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December 7, 2003 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 7, 2003

Minding the Poor

One often says there are few absolutes in the world, but one sad absolute, at least in the world as we know it, is that the poor will always be with us, as goes the teaching of Jesus the Christian New Testament. There is no doubt that Jesus had a great empathy for the poor, and the four gospels that deal primarily with the teachings of Jesus bring up the problems of the poor constantly. (It is interesting that as the New Testament moves into the writings of Paul, the poor are rarely mentioned.) Two of the best known of Jesus’ teachings on the poor are:

      Mark 14:7: For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them . . .

And in response to a wealthy young man who professed his love for Jesus and desire to follow him, asked what he could do to enter the kingdom of heaven:

      Mark 10: 21: And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

The young man, of course, walked away, unwilling to part with his wealth. A couple verses later says how Jesus responds:

      Mark 10: 25: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

This test Jesus made of the young man may indeed be the best test for any of us about what we value at the deepest level. I remember when J. Paul Getty’s grandson was kidnapped, and a ransom was demanded of, I think it was three million dollars (not all that much to a billionaire), and he refused to pay; that is, until the kidnappers sent the grandson’s ear in a box, and the media publicized the fact. I think most of us here would not want to test the mettle of a kidnapper if it was one of our children or grandchildren.

Yesterday, Dec. 6th, was also the Buddhist Day of Mindfulness for the Poor. The term mindfulness means to be aware, to be conscious, but it made me think about minding in its dual meanings; that is: “I’m minding (taking care of) the children. Or “Do you mind if I take your wallet? Of course I mind!” The questions that arise are these: How much do we really mind the poor, that is, both react to and have concern for, the poor? And: What does it mean to be poor in this country of such great wealth?

It is a big subject to tackle, but what rose up in my thinking was one of the most interesting men I have ever met, and you will see why.

When I was early in my teaching career, I used to see a man come and pickup his daughter in a battered truck, and I would see him out mowing yards in the prosperous neighborhood that was near the school. Now, none of this was out of the ordinary. This town had a pretty normal distribution of income groups, and our school had perhaps a bit more on the upside of the scale. What changed in my attitude, or more accurately, my curiosity, towards this man, came from a colleague who knew his story. I do not have a clue now as to what led to this discussion we had, but what I learned astounded me, more then perhaps than it would now thirty years later. It was an unusual story, though, then as now, but it was a story about living up to one’s beliefs. Not something most of us are all that good at, or struggle to do, at any rate. In the next couple of years, I became better acquainted with him, and found out that he was, indeed, a most unusual person.

To give him more dimension, let me call him Alex, a man then in his late thirties or early 40s, with a wife and this little girl who was then seven-years-old. Alex had been raised in the so-called Southern Aristocracy. His family were very wealthy, and he had been educated in private boarding schools, went to a good private college, and then to Harvard Law School, from which he was graduated near the top of his class. He passed his bar exams with flying colors, and was recruited into one of the most prestigious firms in the country. This had been the pattern of the male members of his family for at least three generations. He worked for the better part of the 1960s in this firm, then to the dismay of his family, he quit without warning. He literally walked away from his job one day. His father tried to get him to see reason, and was sure he could get him reinstated, but Alex said he did not want to go back. In fact there was nothing that would ever make him return to the practice of law. His father then gave Alex an ultimatum: either go back to the law firm and pick up his work where he left off, or he would be cut off without a penny from his family. Alex told his father that he respected his position, and would just have to do without the law or the family money.

