Caring for the Poor

SERMON: 2007-08-19--sm0730--caring-for-the-poor SOURCE DURATION: 00:40:17.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The opening segment [0] is clearly the start of the sermon's exposition. The closing segments are entirely dominated by sustained acoustic music intervals (the final interval ends at 00:40:15.300), marking the end boundary of the main recording content. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the start and end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:03:08.900-00:03:27.860, 00:03:36.660-00:03:40.580, 00:04:20.500-00:04:35.240, 00:36:11.800-00:40:15.300 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: start, end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:03:27.860] [CUT] Question for you this morning, how many of you here remember the Make Poverty History campaign? That many? Two, three, four? Well, a little bit more once you get your hands up. The Make Poverty History campaign was the most massive anti-poverty campaign ever undertaken in the history of the human race. It was launched in England on New Year's Day, 2005, by a coalition of over 500 British and Irish charities, religious organizations, trade unions, and celebrities. And if you don't remember the Make Poverty History campaign, chances are you will remember the live eight concerts. Anybody remember that? Ah, see, now you're much more culturally relevant. The live eight concerts was a series of simultaneous concerts, ten of them in number, held all over the world simultaneously as part of the Make Poverty History campaign to try to put pressure on the G8 nations' move meeting towards the end of July in Scotland. And the Make Poverty History campaign and the live eight concert had a threefold purpose, to call attention to the need for fair trade, to cancel or reduce Third World debt, and to provide more and better aid to the nations of the world. The campaign and the concerts were the brainchilds of Bob Geltoff and also Bono of U2 fame, and as part of this whole campaign, there was a series of video messages that were broadcast all around the world. Here is one featuring Bono that captures the essence of what this movement was trying to accomplish. Take a look at this. My name is Bono, but you can relax. I'm not asking you for your money. I'm here to talk to you about something that turned my life upside down 20 years ago. Like the whole world was turned upside down by pictures from Ethiopia. Sometimes I wish I hadn't seen that TV report. Bob Geltoff started wrecking my head, calling me every day, until we did Band-Aid and then Live Aid, and some comedians took up the baton. You laughed, you cried, and over the years you gave $289 million. Around the world, 30,000 people are still dying of extreme stupid poverty every day. I'm talking about children losing their lives because of diarrhea, or because they haven't had an injection that costs 25p. This means someone dying every three seconds. That's someone's mother. That's someone's daughter. Another one. [CUT] Here's Kalki, beautiful, beautiful girl. [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:03:27.860; resume after this marked segment] Now, our mother's no longer with us because she couldn't get the drugs that you and I could find at any chemist. It's an emergency. This year is the best opportunity we're going to get to do something about it. World leaders are meeting in Scotland in July, the G8. They're going to discuss death cancellation, more and better aid. They're going to discuss making trade rules fairer for everybody so that these people can earn their own way out of poverty. It's a real chance to do something, not just for Kalki, but for millions like her. What will our generation be remembered for? The internet? Yes. The war against terror? Yes. Wouldn't it be great if we were also remembered for being the ones that set about making poverty history? Just a little flavor of what that campaign was like. And that Make Poverty History campaign now itself is history. In fact, the coalition was disbanded at the end of January 2006, though there's a Canadian version of it called In Poverty Now that is still carrying on. And while the campaign certainly raised world awareness of poverty to unprecedented levels around the world, and while it took some significant steps in reducing world poverty, the fact remains that really it has only made a very small dent. As a matter of fact, people have made the observation that if you take all the resolutions that have been passed and agreed upon by Western nations since the year 2000, and if you were to put all of them into practice, which itself is doubtful, because people have a way of backing out of their promises, even if you put all of them into practice, then children would still die, not at the rate of one every three seconds, but one at the rate of every 3.5 seconds. Is that a reduction? Yes. Is it significant? Hardly. And what that illustrates, I think, is two things. It illustrates, first of all, the immensity of the problem. It boggles the mind because it involves so many things. It involves economic systems. It involves crooked governments. It involves selfish hearts. It involves the power of sin. The problem is immense not only, but because the problem is immense, the challenge of finding a solution is also huge. And who of us here, when we see the images, particularly in third-world countries, or even when we confront the reality of poverty in our own midst, how many of us sometimes just simply feel overwhelmed, and you say, "Where in the world do I begin?" Yet scripture talks a lot about caring for the poor, and though the context of the passage that we're looking at together this morning is making sure that your left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing, I want to broaden that a little bit and talk just a little bit about practical steps that you and I can take to at least