Feature Article

It Took a Hurricane
By Dwight Liles

We had managed to hide it from ourselves, for a while, for 20 years or so. We managed to look the other way as the real income of the wealthiest 1% of American households rose by 184%, and the real income of the poorest 20% of the population rose by only 6.4%. We concerned ourselves with career advancement, raising our children, and “the work of the church” while 37 million Americans slipped below the “poverty line”. We talked about “sanctity of life” and “family values”, and voted for candidates who promised to rid our society of abortion-on-demand and prevent gay marriages, while the poor got poorer and corporate greed raged unchecked.

Somewhere along the way, we might have read of a man named Jesus, who once was heard to say: “I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance,” (Mark 8:2-3) but maybe it didn’t sink in. Maybe we were a little sleepy that particular morning as we did our devotional reading. Maybe we were so absorbed in our deadlines and obligations that we couldn’t manage eye-contact with the weather-beaten, shabbily dressed, aged-beyond-years homeless person at the end of the interstate ramp, holding a sign that read “Will Work for Food”.

Maybe once a year at Christmastime we dropped some spare change in the pathetic little red canister, mumbling guiltily as the Salvation Army volunteer thanked us for our “generous contribution” of a few coins we figured we’d lose anyway since they were loose in our pockets. Maybe we took our used or “outgrown” clothes to the Goodwill Store…or maybe we replaced that loose change we’d given to the Salvation Army with the proceeds from a yard sale one sunny Saturday.

Through it all, we managed to avoid the shadow of poverty and prejudice. We didn’t see it, so surely it wasn’t there. All our neighbors were healthy, wealthy, and wise. All our churches were full of respectable, middle-class families with 2.5 beautiful children each. There was a chicken in every pot, an entertainment center and a PC in every living room, and an SUV in every driveway. Life was good.

Then came Katrina.

We watched in disbelief as the nakedly disturbing images seeped and poured through our TV screens into our living rooms like so much muddy, polluted water through a broken levee. The hurricane took its toll, and the victims, as always were “the least of these”. The poor, the stranded, the truly left behind, watched helplessly as the waters rose, putrid and contagious around them.

The press called them “refugees” at first, because it looked more like a scene from the Sudan than anything that could happen in a rich and carefree American city. It was said that they “chose not to evacuate”. How does one evacuate from an American city when one has no transportation? We thought we had overcome racism, but when it was noted by the media that blacks were “looting” and whites were “finding food”…well, maybe there’s more racism in our society than we thought.

These stranded victims were crammed into a sports stadium like so many sardines, without adequate food, water, or medical supplies. The wheels of government ground to a disgusting crawl as ineptitude and insensitivity caused us to cringe with embarrassment at those we had elected to protect and defend us. The press could get in to interview them, but the government and the military couldn’t cut through the bureaucratic red tape that barricaded suffering people like so much barbed wire.

To see the masses suffer is numbing. Instead, maybe we should look at one family.

James Scott had fled Louisiana with his brother, sister, and her two young children to escape the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans and devastated the gulf coast. They ended up in Atlanta, where they slept in a car for days. Nearly broke, the family drove to the affluent neighborhood of Buckhead and James began asking for help. Half an hour later, he was approached by a policeman and arrested for soliciting, despite his showing proof that he was not a local homeless person, but an evacuee down on his luck in a strange city.

It wasn’t a strange city. It was a typical city.

Jesus walked among the poorest and the lowest. He taught compassion by showing it. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He always had concern for the physical as well as the spiritual needs of people. The first Christians in the Jerusalem church exhibited a voluntary socialism that would put all Marxists to shame. Consider yet another passage of Scripture we probably missed in our daily devotionals:

“ Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” (Acts 4:32)

Justo L. Gonzalez writes in The Story of Christianity, page 134: “… in the early church, it was affirmed that the Gospel was first of all good news to the poor, and that the rich had particular difficulty in hearing and receiving it.” We have invented a gospel that blesses wealth as a sign of God’s blessing, but Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

This is the gospel we don’t want to hear, and it took a hurricane to get our attention…or was even a hurricane enough? Time will tell…

(Dwight wishes to acknowledge the input of the Committee on Theology and Social Concerns, Columbia Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, for this article.)