Alex soon realized that it was not so easy to get along when you have to rely solely on your own resources. The job market in the late sixties was not bad, but Alex’s problem was that he was over-qualified and job after job he was turned down because they figured he would leave for something better. (I think he was by nature very honest, and no good at dissembling or lying, which is certainly a virtue, but it might have made it easier for him to get along.) He found himself working at all kinds of jobs just to get enough money to eat and pay for a place to sleep. Night after night he came home exhausted in a way he had never been even during the strenuous law school days. He also found himself cut off emotionally, for the people he had grown up with, gone to school with, were people of privilege like himself. He stood out in the laboring pools, by his demeanor, his speech, his knowledge: all things that were just part of him and not easy to disguise. Alex got depressed, and wondered if he should go home and ask for help, but he knew his father would only demand he go back to the law, and he felt strongly that he was not cut out for the law. He would have liked to please his father, but no matter how much it disappointed his father, he would not return to the practice of law. His father was a proud man, an unyielding man, though Alex and his father had generally been close. But Alex knew full well that his father would not bend, nor could he. So, cut off, no other resources, for he was too proud to go to any friends for help, he looked for alternatives. And, he also began to look with fresh eyes on the kind of system we operate within in this country, and felt himself becoming more alienated than ever.

Alex was reared in the Episcopal Church, though he said he had never been all that spiritually oriented, but he found verses of New Testament scripture coming to him: The poor will always be with you. Seek not the things of this world, but seek rather the kingdom of heaven. A rich man can no more get into heaven than a camel can get through the eye of a needle.

Those of middle years, we who came of age in the 1960s, remember that one of the outgrowths of the so-called Hippie movement, was the Jesus Movement. Jesus Christ Superstar, the big musical hit by Andrew Lloyd Weber was about this “groovy” new look at the man Jesus. Jesus was anti-establishment, so these young people, became anti-establishment. They also gained the dubious name of Jesus Freaks, to contrast them with their hippier peers. Alex was drawn into this and began what I would term a reinvention of himself as one of, if not the poor, certainly the working class. While the vast majority of young people of that age were striving to make it big, Alex was going in the opposite direction. While most of the young people came from either the middle or working class and were working to move up the ladder, Alex who had been born at the top of the ladder, was moving down it even faster. And while most people have limited choices about how high they rise in economic terms, Alex who had had it all, found he was in many ways limited too, because he really had always been clueless about the struggles of the poor and working classes. He had no conception that it is not all that easy to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, especially when you do not have any bootstraps to begin with. He had such an empathy for the poor that he could no longer live as a man of means without feeling it was all a sham; that he was doing what all wealthy people do in exploiting the masses of poor and laboring people-at least that is how he came to see capitalism.

After two or three years, he got the idea to start a lawn mowing and landscaping business, which in the early seventies was not nearly so wide spread as it is now. Almost in spite of himself he made a success of it. He had joined an evangelical religious group and identified strongly with the Jesus movement. He saw Jesus as the epitome of the right way to live, which was an ideal kind of communism where people shared everything, shared the work and the rewards. Many of the members of this group went to work with Alex and they would split the proceeds evenly. A couple of years into this venture, one of the men working with him, made off one night with most of the equipment and Alex was back to square one. He decided that the problem with communal living was that not everyone in the community had the same regard for the meaning and message. He decided he would just work by himself, and give freely to the church and to the poor. He met the young woman in this group who became his wife, and they had the one child, and he was still mowing yards for a living. That is what he was doing when I became acquainted with him, and was still doing so when I last heard of him.

As I learned more about him, it was only natural that I would get around to asking him if he regretted his decisions. He said he did not regret anything except that he was estranged from his family. He said the main thing that he could never change, nor would he have wanted to change, was that no matter how little money he had, he still had a wealth of knowledge from his privileged upbringing. He saw that the greatest challenge to the poor in this society was learning, the lack of knowledge, the lack of understanding about practical things. So much rests on how much we can learn while we are children, and that it was clear to him that the working poor are so overwhelmed by just making ends meet that they do not have the time or energy for all the kinds of things that middle and upper class people do for their children. And poverty perpetuates itself, because the ignorance perpetuates itself. Jesus commanded that we care for one another, he said, but we do not really do that. If we did, all children would have parents who could make a decent living, give them really good schools no matter where they lived, and decent food and health coverage.

Alex opted out of privilege, he said, because the weight of it was too painful when he could see the truth of what our system does to people. He hated the burden, as he perceived it, of privilege. He had found himself reading data in his lawyer days about the poor, the wage earners, the immigrant populations, and so forth. He said he became obsessed with what it must be like to have to worry about where your next meal would come from, and other such potent concerns. In the way many people read Tony Robbins’ and other How to manuals for success, Alex read U.S. government white papers on the underprivileged. You see why I said he was unusual.

