Poverty of Spirit.

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

February 2 MMXX

I.

I wonder if this whole idea of being poor in spirit isn’t the key to all the blessings that Jesus offers at the beginning of his great sermon in Matthew.  And if it is the key to these blessings then it is the key to the whole sermon.  And if it is the key to this sermon it is the key to his whole ministry and to the life he gives to those who trust in him.

What does it mean, then, to be “poor in spirit”?  Why does the Lord consider us to be “blessed” if “poor in spirit” describes our condition?

Luke’s version of this verse just says, “Blessed are the poor.”  That leads some to believe that Luke is bravely talking about people who are materially destitute, and that Matthew’s version is watered down because it supposedly allows someone who has a lot of wealth to still claim to be poor in spirit.  As if it’s not about how much we have so much as our attitude towards what we have.  As if if we can be rich but still claim that our wealth is not that important to us, or something.

This way of thinking is not that uncommon among Protestants because, first of all, many of us are rich and resonate with the idea that we can stay rich and yet claim to be somehow spiritually poor, and secondly, we conveniently disconnect faith from works in such a way that we can claim to “believe” in Jesus while not feeling any compulsion to obey his teachings at all.  As if “belief” is this opinion we have about Jesus, but if someone suggests that believing in him means we have to start actually following him by changing our behavior we dismiss that as “works righteousness.”

Thirdly is the absolute worst reading of these sayings of Jesus is to say that since poor people are blessed we have no business helping them become less poor; that would be taking away their blessing!  Thus we concoct a double standard whereby poor people are blessed by their poverty, while rich people may claim the blessing of being spiritually poor.       

All that, of course, is egocentric, self-serving nonsense.  If anything, when the Lord talks about spiritual poverty he is giving us a higher standard.  It doesn’t water-down the demand of poverty but intensifies it.  Just like he ratchets up the rules of the Torah throughout his sermon by making them apply not just to superficial actions but to one’s entire inner disposition and identity.  He will say it’s not enough just to avoid directly committing murder; we have to not even get angry or use violent language.  It’s not enough just to avoid the act of adultery; we are not even to look at someone with lust in our hearts.  And so on.  

Spiritual poverty is way more comprehensive and demanding than simply not having anything.  Not only can you not be blessed if you own a lot of stuff, but even just going through the motions of literally giving everything you have away isn’t going to help you either unless you are doing it as an expression of your inner spirit.  Later he will mention “purity of heart,” which is almost the same thing.  God looks at the heart, says Jesus.  The disposition of our hearts is then realized in the quality of “fruit" we bear in terms of our actions.

II.  

By talking about spiritual poverty, Jesus means to prevent us from  romanticizing or sentimentalizing material poverty.  Like when people wax nostalgically about the Great Depression, and how people helped each other and found ingenious ways to scrimp and save, and scrounged for odd jobs, and “knew the value of a dollar,” and so forth.  Remember The Waltons, on TV?  Or when we see poor people and fake-envy the “simplicity” of their lives, uncluttered by material possessions, unencumbered by the expensive, shiny gadgets of affluence.  I think I have even tried to make sense of this passage in the past by suggesting that the poor are blessed because having nothing makes them more open to and dependent on God.  Maybe….    

Well, my parents lived through the Depression and I can’t remember either them or my grandparents having anything good to say about it.  Poverty generates illness, crime, fear, anger, violence, and despair.  There is nothing good about being forced into poverty.  Most of the impoverished or even homeless people I have met in my life were not happy.  They did not consider themselves blessed.  Perhaps they made some mistakes they wish they hadn’t made.  Or they were simply ground under by the circumstances of an often brutal economy.  They lost their job and were bombarded with medical bills.  That’s not unusual in this country.

