So I join a class at church meeting one evening a week in the dead of Winter to discuss how to care for the homeless “effectively”. The class meets repeatedly for about 3 months. The discussion goes deep, we watch video presentations, read books and websites, call on experts to advise us and so forth. And we do all this in the comfort of a church building classroom, with climate control, sipping lattes or other drinks while the temperature outside plummets upon the very homeless we care so much about we would give up this precious time from our otherwise busy schedules.
But the mere mention of opening the church-house door to the poor and sharing our warmth as a matter of obeying Jesus’ Word incites quizzical looks and ultimately arguing how we should NOT.
Is this care?
Is this the Body of Christ?
Or is this a smoke screen allowing us to FEEL like we care?
You tell me.
Fat Beggars School of Prophets 
Hmm ….
I am looking for the verse where Jesus says “When some asks you for money and a place to stay, lock your doors. That will teach them to be poor and homeless. Blessed are the hypocrites!”
It escapes what the verse is but I know it is there somewhere. 🙂
Well, maybe Jesus does have something to say about hypocrites. That I am sure. The outcome isn’t a good one though.
Just sayin …
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Ahh, the sarcastic side of the force is strong in this one!
To answer the original post, I do not think that the group of people AgentX described meeting in church is a smoke-screen, but nor is it care. Smoke-screens imply a deliberate attempt to mask or deceive as to one’s true movements or purpose, whereas, if anything, the problem with caring for the poor seems to be too many people all trying to carefully notify everyone else of their movements with smoke signals, and not do anything wrong. With the result being a thick, endless fog in which we all wander around accomplishing very little.
The problem with caring and loving, is that it’s very hard to measure if you are doing them correctly, and it is impossible to criticize another individual for doing them incorrectly. Most importantly, in the absence of cold hard cash, care and love cannot lift a person out of poverty.
I’ve written a few times about how I see us getting out of this mess, most recently at http://www.godispossible.com/?p=534 . You will notice the main difference under this scheme is that folks like you or I, the ones that have homes for whatever reason, and want to ensure everyone else has a home too, end up working alongside those currently without.
If you want a fun experiment, look up the local hourly wage for a city laborer in your area. Then locate a local park or municipal area that needs a bit of labor done on its upkeep. Offer a poor person an hour or two of wages, and work alongside them for the duration, then pay them (I often buy lunch for us both as well). The experiment part comes next, go ask 10 other poor people if they would accept if offered the same arrangement, then go ask 10 other not-poor people if poor people would work if given the chance. Every time I’ve done this, I hear 10 not-poor people lie to my face about poor people.
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Okay… you lost me with the experiment. Maybe my brain is just frazzled. I will look again tomorrow, but for now… I don’t get it.
As for smokescreens…
I am sure no one sat down and said, “Let’s put up a smoke screen and pretend we care when really we don’t.” Nevertheless, the function of it is alive and well.
And anyway, when push comes to shove, the only thing we are saving is FACE, not the poor. If the care was real, then surely we could adjust. But since we rely on the smoke screen (now talk to me about denial and “enabling” and addiction etc…), resistance to course correction actually brings the denial and smoke screen out in the light. We rely on the group to hold the line together. Keep the props up, as long as this idiot who no one cares about is the only one pointing out the flaw, then we don’t really have to deal with the flaw. In fact, blame the idiot while we are at it.
in this scenario… I am the idiot.
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Okay… its now “tomorrow” and I have a fresh perspective on your comment.
Actually, still a bit fuzzy on the experiment. What is the “lie” you hear from the 10 not-poor people?
As for the smoke screens again…
I think you are too generous to this group. There is a great expense we go to… to get around caring FOR REAL. I expect we got here with our brains in cruise control, but once confronted with the truth, it is time to deal with it. These church people have been and continue to be confronted with the truth of the matter in various ways by various people. I am only one confronter among others.