Now let me be clear, Alex was not mental deranged, or suffering from some mental illness, but he was undoubtedly a man of great sensitivity who could not shove the plight of the poor into the background of his mind. It might well have been that he had a wealth complex, but he was not way out on a limb. It was about this time that one of the Heinz heirs gave away all his fortune, to work for a living. And, a good friend of mine from graduate school, who could have lived in the lap of luxury, had become a nun and would leave all that wealth to the church for reasons that related to Alex’s. So such cases, while rare, do happen.

I would not suggest that what Alex did was either highly noble, or wrong or short sighted. How could I? What he did came out of his deep beliefs about what is right and wrong, and his own feelings of guilt at profiting by the system that had made his family wealthy while millions of people have so little. Few would take their heart-felt beliefs to that extreme; and, I would point out that many have heart-felt beliefs that lead them to wealth and no one suggests that they have misplaced beliefs. But, what I learned from this brief acquaintance with Alex was to appreciate the need to think about what it means to be poor. What it means to be mindful of the poor.

I grew up in an agricultural family that struggled to survive. A few of my wider family members had achieved some success, but most of the farmer folk of rural areas and my family were what we call these days the “working poor.” Some years were good, some bad, but there was never a whole lot of anything. Keeping equipment up, dealing with basic necessities of farm life on small farms has rarely led anyone to prosperity. My parents were frugal in the extreme, as were most of the people I knew. They had grown up in the Depression and felt the fragility of life in ways most of us have never experienced. All agricultural communities are well-populated with the poor. One issue with modern suburban life, though, is that it can cut us off from the kind of poverty that people used to see up close and personal.

Jesus said the poor will always be with you, but not so those of his followers who were not poor could ignore the plight of the poor, but because he knew that nature of humanity.

The Buddhists have a Mindfulness Day for the Poor: a day when the good Buddhist is to pay special attention to the fact of poverty, to the fact that so many are poor. To be mindful does not mean we can expect to correct all the injustices relating to the poor, but it can elevate our sensitivity to and sympathy for the poor.

I have had a lot of contact with the poor all my life, but as a minister I have had a special kind of contact with the poor. Less so here than when I was in a city church or the center of town church, where we had a steady stream of people coming in for help. They were not all down-and-out types people tend to assume; sometimes they had gotten ill and were trying to get back on their feet. Sometimes, it was a family trying to get from place X, where they had lost a job, to place Z where family members lived that could help them and they needed food or gas. Yes, there was a large contingent of alcoholics, drug abusers, and people who were mentally ill. In these past years, I have also been put in touch with families who represent the most shameful side of poverty in this country. It has been my privilege to be the conduit of help to some of these folks by your generosity through the Minister’s Discretionary Fund, usually in the form of Scrip to help them out with groceries. Let me share with you how poverty works for many of these working people.

One such family consists of a husband, wife, and three children all in elementary school. They man and woman both were working two jobs, and just making ends meet. They lived in a row house in the Wilmington, paying rent, utilities, buying food, clothes, school supplies, and taking care of two older cars which are in almost constant need of repair. The woman broke her hip and knee in a fall and was sent to the hospital for surgery. They did not have any health insurance since their companies keep them just under the number of hours that would give them benefits. Both of this couple are high school graduates, he out of Special Ed programs. They are people who struggle to fill out forms, to understand government tax information (Wait-that’s all of us!); they are people who get frustrated by how to tackle a broken screen door hinge. They represent a large number of people in this country.

Well, the hospital bills began to come in, and they could not keep up with all of them. She was out of work, to boot, and this was not an on-the-job injury. Soon they had creditors calling, and so it goes that they got bad credit. The owner of the house they had rented for several years told them he is going to sell, and they have to find another place to live. But with a family of five and bad credit, they couldn’t find anything to rent except a kitchenette in a seedy motel on Route #13. The kids had to be driven to school, but then soon the school told them they had to switch schools since they were no longer in the same district, so the kids were uprooted from their home and their school in the middle of they year. They struggled for the rest of the year academically.

