God of the Poor

Psalm 68:1-10, Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 21, 2023

The Triumph of God

The Modern German Bible (Die Gute Nachricht, DIE BIBEL in heutigem Deutsch), which I often consult when preparing sermons, gives today's lectionary text, Psalm 68, the subtitle "God's Victory" (Gottes Sieg). In a nutshell, it's about God's complete victory over his enemies, "those who hate the Lord" (v. 1) and "kings of many armies" (v. 12). Verse 2 sings.

May you blow them away like smoke— as wax melts before the fire, may the wicked perish before God..

Let them perish is a bit harsh, but similar phrases like this appear throughout Psalm 68, and in all 150 Psalms. God is portrayed as an improved general who has completely defeated his enemy in battle. The point of God's victory is that God restores the dignity of humanity to the persecuted, ignored, and marginalized. The righteous will rejoice and make merry before God (v. 3), and God is "the father of orphans and the judge of widows" (v. 5). The final verse, verse 10, reads

Your people settled in it,  and from your bounty, God, you provided for the poor.

When we hear the psalmist's statement that the victorious God immobilizes the powerful, the enemies, and those who hate the Lord, and protects and cares for the orphan, the widow, and the poor, we are moved to say, "So be it!" but we have a hard time agreeing. Because that's not how the world we live in works: the poor are ignored by the world. Poor countries have a weak voice on the international stage. How many pastors and Christians speak well of poor churches? While there are occasions in human history when evil powerful people are judged, it's not very often. Does it make sense to say that God destroys the wicked and defends the poor when this is the case? Many Christians see the psalmist's confession as mere religious rhetoric and actually live by political and economic power. That's what we've learned from real history, so we can't help it.

I believe that the failure of Marxism in the 20th century, and conversely, the one-sided triumph of capitalism, has been the misfortune of human history. Marxism envisioned the emancipation of the alienated human being from labor. It tried to realize the ideal of working as much as you can and taking as much as you need, but it failed. The reason is that human selfishness was too intense to realize such a lofty ideal. In competition with capitalism, which ostensibly touts freedom as a value but is actually based on selfishness, communist systems with low productivity were bound to fall behind. Starting in the early 1990s, communist countries began to close their doors, and now there are only a few left, and even those that remain are only moderately allied with capitalism. The fact that real socialism (communism) failed to create a world that was superior to the capitalist system - that it tried to create a world without rich people and poor people, so to speak, and ended up collectively poorer - has led modern people to no longer value equality as a priority. The current regime in South Korea is even more blatantly promoting the value of freedom over equality. Their version of freedom is more of an ideology that promotes endless competition rather than human dignity.

I consider it a misfortune of Korean church history that the so-called "Full Gospel Church" in Yeouido, Seoul, has become the largest church in the world. The Full Gospel Church is the poster child for prosperity theology. Korean Christians were attracted to the message that they could all be blessed by believing in God and receive the so-called "triple blessing" and live happily ever after. Conversely, progressive churches that proclaimed that the God of the poor is the God of the Bible did not attract believers. Even among the "Kijang" (Christian Presbyterian) churches, which represent progressive denominations, most of the churches that have grown into medium and large churches are offshoots of the Full Gospel Church. South Korea as a country, and the Korean church as a whole, is mired in a prosperity and growth ideology that makes it difficult for Christians living in it to hear the biblical message of the "God of the poor" with a straight face.

The Image of God

On what basis does the psalmist who wrote today's text say that God cares for orphans, widows, and the poor? Is it just a bunch of crap? The psalmist isn't saying this based on social science data. It's a theological statement that comes from a belief about who God is. There are two beliefs about God that underlie this statement. These beliefs underlie the entire Old and New Testaments, and they underlie the words of Jesus.

One is that God made every person in the world. Genesis 1:27 reads. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them ... " It's a simple sentence, but it's a truly amazing statement. We are said to have the "image of God," where the image of God refers not to a person's outward appearance, but to their spiritual attributes. For example, freedom, joy, and love are spiritual attributes. That's why we are both earthly and spiritual. There are no exceptions to the image of God: even the lowliest person is an image of God. Orphans, widows, and the poor are all created in the image of God, and to ignore them is to deny God. In Jewish society two and a half millennia ago, orphans, widows, and the poor were often ignored. Their very survival was at stake, and the psalmist, seeing through this, had no choice but to say that God protected them.

The other is the belief that God is all-powerful. This belief points to two facts. One is that no one is all-powerful except God, and the other is that God rules the world in ways we don't expect. The kings and nobles who are supposed to rule the world justly are supposed to ensure that orphans, widows, and the poor survive, but they are neither willing nor able to do so. If orphans, widows, and the poor have not been treated well in any society, in any time period, it means that people and man-made systems are not capable of doing so. Our system is also incapable of doing so. People are uncomfortable with the struggle of people with disabilities for the right to mobility and survival. There's a huge lack of prophetic imagination to change the world, and that's a testament to the fact that we're not omnipotent.

Given these two beliefs - that God created humans in his image and that God is omnipotent - we accept as truth the psalmist's affirmation that God defends the orphan, the widow, and the poor like a father and like a just judge. The problem is, as we've pointed out before, that the world we live in too often denies the image of God. We treat people as a means to an end. The gap between the rich and the poor shows no sign of shrinking. The gap between the lives of the people in Wandang Village, Yeongcheon, where I live, and the people in Gangnam, Seoul, is staggering. I wonder if they live in the same country, Korea. Is God really the one who created even the people living at the bottom in his image? Is he really the one who is all-powerful and good, so he is ruling the world justly? Then why is the world so messed up?

