The recent visit of Pope Francis unmasked a distorted Christianity in our country. Fox Entertainment, known as Fox News, had commentators highly critical of the Pope’s ideas for caring the poor, the homeless, immigrants, and the vulnerable. The sad part was that they had no idea where Francis was getting his ideas and that most everything spoke and did was based in imitation of Jesus in the gospels. A sizeable number of folks identify themselves as “salvation” Christians, who understand that Christianity is about their personal and individual salvation. It is all about them, failing to consider the needs of their brothers and sisters in dire need. They seem to divide the world into the saved and unsaved. Or the way I envision it an exclusive country club of the saved.

I learned as a young man in the Jesuit seminaries, much like Francis who has a similar Jesuit background, about “God’s preferential option for the poor.” What does this really mean? It originates from Christians who have witnessed extreme poverty around them and the fact the words “the poor” and “poverty” appears in the Bible over 2000 times. When you add words such as orphans, widows, eunuchs, barren women, the oppressed, or any one that is vulnerable, this increases the number of people for whom God cares. I learn as a teacher that you had to repeat any important idea three times for students to remember it. Here are thousands of times that the scriptures mention God care for those people at risk. Yet Christianity has been distorted into a salvation religion, and care for the poor has seriously diminished or has become alien concept. God attempts to communicate that we are siblings and God’s children. We are part of God’s family.

I heard the term “preferential option for the poor” for the first time in 1968 in seminary where I became aware how often God and/or Jesus call our attention in the Hebrew scriptures and the gospels to the poor around us.

I learned through a number of lessons in my life that poor people do not want to you be poor but to empower them to escape the extreme poverty within which they find themselves. The poor and the vulnerable indicate the location where God is to be found. If there is any doubt, Jesus is quite clear, “whenever you do something for the least of my family, you do it for me.” Jesus invites us to see him in the poor.

Today’s gospel addresses the “salvation Christians.” The story of the young rich man illustrates clearly the divide. The rich man asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds to him, “You know the commandments.” The rich man responds, “All these have kept since my youth.” I hear a sense of emptiness in the words of the rich man.

Jesus invites him: “one thing you lack, Go your way, sell whatever you have and give it to the poor…” Jesus has invited the young man to follow him, to move from a salvation oriented style faith to faith in the presence of God’s companionship of empowerment or the reign of God. In other words, Jesus invites him a discipleship of service to and compassion for the poor, the outcast, and the vulnerable.

The young man is not able to leave his wealth and give it to the poor. The story presents two different and completely conflicting practice of religion: salvation and Jesus’ mission. If your practice is only for your own salvation, you have missed the mark entirely. Jesus empowered his disciples, later the movement which became his church, as a church that serves the poor and vulnerable.
Jesus points to an alternative path, empowered companionship in the presence of God. He teaches, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is companionship of empowerment. Blessed are you who are hungry, you will be satisfied.” If God values the poor, what does that mean for us? What does mean to the mission of the church? Jesus’ church is defined its mission, and its mission to serve the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, the outcast, those who are at risk. In 1 Jn. 3:17, the author writes, “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”

There is so much evidence from the Bible that God cares for the poor. Leonardo Boff, who writes about the preferential option for the poor, says “the church of the poor, for the poor, with the poor.” This mission is the primary purpose of the church. It is what Jesus understood as the companionship of empowerment that we identify with the poor and those at most risk. It is the place, where we find God amidst human suffering.

I read a wonderful article by Albert Nolan, a South African priest and theologian. He wrote a wonderful book, Jesus before Christianity. I did a book study years ago on his book at this church. He affirms that there are four stages of a Christian spirituality in serving the poor.

1) There is the stage of compassion. Think of the last homeless person you experienced and felt their suffering. Compassion is the starting point when we personally identify with the suffering of the poor and want to alleviate that suffering. That compassion grows as we are exposed to the poor and their living conditions. When I was a Jesuit seminarian, I was sent to work in the inner city of Bridgeport, CT, and later to India where I witnessed such poverty in India unimaginable to a sheltered middle class youth from a small town. Nothing can replace immediate and personal contact with the poor: the conditions, the dirt, smells, the desperation in people’s eyes, the malnutrition of adults and children, the resulting illnesses. Compassion grows, and we learn a little more why Jesus instructed his disciples: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is.” Our compassion leads to action. Jesus realized that the poor make the real presence of God and Christ. Service to the poor is service to Christ.