You see how it spirals down so quickly for the working poor. They are still struggling, though they finally found another row house with the aid of somebody willing to take an interest in them. I helped them on your behalf with some Scrip, and with deciphering of forms and such like. I have no delusions that much will ever change for this family and many like them. And pure numbers say that their children are not likely to move far from this set of circumstances they have been born into.

You have heard the numbers, you know that reality of poverty in this the wealthiest country on earth, and you know how pitifully little it feels like we can do about it. But, I am here to remind us all that we are also a country of the greatest social outreach, much of it instituted by our Unitarian and Universalist forebears. We have the greatest amount of giving to charity, to volunteer causes, and it says a great deal about our compassion.

But, my friends, there is a missing piece, and that is oversight. My chief complaint about all governmental programs is oversight. We can come up with grand schemes for helping the disadvantaged, but we seem to be totally inept at monitoring those programs to prevent abuse. If we put 1/10th the oversight into program management of all welfare programs we do into oversight of our financial institutions, we would have very little to worry about in making sure the poor had adequate housing, food, and education. Our national values are clear.

Maybe it relates to that Kaiser Foundation/ Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government poll. Maybe Americans really do not care all that much about the poor. If so, shame on us all. The world of humanity is not just for the conquerors, the fastest, the smartest, the most ruthless; it is the world of us all, and we all need to be mindful of it from top to bottom.

One writer about the poor, whose name I do not know stated:

          Retreat would be nice. It would be peaceful and non-distracting. But is it practical for us everyday people? And, if we are in this world, with all its distractions, then we need to make it the best world we can. Can we find stillness within while gangs shoot up our neighborhoods, the earth is raped and made into an uninhabitable desert, and the poor starve a few blocks from where the wealthy feast? That is the true challenge. Turning our backs on the world is not the answer. Doing whatever we can do, no matter how little that might be, is one path to choose.

You and I cannot correct all the problems of the world, but not to care is sad. Not to demand that our public servants truly serve all the people, not just wealthy and special interest groups is sad. Not to want to see children properly cared for and educated is sad. To not care as much for the poor as we do for the rich, is what it means to mind the poor being among us. To be mindful means we are indeed saddened by the fact of poverty, the savagery of poverty, the never-ending plight of poverty. It is our mindfulness and our sadness that will guide us to do what we can within our limited powers to help make the world around us a little better place to be.

So be it.

 

December 21, 2003 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 21, 2003

What the Children Bring to Us All

Children are interesting little people. When I was in college studying child development, it came as something of a surprise to me to learn that we are our smartest the first three years of our lives, if we understand smartness as the capacity to learn; indeed, we learn approximately 30% of everything we will ever know in the first three years of life. Now that sounds fantastic until you realize that the foundation of all that we know resides in learning the language and in our socialization, and the foundation for all that is learned by age three. To further make the point, those rare children who have been kept isolated from other people (we have heard these horror stories over the years about these children kept locked in an outbuilding or basement, one assumes by a mentally ill parent, one was in the news in the past few months), but such children who do not hear language, nor engage in social interaction, in the first three years of life are never able to learn language, and they develop only the most rudimentary social skills. They are far more like wild things that human beings. (The most famous was Victor the wild boy, that the 19th Century French doctor Itard studied for several years.)

All of that scary stuff is meant to highlight just how important are a child’s early years, and how much they mean in relation what kind of adult s/he will be. Most know the proverb: The boy is father to the Man. And, of course, the girl is mother to the woman. In other words, the frame work for our later lives is built in those early years.

When I started my teaching career in my twenties, I had the pleasant experience of learning just how truly smart these little ones are of six and seven years. Children of that age are incredibly smart, what they do not have, that they gain from that point forward, is experience. So two-thirds of what we know builds on language and social skills, as increasing numbers of experiences through education, play, social interactions. The more experiences we have, the more we learn. So two-thirds of our knowledge comes from the expansion through experience of what we learn in those first early years.