help alleviate the problem. And so in the time that we have this morning, just a couple of principles that I think are helpful to keep in mind as individually and corporately we try to answer that biblical call of giving alms to the poor. First of all, any kind of giving must embody God's heart. There can be no question that from a biblical point of view, God has a very special place in his heart for those who are poor. We read in the Old Testament, Psalm 35, 10, "Who is like you, O Lord? You rescue the poor from those too strong for them, but the poor and the needy from those who rob them." And then Psalm 113, verse 7, "He raises the poor from the dust, and he lifts the needy from the ash heap." God has a special compassion for the poor and the needy because, as I've said many times before, they lack the normal means of support, and so God steps into the picture. And one of the ways, of course, in which he steps into the picture is he uses his people who share his heart to become his hands and his feet. And so we read in Deuteronomy 15.1, "There will always be poor in the land." A very interesting verse because later on in that chapter, he says that if God's people walk in covenant relationship with him, there will not be any poor people. "There will always be poor people in the land, and therefore I command you to be open-handed towards your brothers and towards the poor and needy in your land." And then Paul in Galatians chapter 2 in the context of reporting to the core leadership of the Church of Jerusalem about his ministry to the Gentiles, he says their response to him was to bless him, and then he said, "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, and it was the very thing I was eager to do." And if you read about Paul's missionary journeys and in the corresponding passages in the epistles, then you discover that one of the things that he does is he takes an offering among the Gentiles to bring it home to the Jewish believers because of the famine which they had been experiencing all through history. God's people have always had a special compassion for the poor, so much so that scripture says, "In all their possessions, and sees his brother in need, but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth." And the issue from a biblical point of view in terms of sharing the world's resources is that particularly in the body of Christ, he wants our abundance to meet the needs of those who are lacking. And writing to the Corinthians, Paul puts it this way, talking now about the offering that he is receiving from the Gentile believers for the Christian believers back in Jerusalem. He says, "Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard-pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time, your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality as it is written, 'He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little.'" Interesting passage, a reference to manna and Israel's gathering of manna in the wilderness, and Paul uses that then to teach us that part of our collective responsibility towards one another is to take of our abundance and share it with those who have less so that everybody has enough. That's a biblical principle that proceeds from the heart of God, and that will increasingly be reproduced in your heart and in my heart as we grow in God's grace and the Holy Spirit lives within us. We cannot close our heart off to people who are in need when God's love lives within us, which is why, as I've said many times over all the centuries, it's been God's people who have always been on the forefront of the campaign to end poverty. Even Bono, who is a YouTube musician, as perhaps you recognize, professes to be a Christian and is motivated in part by his Anglican Church upbringing in pushing this particular Make Poverty History campaign. We must embody God's heart not only, but we must also exercise responsible stewardship. Now, the interesting thing, biblically speaking, is that the Bible never condemns wealth or the acquisition of wealth as such. It has a lot to say about money, and it has a lot to say about the love of money being the root of all evil, and it has a lot to say about greed being wrong and ill-gotten gains being wrong and a selfish lifestyle being wrong, but it never condemns wealth, because wealth in Scripture is often seen as a blessing from God, which can then be used of God to extend God's love and God's blessing to other people all around. Let me give you just two quick examples. Some of you know that when Michelle and I were on vacation, we spent the first week of our vacation in Michigan meeting with my pastor's accountability group. Usually we meet in San Diego in January, but a lot of us weren't able to make it this past year, and so the powers that be decided to call a second meeting in Michigan, and one of the guys in our group has in his church a guy who is a multimillionaire heir to some humongous fortune, and he built for himself this incredible log retreat center up in northern Michigan, set in 900 acres of land. This place has got 16 or 17 huge bedrooms, every one with its own whirlpool and all the amenities that you could want, and you look at a place like that and you say to yourself, "How in the world can this guy justify "spending the kind of millions of dollars "that he must have spent putting this thing together?" As a matter of fact, when we were there, he had a crew on the outside stripping the finish off and restating the outside the second time they'd been doing this in seven years because he didn't like the color. That's the kind of money this dude has got. And it's easy to enter into judgment in terms of his stewardship, but you know, one of the things that he does, and you know, he's responsible before God in all of this, is he generously makes these facilities available to a wide number of organizations, particularly Christian ones, who can come there as