Pope Francis and the Wayward Focus of American Christianity

This right here is why I really, really like Pope Francis:

He was asked about a blog post in the Economist magazine that said he sounded like a Leninist when he criticised capitalism and called for radical economic reform.
“I can only say that the communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian. Poverty is at the centre of the Gospel,” he said, citing Biblical passages about the need to help the poor, the sick and the needy.
“Communists say that all this is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later. So when they speak, one can say to them: ‘but then you are Christian’,” he said, laughing.

© 2014 Aleteia Image Department, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio

The Green family, good doctrinaire Catholics that they are, could really take a good lesson from Francis on focus. Because Francis really gets where our energies as Christians need to be turned primarily.

Also, I love his willingness to challenge long-hold ideas about how Christians and Catholics are supposed to think about the world. Can you imagine John Paul II or Benedict saying anything about Communism that wasn't centered around a scathing denouncement?

Elizabeth Stoker Bruening captures the conservative American Christian's relationship with politics and theology:

You don’t have to do much googling to find hand-wringing over whether or not Pope Francis is a Marxist, Leninist, communist — or some other permutation of politically charged bad guy. These accusations are never meant to argue seriously; they’re smears, they’re an attempt to take a claim that is radical and domesticate it, make it familiar and digestible to an audience that doesn’t want to deal with a disrupted political narrative. It is quite flatly uncomfortable to imagine politics to be the province of Christian ethics, and economics at that; it is troubling to think the eye of God peers into the market, where some other invisible hand is usually the preferred deity. It is easier to pretend Pope Francis’ ethical analyses of economics aren’t religious, that they’re purely of a secular vein of prima facie rejected political orders still coasting along in collective middle American nightmares on the bad fumes of the Cold War. The Pope is a Marxist! isn’t the whole narrative, it’s just a metonymy; the narrative is: The Pope is a Marxist because he claims poverty is injustice and that it can be corrected in part through state activity, and we all know this Marxist diagnosis is unChristian and unAmerican and wrong.

Absolutely right. The major sickness of American Christianity, summed up in one paragraph.

The Sermon on the Mount in Our World, Part 4: Blessed are Those Who Hunger and Thirst For Rigtheousness

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." -Matthew 5:6

The Rays of the Holy Trinity flow downward to the Bible and the Baptismal shell representing righteousness for which they hunger and thirst. The Staff and Cross represent the Lord as our Shepherd.

 Righteousness is one of those good old church words. You know the ones I'm talking about. One of those words you hear a thousand times on Sundays as a kid growing up, but have absolutely so idea what it means. And then as you grow up, you are expected to absorb the meaning somehow and understand when it is referenced.

Like through osmosis with the preacher or something.

But no one really ever explains it to us. So what is righteousness?

Websters Dictionary defines righteousness as the noun form of the adjective "righteous." And righteous is defined as "acting in accord with divine or moral law," and "morally right or justifiable."  A subheading says "arising from an outraged sense of justice or morality."

I like that. We are getting somewhere.

"An outraged sense of justice or morality" is what I think Jesus is getting at in Matthew 5:6. So far, through three verses, he has blessed groups of downtrodden people.

The poor in spirit.

Those who mourn.

The meek.

Now, he is blessing "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." I don't think he is invoking another downtrodden group here. I think, in wrapping up the first half of the eight Beatitudes, he is putting the bow on top of the first three, so to speak.

If you peek ahead a little, the last Beatitude also invokes "Righteousness." Interesting, huh?

So who are these people who "hunger and thirst for righteousness"?

As we have seen, the outcasts of ancient Palestine were forgotten groups of people. The ill. The widows. The gentle. Jesus has already upended things by giving his first Blessings to these outcasts. Now, Jesus is calling on his disciples and followers. By blessing those "Who hunger and thirst for righteousness," he is telling his listeners who they are called to be.

And what a way to describe them! Not just those who want to see righteousness. Those who "hunger and thirst" for it! Those who are starving for righteousness, who are parched for righteousness. One who hungers or thirsts is not one who is just mildly uncomfortable or annoyed. Think about a time you have been really, really hungry or thirsty. The feeling wraps you it up, it consumes you. All you can think about is eating or drinking something.

Jesus wants us to feel a need for righteousness in the same way.

Jesus doesn't just want his followers to see injustice in the world and have a casual reaction to it. He doesn't want them to simply respond with a small cash donation, or 30 minutes bagging meals for the hungry. He wants them to feel the need to rectify it as a deep, painful sensation!

In Palestine, as we have seen, injustice was a huge part of society. So many people lived in poverty, and in need. And with the rule of the Romans, the Jewish people were regarded as scarcely better than livestock. Rome's justice was not one that made sense to the people of Palestine. It did not play by the rules that their God had laid out two thousand years earlier to Moses. It was impersonal and distant and unjust.

But it was the just the way the world was. It was accepted as the way of the world. Rome's dominance was accepted as inevitable, as they swept across the Western world unstoppably over the past century. Unjust? Yes. Unexpected? Not at all.

Jesus wanted to shake the people of Palestine out of this acceptance of injustice! He wanted them to look at the inequality and poverty and bleakness of the world and be just as outrage as He was! He wanted them to feel a righteous anger over it so deep they could taste it. And he knew this "outraged sense of justice or morality" would propel them on to action.

And he made it very easy to realize if you were doing the right thing. One who "hungers and thirsts" doesn't just accept that and move on. They try to quench that hunger and thirst. They don't stop until they find food or drink to satisfy them. By blessing those who hunger and thirst, Jesus told us, "If you really, really care about righteousness, about the injustice in the world, you will not stop until you have quenched your hunger and thirst to see it made it right."

Injustice is still a huge part of the world. It's a huge part of the very nation we live in. So many people in America live in poverty, live with food insecurity, live with the constant threat of violence. Inequality in our country is more pronounced than ever, and much more pronounced than in much of the rest of the world.

And yet we just accept that that is the way it is.

We say it's their own fault. They are lazy and weak and don't want to work hard and only want a handout. We say they should pulls themselves up, nothing is standing in their way. We say the free market should not be interfered with, that it knows what is the right balance of equality in the world. We say that the rich obviously earned what they have. We say it's not our problem. It's unfortunate, but we can't do anything about it. We say there will always be poor and hungry people. We say it is structural, and the price of a free capitalist society.

If you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you don't say any of these things.

You don't just accept poverty and hunger and inequality as inevitable. You don't just accept the injustice in the world. You act. You quench that hunger and thirst you feel deep down inside, and you don't stop until it is done.

If you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you will be filled. But you have to make it happen.

Read Part 1: Blessed are the poor in spirit. 
Read Part 2: Blessed are those who mourn.
Read Part 3: Blessed are the meek