
poverty is actually not inevitable, and
its presence in the world is a sign of our unworthiness.
(It’s the cheerful, upbeat stuff you’ve come to love from my writing.)
And we’ll start, dear reader, by contrasting the way we view almsgiving with the other core practices of the Christian life.
A Low Bar for Almsgiving
You may have heard people (like Fr Evan Armatas, for example) refer to the three-legged stool of the spiritual life: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. And we generally maintain a very high bar for these practices.
Take prayer, for example…
Saint Paul exhorts us to “pray without ceasing” in his first epistle to the Thessalonians. I don’t know about you, but I’m a long way from that goal: I still struggle to say short morning and evening prayers!
Unceasing prayer is a high bar, but it’s one we maintain as Orthodox Christians: we confess that we’re not meeting the mark, and we take daily steps to become people of unceasing prayer. Said another way, we live in the tension between where we are and where we need to be.
Now take fasting…
If you look at the Church calendar, we’re supposed to fast more than half the year. Taken to a deeper level, we’re supposed to fast constantly in that we’re called to live free to free of the chains of gluttony and lust. Man is supposed to eat to live, not live to eat, after all. We’re not supposed to live by bread alone!
Again, I’m very far from that goal! I struggle to keep the weekly and seasonal fasts. And the good Lord knows that my belly is too full, too often.
Constant fasting is a high bar, but it’s one we maintain as Orthodox Christians: we confess that we’re not meeting the mark, and we take daily steps to become people of unceasing fasting. Again, we live in the tension between where we are and where we need to be.
Now what about almsgiving, dear reader?
In his account of the Gospel, Saint Matthew shares the story of the Rich Young Ruler, who asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. When he insisted that he was already keeping all the commandments and asked what more he could do, the Lord told him what he lacked:
Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. (Matthew 19:21-22)
In my experience, these are perhaps the only verses in the Scripture that we read as if they don’t apply to us. Calls for unceasing prayer? That’s a message for us. Calls for constant fasting? Again, that’s a message for us.
But a call to sell all we have and give to the poor? Surely that only applies to monks and nuns, right?
Right???
When Saint Anthony the Great heard the above verses in Church one day, he realized they were directed at him. He sold everything he had, distributed the funds to the poor, and then went into the wilderness to seek God.
What if we are all called to a complete renunciation of property (one of the three great temptations we’ve reflected on in past articles)?
Most of us aren’t there—perhaps we’re not anywhere close to there. But we’re also not close to unceasing prayer, are we?
Perhaps we all need to live in the tension between where we are and where we’re called to be regarding not just prayer and fasting, but almsgiving as well.
Because doing so can address a big challenge the Church faces with her ministry…
The Values Gap
My buddy Christian and I used to do a podcast called “We Are Orthodoxy.” It was a chance for young adults to share their stories and explain why they remained connected to the Church or why they’d fallen away.
In one episode we interviewed Sean, a guy originally from the Bay Area. As he grew up, he realized that extreme poverty existed just down the road from him and his comfortable community: hunger, despair, incarceration, etc. When he suggested to parish leadership that they take steps to address the need all around them, they expressed indifference.
They had more important things to worry about, like the annual food festival.
But Sean never stopped worrying about his neighbors. In fact, he dedicated his career to helping people in need.
But, along the way, Sean drifted away from the Church. It’s not because he became an atheist or somehow lost his faith: quite to the contrary, Sean took the words of Jesus seriously. And those words include a call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
In his epistle, Saint James writes that “pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”
Perhaps Sean was looking for pure and undefined religion. If so, he certainly didn’t find it in the Church.
Shame on us for it.
The Springtide Research Institute often speaks about the “values gap” between young people and the faith traditions from which they fall away. Youth and young adults can become disillusioned when the churches that raise them don’t take seriously the issues that matter to them.
On one level, we can dismiss this gap and chalk it up to external, “secular” influence—thought I’ve already written ad nauseam about why that’s not a helpful way to approach postmodern realities. But when it comes to poverty, the Lord’s teaching is clear: we are called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
But if we’re not obeying the Lord’s command, and it causes people to fall away from the Church, whose fault is that really?
And this takes us back to the story we started with and the word of Jesus in Matthew 26. If poverty is inevitable, why get so worked up about it?
Well, dear reader, let’s take a closer look…
Is Poverty Inevitable?
If we search the Scripture, we will find words similar to what Jesus said in Matthew 26.
(And that shouldn’t surprise us: after all, it’s the same God behind all of it.)
In Deuteronomy 15, where the Lord offers instruction about forgiveness of debts and care for those in need, we read that “the poor will never cease from the land.” Taken out of context, that can lead to the same resignation in the face of inevitability that we discussed earlier.
But let’s look at the verse in full:
For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, “You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land.”
The Lord is both observing that poverty will persist and commanding His followers to address it head-on. Our response to the inevitability of poverty should be a posture of generosity, not despair: we’re called to open our hands, not shrug our shoulders.
However, is the Lord saying that poverty is inevitable?
No, dear reader. He’s not.
Let’s back up a few verses in the chapter, where we’ll find this:
There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.
Here we have, not a statement of inevitability, but a prophetic word: there will be no one in need among you if you obey the Lord and diligently observe this commandment.
And what is this commandment? To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and so forth.
So if poverty persists among us, dear reader, the cause is clear:
We have not followed the command of God.
We do not act like His sons and daughters.
We are unworthy of His name.
When Jesus tells us that poverty is inevitable, there’s a certain irony behind His words: oh faithless and perverse generation, the poor will be with you always because you persist in not heeding my Word.
Do you agree?
A Vision for the World
These are the thoughts that led me to work with FOCUS North America, a ministry which serves the poor by bringing together Orthodox Christians and community partners to provide much-needed assistance for local communities.
We do this because we dream of a world where everyone experiences and shares the transformative love of Jesus Christ.
And I do this because I believe that poverty is not inevitable.
I believe that, if poverty is still chronic and pervasive, it is a sign of our stiff-necked unworthiness.
What do you think?
Here’s a short video we put together for this Giving Tuesday. It reminds us all to take a break from our busy lives and focus on the need that’s right under our noses:
And here’s a video which gives a great summary of everything we do at FOCUS and all the ways we invite people into a life of service. If you’re not that familiar with our work, it’s a great introduction.
I hope you’ll consider giving to FOCUS this Giving Tuesday. We currently operate 11 FOCUS Centers across the United States, but I dream of the day we operate 100 FOCUS Centers in 100 cities across the country.
I dream of the day people anywhere and everywhere know that, when they’re in need, they can turn to the Orthodox Church. I dream of the day people seeking true religion know to seek the Church because they see us caring for widows and orphans.
And, beyond that, I dream of the day when there will no longer be poor among us because everyone is taken care of.
I hope you share this dream, dear reader.
And that you’ll help make it a reality by giving today.
Thanks for reading. Please sharing this with your friends!
Great article, thank you. Shared with my parish email group.
We can respond to all kinds of inevitabilities with generosity and action. I'm unemployed so I'm taking this blog post in a more abstract way than you may have intended it. Only be not resigning to the "inevitabilities" of the job market, the economy, etc. will I get myself back in a position to better help the poor.