So when Jesus says “Blessed are the poor” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he doesn’t mean we need to examine the lives of such unfortunate people and try and imagine some “silver lining” in their darkly overcast lives.  When the Lord comes into the world he takes on our life at its most dependent and impoverished.  I mean, he is born in a barn, for heaven’s sake, and greeted by a band of minimum-wage shepherds.  In his ministry he has empathy and compassion for such folks, and, identifying with them, shares in the liabilities they suffer.

And that is part of his point.  It makes a huge difference whether we choose something or whether the same thing is imposed on us.  I wonder if   spiritual poverty isn’t intentional.  Maybe spiritual poverty is chosen.  It is something we take on as a response to the love of God which has been poured into our hearts.

In the book of Acts, it is apparently expected that people joining the new Jesus movement sell their possessions and bring the proceeds to the Apostles to manage and distribute.  They embody Jesus’ communal economics, which are summarized by “give what you have, receive what you need.”  

In those little bios of saints that I send out by e-mail, I find that a lot of them follow the path of Francis of Assisi, who started out very well-off, but then had a transformative spiritual experience and as a result deliberately gives away all he has, and decides to live in radical simplicity.  Monastics have always taken a vow of poverty; which is to say they choose not to own property.

So something that is horrible and deadly when it is forced on us, can become a blessing when we choose it, especially when we choose it together.  This is spiritual poverty.

III.

And people who voluntarily opt for poverty of this kind, generally do not starve.  They seem somehow to receive what they need.  It’s like: I’ve never known anyone who tithed their income to the church get driven thereby into homelessness, or to go bankrupt, or lack food, or even not be able to pay their utility bills.

The point of spiritual poverty is not being empty for the sake of sustaining emptiness.  It is not about being destitute.  The Lord values spiritual poverty because it means we can be filled.  It’s about letting go of things; it’s about generosity.  It’s not so much about being empty but of emptying, continually making room to receive more.  It’s about the flow.  

Even John Calvin, who has an undeserved bad reputation on this score, says that the only reason to acquire wealth is so that you have more to give away to the poor.  It is the giving that is the main thing. 

In other words, poverty of spirit means giving a lot because we receive a lot, and holding on to none of it.  In the spiritual life we are called to be kind of like a garden hose: the more water the hose keeps in itself, the less useful it is.  The more water it receives and allows to pass through it into the garden, the more of a blessing it is to the garden.  To be blessed is to be a blessing.

That famous prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi has the line “for it is in giving that we receive.”  I suspect that all of these blessings that Jesus pronounces can be interpreted in this way.  Some of them explicitly talk about what we receive in return for what we give.  In two of them what is received is “the Kingdom of Heaven.”  That is, the more we give the more we receive, and this energy of giving and receiving is itself the Kingdom of Heaven.  

It is not an exchange in the sense that we give something to God and God gives something to us in return, like a legal deal, a quid pro quo.  It is more like God gives to us and we have the choice to re-gift it in turn to others, in which case God gives us even more.  The more we give, the more we get; the more we keep, the less we get.

We may not get material things, let alone something as profane as money.  What we receive from God can only rarely be quantitatively measured.  But we give forgiveness and compassion, we give joy and wisdom, we give our example of trusting in the Lord, we give prayer and time and energy in service.  We give what we are given, whatever that may be.  For some it is money.

But whatever it is, it is like the manna with which God fed the people in the wilderness: if you keep it to yourself?  If you try and save or hoard it?  It just rots.  It is worthless.

IV.

We don’t give in order to get.  That is works righteousness.  God is the Giver.  We give because of what we have already received.  We give because giving is the response to our awareness of what we have been given.  Not what we have earned… what we have been freely given.

Poverty of spirit means we we have, keep, save, hoard, and grasp nothing of what God has given.  Anything we try and hold on to becomes toxic to us.  It sours into a sclerotic congestion that will kill us.  

Rather, in the energy generated by our gratitude and our generosity, we keep God’s goodness flowing in our lives.  By receiving with wonder and giving in compassion the abundance of God’s blessings, we become a blessing ourselves.  And we receive together the Kingdom of Heaven.

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