a retreat center. And that's one way in which you transfer the treasures of this age into the age to come. I've got to tell you, I'm not easily awed. They built this thing off-site, put it all together, let it dry for a year or two, then disassembled it, numbered all the pieces, and then they put it up in this particular location. Incredible. But he shares it freely as a gift to the broader Christian community. That's one example. Still another example. One of the obituaries in the paper just this past week was the death of a woman by the name of Brooke Astor, a Toronto star devoted a whole page to her. She inherited from her husband, who inherited from his father, a fortune accumulated by the fur and the real estate trade in the New York area. And before her husband died, he said, "I'm willing you $60 million for your personal use "and $60 million for you to share for charitable causes." And so from that point on, from the point that her husband died and she inherited that money, she set up a charitable foundation, and over the course of the years, she has spent $195 million supporting worthy causes, particularly in the New York area. One of her favorite sayings was a quotation from Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, saying, "Money is like manure. "It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around." Now, there's an interesting take on money. My point is, from a biblical point of view, exercising stewardship means taking the resources that God provides us with, recognizing that we are responsible before God in how we use it and that it can indeed be used as a blessing. John Wesley, I think, put it well when he said many years ago-- and you've got to understand this in its proper context-- he said, "Make all you can. "Save all you can. "Give all you can." He practiced what he preached. By the time he died, he only had pennies left in his pocket, but he left behind him a terrifically rich legacy of generosity. Scripture puts it this way, 1 Timothy 6, 17, 18, and 19. "Command those who are rich in this present world "not to be arrogant, "not to put their hope in wealth, "which is so uncertain, "but to put their hope in God, "who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment." Notice the emphasis there. It's okay to enjoy what God has given you, because that's part of God's generosity towards His people. But he goes on to say, "Command them to do good, "to be rich in good deeds, "and to be generous and willing to share. "In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves "as a firm foundation for the coming age, "so they may take hold of the life that is truly life." Jesus, earlier in the Gospels, he put it this way. He said, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven "by taking the resources that God gives us, "whatever they are, "whether bountiful or limited, "as we share them in obedience to Scripture, "and by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, "they translate into a reward in heaven, "because it becomes a practical demonstration of our faith. "Our hope is not in this world, "but in the security of this world. "But our hope is in God, and because our hope is in God, "that's why Christian people throughout the course of the ages "have been a generous people, "because they know that as they give to the poor, "they lend to God, as says the Book of Proverbs. "So we are to embody God's heart. "We are to exercise responsible stewardship, "and then our aid must be strategic. "I dare say we've all heard the proverb, "'Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.' "Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." And the challenge in helping the poor is how do you help the poor to help themselves without creating the kind of welfare state, the kind of welfare cycle that makes them dependent on the help of others all the time? And that's precisely one of the critical issues in the whole issue of how do you help poor folks, whether that's on a local level or whether that's on a global level. And people who know a whole lot more about this than I do say there are three core conditions that need to be met if the help that we give to the poor is going to help them long-term rather than hinder them. Let me walk you through them very quickly. The first is justice. Justice means that everybody gets a fair shake of life and that you aren't penalized for who you are by an economic situation or by the oppressive powers of other people. In other words, justice means that you are allowed to be who you can possibly be on Earth before the face of God. Very major issue and a very complex one, as you can appreciate, because one person's sense of justice is another person's sense of injustice. Empowerment, that is to say, if giving to the poor is going to do them any good, it must not rob them of the ability to look after themselves. It must, in fact, empower them so that they can rise to the occasion, become self-sufficient, and look after themselves. That's always the aim. Now, there are always people who will always be dependent. There are the sick, the infirm, who simply cannot stand on their own two feet. Those will always be the poor among us that we have to look after. But you know, as well as I do, that poverty very quickly becomes a cultivated lifestyle. If all I ever do is live off handouts, then living off handouts is all I know how to do. So true aid must give an empowerment, and it must also have a built-in sense of accountability. That is to say, there must be a way of being held responsible for what I receive. Now, part of the difficulty in global campaigns to alleviate poverty is that many aid campaigns-- I don't know how to put this, but they have unintended consequences. Instead of exercising justice, empowering people, and holding them accountable in a responsible fashion, what often ends up happening is that, in fact, for all the good intentions of aid programs, they