2) The second stage begins while we may serve the poor. We start with questions. “Why are they poor? What structures and conditions in our society lead to poverty? Is there anything we can do?” Poverty is structurally caused by corporations and governments. It is produced by an economic system that enriches the very wealthy and impoverishes many. An example: large US corporations bought farm lands in Mexico dirt cheap. It displaced the farmers who no longer had any means to support their families. Many traveled across the border to find means to support their families. This is one example, and there are many more. The Bible consistently narrates how God is angry at oppression of the poor, the plight of widows and orphans, and those socially at risk. What would Jesus say and do about these structures that diminish the lives of people? The biggest banker in Jesus’ time was the Temple in Jerusalem. He called the Temple institution a “den of thieves” and acted up, throwing down the money tables, releasing the animals, and stopping the sacrifice of animals and work in the Temple. Jesus was executed for this ACT UP demonstration. We may find ourselves angry like Jesus at the causes of structural poverty in our society.

3) The third stage, Nolan, says come eventually when we discover that we cannot save the poor and the homeless. We come to grips with the humility of our service to the poor. Albert Nolan writes, “When one is dedicated to the service of the poor it is even more difficult to accept that it is not they who need me but I who need them. They can and will save themselves with or without me, but I cannot be liberated without them.” We may save our souls when we realize how much we need the poor to remind of us our mission. Salvation will be attained, but it is secondary to the mission of care and love.

The poor generally have little chance of changing their condition without others. But they also know what to do, and this may surprise and deflate any notion that we are here to rescue the poor. What we learn that Jesus’ authentic church stands at the side of the poor, to assist the poor in envisioning escape from poverty and empowering them to do so. We are called to be at the side of the poor. Jesus announced the reign of God as companioning with the poor, the outcast, and those without hope. Companioning is an awesome gift of extending God’s grace. We create social relationships to help growth. He adds at this stage we discover,

God wants to use the poor, in Christ, to save all of us from the madness of a world in which so many people starve in the midst of unimaginable wealth. This discovery can become an experience of God present and acting in the struggles of the poor. Thus we not only see the face of the suffering Christ in the sufferings of the poor but also hear the voice of God and see the hands of God and his power in the political struggles of the poor.

4) The fourth stage comes from our disillusionment. There is a tendency to romanticize the poor. The poor are afflicted with many of the same issues and faults as we have. The poor are not saints; they are people suffering from at least the burdens of poverty, illness or mental illness. Nolan writes, “As Christians we will experience this solidarity with one another as solidarity in Christ, solidarity with the cause of the poor. It is precisely by recognizing the cause of the poor as God’s cause that we can come through the crisis of disillusionment and disappointment with particular poor people.”

What these four stages of Christian spirituality in serving the poor points out that we discover many things about poverty and the poor, but we also discover much about ourselves. This knowledge is good to understand in order to serve and care for the poor. We discover why Jesus uses the saying inviting us to take up our crosses because service has always its challenges, but it also has its moments of God’s grace.

Christ’s church carries on the mission of feeding the poor, assisting the homeless, clothing and caring for those in need. We remember Jesus’ words when throwing a banquet: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Christ’s church does not build a wall to keep migrants and refugees out of our country. It does not demonize migrants as rapists, violent, and murderers. It does not let people drown in the moats, electrocuted by our electric fence, or drown in moats that we built between San Ysidro on the US border and Tijuana.

Christ’s church does not oppose the Affordable Care Act, with now 18 million previously uninsured Americans.

Christ’s church cares for the Earth vulnerable to predatory humans, corporations, and governments.

Christ’s church does not discriminate against God’s children. We all are siblings, children of God. Black lives matter. But we go further when we as church declares, All life matters.

Paul speaks about the sacrifice in following Christ:

…whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ, Jesus My Lord. For his sake I suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…Phil 3:7-8