As a bit of proof about how smart kids are, here are some great truths children have learned about life, gleaned by teachers over the years as stated by the children themselves:

• You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.

• No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize a cat.

• If your sister hits you, don't hit back. They always catch the second person.

• Never ask a three-year-old to hold a tomato.

• When your mom is mad at your dad, don't let her brush your hair.

• Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair.

• Never hold a Dust-buster and a cat at the same time.

There are corollaries to adult life in these!

Children are smart, and when we encounter little children, we are in touch with minds that are in hyper-drive compared to the way our adult minds work. It has been well demonstrated that children in their early years will learn several languages with ease; again, this is because their young brains are operating at peak performance for language acquisition. My daughter has been teaching my two-year-old twin grand-daughters Spanish as she teaches them English, and it is such a joy to see their now rapidly and effortlessly they are developing skills in both. It is no harder for them to learn several words for please and thank you, or door or apple; so they will go forward with all this additional information almost effortlessly. Unlike when most people learn a language later in life, we have to memorize to learn the language, if we ever learn.

If you pay attention, you notice how children mimic behavior they see, and all parents and caregivers have seen the down side of this trait. Someone once said: Children are natural mimics-they act like their parents in spite of our efforts to teach them otherwise. I’ll never forget seeing my four-year-old daughter sitting with her doll and admonishing the dolly, saying: “No elbows on the table, do you hear me?” I did not realize I sounded like that.

One of the greatest strengths of our Unitarian Universalist faith, in most congregations, is the front-and-center approach we have toward our children. We bring them forward, we encourage them to express themselves openly, we let them know through these things that we value their ideas, and that we love and value them as individual people. I have watched how much more confident our teens are about speaking before groups than young people commonly are-certainly far more than I was in high school. This is a gift we adults give them, but they also bring so much to us that adds greatly to the wonder of our lives. If we are willing to pay attention-that is usually our adult weakness, that we do not think we need to pay attention.

Children remind us of the joy of living. Joy in learning, the joy of surprises that are ahead of the growing child, and the surprises that can be ahead for us, too, and that those surprises can be joyful throughout life. Children also give us hope, and often they are the reason we strive so hard to do many of the things we do, and do happily for them. I know this was an important factor in the great work that went into building this congregation and this church building. For we of this faith community want for our children and for all children to come in the future to have this marvelous liberal religious faith as an option for their spiritual development.

Children are also the most abundant and open source of love, this is their greatest gift to us. We are often reminded how to love and why to love by children. Children love freely, easily, joyfully, in a way we often become timid about as we age. Better than we adults who teach them, children, who can be far from perfect, are usually quick to forgive. Children can certainly be unkind, even cruel, yet they can be moved to great compassion, as well. It is the work of parents, and all adults to guide the children toward their better selves. It is the work of parents, and all of us in the communities of faith, to help children learn to develop their minds/spirits along a positive, ethically strong continuum.

One of greatest world’s evils is that in most of the developing world, the majority of the population is under fifteen years of age, and these young people are often being misguided to vengeance and war. War is common in these places, and much of what these children are being taught is hate and revenge.

Here, in the Mill Creek congregation, our children help us to remember that as we care for the young, they in turn care for us--if not as direct caregivers, then as people who vote and affect legislation. The comedienne Phyllis Diller once said: Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

We might extend that idea to say, that while we are in charge, take care to provide the right balance of love, compassion, and education in helping to rear these children, for one day they will be in charge. And so it goes, that from one generation to the next we teach our language, engrain our social skills, and pass on our values, and give the children the moral compass that will guide the next generation to come.

President John Kennedy said: Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. This is not the case. President Kennedy was speaking during a June 19, 1963, television address on civil rights after the registration of two African-American young people at the University of Alabama.

Certainly a lot has changed, but the children remind us that there is much yet to change if the world is to be fair and just.

Children need our adult, experience-laden guidance, and in this need of theirs, they teach us what is truly most important in life. Not that we become this, that, or the other sort of man or woman, or person of great fame or fortune, but rather that we are acknowledged as unique, treated with respect, and loved in all things, including discipline.

So be it.

 

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