rob people of their independence, and they get further behind instead of forward. Give you a couple of examples. In the last 50 years, the Western world has poured into the continent of Africa $1.5 trillion worth of aid. Yet Africa is worse off today than they were 50 years ago. That's a fascinating comment on the failure of our aid programs. Give you another couple of practical examples. One of the aims of the Make Poverty History campaign was to put pressure on the G8 nations meeting in Scotland in July to increase their giving to third world countries, raising their charitable giving to 0.7% of the gross national product, as well as forgiving and canceling the debt of third world nations. Now, a lot of the people signed up for that, and they agreed that they were going to do a number of those kinds of things, and it all sounds very good, but it often has what I call the law of unintended consequences. Give you a couple of examples. The Western world says we're going to forgive the debt, but they're only going to forgive the debt of 18 nations instead of 60 nations, and in forgiving their debt, they're taking it off the aid which those countries were to receive from them in the first place. Now, see what that translates into. That translates into money going into the, what is it, the International Money Fund, the IMF, but the countries themselves in fact receive less money for development than what they would have received before that debt was cancelled. That puts them further back. In addition, for that money cancellation or for the additional money that is being given, the conditions are so stringent that the countries are no longer free to assume their own economic policies and are tremendously resistant to the kind of interference that comes along with that kind of money to be given. As a matter of fact, a person by the name of Amante Traori, who is a former Malian government minister, put it this way. He said they are killing us while they say they are developing us. But they are lying. We are not developed. We are subjugated more and more. That's how complicated this business can get. One other quick example, you know that Afghanistan, and I've used this example before, Afghanistan is one of the world's suppliers today of heroin because when the farmers there grow poppies, that's one of the best money-making crops they have. How do they get that way? A whole lot of factors have gone into that. But one of the factors is the aid that, as a nation, we have been given to Afghanistan in providing them with grain. Because until recently, the rule in Canada was that if we're going to provide aid to a country like that, 90% of the aid that we give them has to be spent buying our grain. Now, the net result of that is that we're dumping subsidized Canadian grain in the Afghanistan market. That depresses the Afghanistan grain market price. The result is the farmers can't make any money growing grain, and now they turn to poppies because that's where the money is to be made. Now, recently, that Canadian policy has been changed from 90% to 50%, but you see how easy it is to say, "I'm helping you. I'm doing this for your good." But human nature being what it is, our tendency is to help ourselves, thinking that we're doing good for somebody else. And you don't have to be international to run into this problem, you and I. We run into that same issue when we try to share our generosity with somebody else. How many times aren't their strings attached? And how many times isn't it more about us than it is about somebody else? And that's why Jesus says, "Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." This is not about you. This is not about what it does for you. This is about being obedient to God and in legitimate and realistic ways truly loving your neighbor as yourself. And so whether we give aid globally, whether we help somebody in our church, or whether we help somebody in the broader community, our aid must be strategic. It must be built on justice. It must be built on empowerment, and it must be built on some level of accountability. Two quick examples that I think embody that realistically. My brother-in-law, Conrad van Dijk and his wife Anna, who is Michelle's sister, had up an organization called Christian Veterinary Missions of Canada. And this organization is involved in Sierra Leone, and among other things, one of their projects is a poultry project. Conrad is a poultry specialist, and he spends an enormous amount of time and energy traveling back and forth to Sierra Leone, and part of their aim this year is to set up an additional 100 farmers in being able to raise their own poultry and become self-sufficient. And in one of the recent newsletters, Conrad reports that he was meeting with a farmer who had been making money by raising chickens and selling eggs, but he was at a loss as to why the chickens were not producing as well as he would hope. And Conrad, as I said, is a poultry specialist, quickly went on to identify some basic improvements needed in the chickens' living conditions. And so he provided a model chicken house made of local materials and some very simple tips. And here is a picture-- I don't know how clear that will be-- of what that enclosure looks like. Very important to understand that typically the Western world has moved into Africa with Western technology and Western know-how, and then it sits and it rots because people haven't owned it. It has not become reproducible. The story goes on to say that with these simple improvements, the farmer was astounded to discover that the chickens in the model house were able to lay 20% more eggs. And to a poor Sierra Leone farmer, a 20% increase in eggs translates into enough daily income to feed the entire family each day. And these farmers learned that quite literally, if you teach a man to raise chickens, his family will eat for a lifetime. And the model house will be used