This past Sunday, millions of Christians heard the same text read aloud in their church. Many Christian traditions – including Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, and the Episcopal Church of which I’m a part – use a shared lectionary or reading schedule for worship services. One of the texts that was read in our chief Sunday service was from 2 Thessalonians – a letter in the New Testament that was either written by St. Paul, or by someone writing in his name. At one point, the author writes, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.”
The language of this is abrupt and startling. I felt the whole room of people tense up upon heqaring it. Multiple congregants actually made sounds of disgust or disbelief. I appreciated that because it meant they were paying attention. I also appreciated it because, out of context and without careful interpretation, the line is callous and indifferent at best – cruel at worst.
I have not been able to find a serious Christian scholar who believes the author is advocating for letting people starve. We want to remember that the first century church in Thessaloniki is a small Christian community in an urban setting whose existence depends upon one another. They are in it together. They are caring for one another. Their ability to thrive depends on everyone pitching in. In this context, the line feels a lot more like the apostle saying, “If you’re not willing to contribute to the group project – don’t expect to share in the A grade.” If I read this and think that Paul is saying that a community should let people starve – I am missing the heart and soul both of Paul’s work and of the Gospel.
And also. We do not and cannot hear the Bible in a vacuum. We are living in a time when our country is radically reducing support for those who are poor and struggling. We are seeing this most drastically with the federal attack on SNAP funding – our primary food assistance program for those in need. The threads of the social safety net are actively being cut. More and more people are finding themselves on the margins of society, and once there, they are finding less help than ever before. Some careless, clueless Christian leaders will even use the text from 2 Thessalonians to support this action.
Much of the rhetoric around reduction and removal of this kind of assistance is that it incentivizes people not to work – that essentially people are lazy and these programs reward their laziness. Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. This is an age-old and pernicious characterization that allows us to distance ourselves from those in need, allows us to conveniently sidestep our mutual belonging, our responsibility to one another.
It also ignores reality.
Let’s remember that we live in a country where you can have multiple jobs and still need government assistance to get by. Millions upon millions of SNAP recipients are working full-time. Still millions others are underemployed, between jobs, or have disabilities that prevent them from working. And let’s remember that 39% of all SNAP recipients are children.
But never mind for a moment the facts – because when did those ever convince anyone of something they didn’t want to believe? Even if these things were not true, there would still be no Christian justification for refusing to feed hungry people. Do you and I really believe that Jesus Christ the Son of God would have people starve? Please read that question again and sit with it. Do you believe that Jesus would have people starve? And if so, who? Who would Jesus starve?
Sometimes I am a little too literal in my thinking, and while I have no idea if it will actually be like this, I do occasionally picture myself standing before Jesus at the end of my life, and trying to explain to Jesus how those people weren’t my problem, how they deserved it, how I read in the Bible that they shouldn’t eat.
I want to remind you that I do not believe this to be idealistic thinking. I do not at all buy the narrative of Jesus as idealist. Jesus’ teachings were meant to be practical. When he said, “whatever you do the least of my siblings, you do to me,” he was not indulging in utopian fantasies of human harmony: He was giving us a framework for how we deal with one another right here and now in the gorgeous, dangerous, imperfect today. One of the things they say in the 12-Step rooms is, “A head full of AA and a body full of booze don’t mix.” Which, as an alcoholic once explained to me, means, “If I’m paying attention to the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, if I’m actually trying to practice them, there’s no room in my body for booze – it just doesn’t make sense.”
There is no room in the Body of Christ for social Darwinism, for cutthroat attitudes towards those on the margins, for letting people go hungry. If I’m paying attention to Jesus’ teachings, if I’m actually trying to practice them, that kind of callous dismissal of others just doesn’t make sense. It is not practical. Christians have a responsibility to create communities and cultures that recognize and honor the dignity of every human being. Letting someone go hungry, go homeless – these things are simply incompatible with Christianity. There’s nothing ideological or partisan about it.
Our current culture does not properly honor the dignity of every human being. We allow for some people to go hungry, to go homeless while others live in lavish, extravagant wealth. It’s not Christlike. Jesus would have us create a system that functions differently.
This is the part of the conversation where someone cries, “Communism!” I try not to take anything as disingenuous. It’s very likely that some of us are truly concerned that using shared resources to care for the poor is communism. What I will say is this: I am a Christian. Before I am a capitalist, I am a Christian. Before I am a communist, I am a Christian. Jesus is my lord, not Adam Smith, not Karl Marx. Not Donald Trump, not Xi Jinping. Jesus. And Jesus commands Christians to care for the poor, to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, house the homeless, tend to the widow and orphan, and include the immigrant and outsider. Jesus says clearly and emphatically that how you treat any of these people is how you treat him – it’s how you treat God. This has to be a Christian’s first concern if they are at all serious about following Jesus: Not contemporary political labels or economic ideologies.
I, for one, am not a communist. Millions of people have been starved, oppressed, and killed under communist rule, just as under capitalist rule. Neither ideology is inherently moral, neither is inherently good, neither is inherently Christian. And as a sidenote, you can miss me with the argument that true communism has never been actually instituted. Back in my libertarian days I used to make the same argument about so-called true or pure capitalism. Of course some pure, true, perfect version of a political ideology has never been instituted: We are not pure, true, or perfect – we are human. It’s never going to happen. As Christians, our allegiance to any political ideology or idealism should be cast down at the feet of Christ crucified. His sacrificial love for all people was not rooted in idealism – it was a practical response to the world in which he lived.
So must it be for us.
On a practical level, we have all we need to transform our country into a place that promotes the dignity of every human being. We have enough people, we have enough wealth, we have enough talent, we have enough infrastructure, we have enough technology, we have enough food, we have enough housing. Right now, in the real world without rose colored glasses or utopian thinking, we have the opportunity to bless, to be a blessing. Right here and right now, we have the opportunity to love people the way Jesus does.