Confrontation comes in many shapes and sizes, and has done its thing. NOW, this group is in full resistance. Avoiding, ducking, and then accusing me of being “unloving” and “doing harm”. The effort to resist is getting more elaborate all the time. In fact, there is quite an industry devoted to it.
Love is not THAT complicated. Not generally. Neither is God’s Word – not generally. We can point right to the words and actions of Jesus as both commands and examples. Other Bible passages as well. But this group pays big money to get hifalutin theologians to put up smoke screens for us to get lost in.
What began as an in-purposed error is now purposeful contempt with shepherds leading the way.
We cannot excuse THIS. It was a matter of not understanding – possibly, but the purposeful resistance is another thing.
As for “measuring” if we are caring and loving “correctly” or not…
There is always room for improvement. Some efforts can be real blunders alright, but real LOVE, if that is what we really have, will find its way. This is generally true, and almost always true. LOVE really doesn’t fail, even if it does blunder a bit.
But that is not what I am reacting to with this blog. We are waaaaaay past that. I once was a valued voice and member of my church. I shared the load with the others. Then the others decided to make changes to the ministry. I confronted this way back in the planning stages, and confronted it with the Word of God. I was over ruled. Then when I persisted, I was shunned. Then I persisted more and was kicked out. Time and time again, I have addressed these issues with the Word of God, and the few times I got a hearing, the response was blank stares, resistance, accusations and expulsion. A couple times I was refuted with appeal to God’s Word, but this was done with obvious mishandling, and I pointed that out too. (This is the part where it is actually arguable, but I feel confident that these were really lame misuses of Scripture AND I have witnesses who concur – so this is not just my subjectivity speaking here).
Given this background, I stand by the post. The smoke screen is deliberate. I don’t claim it started out like that, but this is where we are now.
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Reminds me how [Pastor Bates and his wife] acted all hurt when their flock said they didn’t care about them.
Its hard to argue the point. That “church” does a lot to help people alright. But to say it’s care stretches things. So when the street people say they don’t care, its really true.
This comment edited only to protect the names of the guilty. No other changes made except between the [] brackets.
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Wait, didn’t you read somewhere in the Bible, maybe 2 Matthew, where Jesus offers a variation on the Beatitudes. I think I saw something about Jesus saying: “Blessed are they who sit around and talk about the poor rather than go and actually do the actions, for theirs is a warm heart to let people know that they care.” Or something like that. It’s a really favorite passage of many Comfortable Christians.
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Sorry, for the slow reply. Didn’t see your reply till now.
When you say I am too generous to this group, you have a point, but the reason I am generous to them is because I know they have the ability, using nothing but their own free-will and knowledge of Jesus that they already posses, to do what he would do. While they act like self-deceiving, short-sighted fools who care only for all the nice things the world has to offer them, I know that if they thought someone bigger than them was watching, they would not treat us and homeless people this way.
I was treated well by people at churches, and I feel I became a part of each community I joined, but I was never a valued member of a church. I suspect this is because I claim that God asked me to have humanity implement jury trials for people claiming to be from Him. Church leadership ignores me and it is infuriating, but part of me knows they ‘want’ me to lose my temper, so they have something to use against me.
I remained calm and nailed letters to the church doors, restating my requests. They were ignored. My friend the pastor suggested I might be making my claims due to mental illness instead of God. So I wrote him a letter demanding a criminal trial for uttering threats, and threatening to harm a randomly chosen psychiatrist unless I was given my trial. A pastor is obliged to report this sort of thing, so he betrayed me to the authorities, who sent me off to hospital instead of court. After a bit of torture and forced drugging to punish me, I was released a couple weeks later with a clean bill of mental health, and my pastor went back to calling me mentally ill.
I just wrote stuff down and added another post or chapter to my story. I did not so much as raise my voice, because my Savior will never be saved that way.
Would you ever consider changing your school for prophets to a school for angels? A prophet by definition believes God exists for certain, because God tells them so.
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