as a prototype for other new farmers and will house each 50 to 100 layer chickens. The extra one to three dozen eggs produced each day translates into $2 to $5 per day, a tremendous boost in income for people who might previously have lived on less than $1 a day. That's strategic aid. That empowers and sets people free. One other quick example, and that comes from Rick Warren, and it's a story related to mosquito netting. Rick Warren is pastor of Saddleback Church in California. He's the author of The Purpose Driven Life. In recent years, he's been taking a significant leadership role in the evangelical church about providing help to Africa, particularly HIV/AIDS, but also in whole areas of poverty. And as reported in the current issue of Leadership Magazine, President Bush in the United States just recently announced a campaign to deal with malaria in Africa to the tune of $1 billion. And another group called Malaria No More decided to match it, and so now this initiative is backed with a total of $2 billion. And so in typical fashion, as we usually do in the West, they drew up a program to alleviate malaria in these countries, causes the deaths of numerous people and kids every year, of course. And so in a typical fashion, they said, "We're going to spend money and buy mosquito netting, "because if you can be hidden from these mosquitoes at night, "then we will cut the rate of malaria infection "by a significant percentage." Well, Rick Warren has been learning this lesson of making sure that the people you're trying to help own the project and make it their own. And so he went to the leaders of one of these groups of people, and he said, "This is what the United Nations is thinking of doing, "and they want to buy you all this mosquito netting. "What do you think?" And guess what they said? "We don't want it." And he said, "What? Why don't you want it?" Well, they went on to explain that they had already tried several net programs of this nature, and they said, "If you give us nets without trading, "some of them will be used for bridal gowns, "others will be used to catch fish, "and the rest will be sold in the black market." So he said then to them, "What do you want us to do?" They said to him, "The first thing that we want you to do "is the last thing on your list, "help us to spray the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. "Help us then to learn how to manage our waste "so that we don't give ground to these kinds of breeding grounds." And so on, they went through a whole program, and they said towards the end of that, "You put the rest of these things in place, "then give us mosquito netting, and it will really work." And it's another one of those very practical examples of the difference between coming from a Western point of view and saying, "This is what we think you should do," really stepping into people's own shoes and getting their input and being humble enough. He said to the people later on, he says, "You people have way too much power. "You're changing American policy before it even gets announced "because the Americans have chosen to listen "to this particular input. "Our aid must be strategic." And then just very quickly on my final point here this morning, we need to, of course, focus our resources. I said earlier, we can possibly be all things to all men, and when we spread ourselves too thin, we don't do anybody any good. And so we need to listen to scripture. We need to listen to the Holy Spirit. We need to partner with reputable organizations like Christian Reformed World Relief, Compassion Canada, other organizations who are on the forefront and who can serve as our hands and our feet and who will step into the breach for us. You can live under guilt all the time because there's always more to be done. Only God knows what we can do and what we should do. And so each of us, if we can just focus on a little piece of the pie, be faithful there, let the Lord worry about all the rest, then we know that when we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we know that we have been faithful stewards over what God has given us, and we will see that the little that we have invested will long-term make a huge difference because it has addressed real issues. It has helped people instead of hindering people. [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:36:11.800; remove through 00:40:17.000] ( [CUT]guitar music) ♪ Multiply your love through us ♪ ♪ To the lost and the least ♪ ♪ Let us be your healing hands ♪ ♪ Your instruments of peace ♪ ♪ May our single purpose be ♪ ♪ To imitate your life ♪ ♪ Through our simple words and deeds ♪ ♪ Let love be multiplied ♪ (guitar music) ♪ Multiply your love through me ♪ ♪ To someone in need ♪ ♪ Help me, Lord, to freely give ♪ ♪ This grace that I've received ♪ ♪ Let my single purpose be ♪ ♪ To imitate your life ♪ ♪ Through my simple words and deeds ♪ ♪ Let love be multiplied ♪ (guitar music) ♪ Let us see your kingdom come ♪ ♪ To the poor and broken ones ♪ ♪ Let us see your mighty blood ♪ ♪ Of justice and mercy ♪ ♪ Oh, Jesus ♪ ♪ Let love be multiplied ♪ ♪ Let love be multiplied ♪ ♪ Multiply your trust through us ♪ ♪ To the ends of the earth ♪ ♪ Where there's only barrenness ♪ ♪ Let us see new birth ♪ ♪ Use us as your laborers ♪ ♪ Working side by side ♪ ♪ Let us see your harvest come ♪ ♪ Let love be multiplied ♪ (guitar music) ♪ Let us see your kingdom come ♪ ♪ To the poor and broken ones ♪ ♪ Let us see your mighty blood ♪ Of justice and mercy, oh Jesus, Let love be multiplied, let love be multiplied, let love be multiplied. Let love be multiplied, let love be multiplied, let love be multiplied. Multiply your love through us, multiply your love, multiply your love through us, multiply your love. Multiply your love through us, multiply your love, multiply your love, multiply your love. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:40:17.000; resume after this marked segment]