The Hope of the Poor
by Gary Commins, Jubilee Consortium Board President
When I was in seminary, our very old, very thin, very traditional, and venerable Liturgics Professor always spoke in a very low voice. He enunciated very clearly or taking notes would have been an exercise in futility.
One day he quietly unfurled a story about introducing Sixties “revisions” to the Book of Common Prayer. After the service, a parishioner complained about a versicle in Morning Prayer – “let not the hope of the poor be taken away.” The parishioner raised his voice in outrage, “That’s Communism!” Our professor, in our class years removed from the incident raised his voice in frustration and said, “It’s the Psalms!”
The Episcopal Church has changed since those days. Debates on sexuality may dominate some people’s theological passions and the media’s need for a circus, but the Episcopal Church keeps committing itself more fully to the hopes of the poor, and July’s General Convention was no exception. In spite of budget cuts, the Convention re-committed funds to the Millennium Development Goals and the Presiding Bishop reiterated her commitment to respond to domestic poverty.
What the Church says perhaps mostly in prayer and in theory, the Jubilee Consortium enacts in practice. Those of us involved in the Jubilee Consortium know that the hopes of the poor are many, but they include health and well-being, and a yearning that the next generation not be swallowed up by violence or stigmatized by the pockmarks of poverty.
Those of us involved in the Jubilee Consortium also know that tying our lives to the hopes of the poor is meaningful but hard work. Tangible and effective responses to ethical and ethereal commitments are always remarkably tricky. As the Jewish theologian Martin Buber said, “It is difficult, terribly difficult, to drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality.”
Theories can be inspiring. The interchange of ideas can be fun. Words are easy. Conventions make statements. Churches make pronouncements. Making ethics break through the hard soil of life is backbreaking and sometimes spirit-sinking work. But that is precisely what the Jubilee Consortium does. We apply our faith, our ethics, and our commitment and bring them to bear in local communities, very hard places indeed.
“Communism” has been replaced as an epithet by other bugaboos, but responding to the hope of the poor was never about communism. It’s a matter of commitment. It’s the Psalms (stupid)! It’s part of our faith. And through Jubilee, it’s part of our life.