The message of many of the prophets of ancient proclaimed to the people that they would be judged as a society as to how they treated the poorest and neediest – the least among them. Usually, the poorest and the neediest included the widows, the orphans, and the strangers living in the land. This week we have been hearing from the prophet Amos. Amos tells the people that God will punish those who trample the needy and who destroy the poor of the land. The message from the prophet cuts to our hearts today as it did in the time that it was first proclaimed? Yet, I sometimes wonder what it means to help the poor, to empower them, to give them a hand up rather than a hand down. When I was a young adult, I joined the Peace Corps and headed to West Africa, I spent years as a missionary working in a soup kitchen in Canada and working in development projects and in education in the jungles of Ecuador. I taught in a school in a poor community in South Texas for a year and at the public high school in Greenville for four years. Yet, through all of this, I have more questions than answers. And after living for many years in the Mississippi Delta, I see all the warts and flaws of our social welfare system taken to the extreme, how good intentions destroy many lives and take away human dignity.
The Lord hears the cry of the poor. The Lord calls us to a special love for the poor. We need to figure out what that means. And believe me, that is easier said than done.
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