Christian Living

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The Jewish prophet and Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth mentioned the "poor" in one of his many sermons in the Judean hill country nearly two thousand years ago. His attention to their plight echoes with solemn importance and obliges us today to give heed to ourselves and our mutual responsibility as our brother's keeper. All societies have the arduous task of dealing with the issue of homelessness and poverty; it is a problem that will not simply just go away. In America, supporters and critics alike have weighed in on this topic of intense public debate with the interest of shaping social policy.

Some proponents feel that it is a religious duty to help the needy, poor, and the homeless in our midst. They believe that it is the moral imperative and obligation of an enlightened society in such a prosperous and wealthy nation as America to perform this form of social philanthropy. Detractors, on the other hand, feel that this is a waste of valuable resources and that, "if a person doesn't work, then neither should they eat". These individuals charge that the local, state, and federal programs are nothing more than social welfare (socialism), forcing the already heavily burdened taxpayer to pick up the tab (absorb the costs incurred with implementation of these programs) to the detriment of other needed services such as building larger jails and prisons for criminal offenders and funding the efforts to combat the threat of "global terrorism".

Perhaps the desire to help the less fortunate stems in part from our common humanity. The need to reach out and help someone suffering and in dire deprivation is our way of validating ourselves as human; as caring, sympathetic and compassionate beings, connecting with those whom society has discarded, forgotten and deemed as worthless. There are citizens who consider themselves upright, God-fearing, and patriotic that look down upon the homeless and poor as one would do to social lepers, or even as a cancer, a horrible disease to be avoided (like HIV/AIDS). Others see them as an embarrassment, an experiment gone horribly wrong, a scourge, a blight, a problem that some wish would just quietly go away or disappear.

To observe the legions of nameless faces, wandering nomads pandering for the most meager and basic human needs is visually disturbing. They remind us how vulnerable we are and that reality makes us feel uncomfortable. They are our mirrors and we don't like what we see. We live in denial, isolation and avoidance, rejecting the painful and pitiful images of ourselves. We convince ourselves that "we could never end up like that

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