It's hard to find a good answer here. Probably no one will find the perfect answer until the end of time, but we do know some tentative answers. We could answer that the world is unjust because humans have sinned and the innocent still suffer, or that justice will only be fully realized at the end of time, or that the righteous who suffer now in an unjust world will be rewarded later in heaven. That sounds plausible, but who would be satisfied with that answer? If we take the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus literally, there is a logic of reward after death, but it doesn't make sense to people who live responsibly in the face of history. I don't have a definitive answer to why the world is not just. I just try to get closer to an answer. Perhaps the biblical view of the righteous and the wicked in today's text can help us get closer to that answer.

According to today's text, the wicked are enemies, haters of the Lord, and those who hold power in their hands. The righteous, on the other hand, are the orphan, the widow, and the poor. Not all the poor are righteous, and not all the rich are wicked; on the contrary, you can be rich and righteous, and poor and wicked. That's a superficial view of people and history; the Bible looks at the issue from a deeper level. 1) The rich and powerful don't really pay attention to God because their lives are centered on wealth and power. This is why Jesus said it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. 2) The poor have nothing in the world to rely on, so they rely on God alone. This is why Jesus said that the poor are blessed. The idea is that failure to pay attention to God is the most fundamental sin, and a life of dependence on God alone is true righteousness and blessing. From this perspective, God is on the side of the poor, which is why the psalmist today could proclaim that God keeps them and is responsible for them. On the other hand, at the ultimate level, the fact is that we will all be complete strangers at some point, with no one or nothing to turn to, and the only one who will accept us in that moment is God-not our family, not our friends, not our government, not our country, not our church. Happiness in Poverty

I believe that the phrase "God of the poor" is true not only when we die, but also in our daily lives here and now. Let me tell you a little bit about how happiness in poverty happens in my daily life. First of all, when you're poor, you don't bother with finances. You know what a blessing that is. Recently, a young member of parliament has been in the news for investing in coins. While he may not be breaking any laws, he deserves to be criticized for entering a highly speculative business as a member of parliament, and I can only imagine how poor his soul must be. If I were poor, I wouldn't have gotten into the coin business. It's also tiring to 'check' the stock price every day. If you own multiple homes, having to worry about the price of your house going up and down is a drain on your soul. If you're poor, you don't have to worry about any of this at all. Do you think my description is too far removed from reality?

Let me give you a more realistic example: a poor couple. They avoid (can't) do things that cost money. They don't go to expensive hotel restaurants. They don't have designer clothes or bags. They don't go out with friends often because they don't have the money. It might seem like a very humble life to some, but they take walks together, make simple side dishes and eat them together, read books and talk to each other. There are so many ways to be happy, even if you're poor. If you're married, you can be happy as one; if you're single, you can be happy as single. If you have children, you can be happy with them, if you don't, you can be happy without them, if you're healthy, you can be healthy, if you're weak, you can be weak. I'm not spouting poverty aesthetics here - I'm not a professional monk who finds the deepest meaning in the simplest of lives - I'm not trying to convince you to become poor in a secular society that's going back to its old ways, but I am advising you that you can be as happy as you want to be in poverty. Doesn't that make sense? Are you trying to tell me that I'm preaching something unrealistic because you don't realize how draining poverty can be on our lives?

I'm not preaching poverty per se, I'm preaching God, the God who created us in His image. God is good, his power is absolute, and he will not allow anyone to lose his image through poverty. If we know and believe in such a God, we will realize how deep, mysterious, and rich our lives are. Let me give you one more analogy: There are many ways to get from Daegu to Yeongcheon. You can take a chauffeured Benz car, you can take a train, or you can ride a bicycle. Or you can walk because you don't have any money. Are people who walk the most unhappy? No. There are many good things about walking. You see the sky, you see trees and flowers. You might meet a young couple with their kids and talk to them. Whether he walks or drives, what matters is how much he actually enjoys the process of getting from Daegu to Yeongcheon. That's right. Even if you live in poverty, you can find happiness if you have eyes to see it. If we don't find them, poverty becomes a curse, because God created us in His image. I wonder if South Korea is a country possessed by a poverty curse, because there are phenomena everywhere that we can't understand otherwise.

In the psalmist's cry and praise that God cares for the poor, I see another perspective: that if you actually believe that you are created in the image of God, you actually care about caring for the poor. If you don't care about such things, you cannot be called a believer in God. Here, the minimum standard for caring for the poor is daily bread. Daily bread is actually the foundation upon which a poor person can find their own happy life. This is why Jesus mentioned daily necessities when he taught his disciples to pray. You don't need a communist revolution to make this happen; you just need to be wise with what you already have. For example, if we reduce tensions between North and South Korea, so we can spend less on defense, and if we take a little more tax from those who have more money, we can solve the problem of those who don't have enough to eat. Is this so difficult? Is this some kind of left-right debate? Isn't this a Christian struggle to bear witness in the real world to our faith in God's creation, God's image, God's power, and God's goodness? Yes, it is. Our God is the "God of the poor.