Theirs Is the Kingdom

Robert D. Lupton

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062031297
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"A gripping discovery of God's grace where we least expect to find it—in the decaying core of the city." —Ronald A. Nikkel, president, Prison Fellowship International

"The story of Lupton's ministry is one of the most inspiring in America. Those of us who are trying to accomplish something of value in urban settings look to him and his co-workers as models." —Tony Campolo, author of Stories That Feed Your Soul

Urban ministry activist Robert Lupton moved into a high crime area of Atlanta intending to bring Christ's message into the ghetto—but his humbling discovery of a spiritual life already flowering in the city's urban soil forces the minister to reexamine the deepest parts of his own soul, confronting his own patronizing, materialistic attitudes and the biases he himself held against the urban poor.

PART ONE

Theirs Is the Kingdom

MOTHER TERESA OF GRANT PARK

There is a saint who lives in our neighborhood. I call her the Mother Teresa of Grant Park. She has been an inner-city missionary for nearly thirty years. She has no program, no facility, and no staff. She lives in virtual poverty. Her house blends well with the poor who are her neighbors. There are box springs and mattresses on the porch and grass growing up around the old cars in her front yard.

She goes about feeding and clothing the poor with donations from concerned people. She works all hours of the day and night. She is difficult to reach by phone, and she doesn’t give tax deductible receipts to her donors. To the consternation of her mission board, she seldom submits ministry reports (although for years she has faithfully saved all her receipts—in a large trash bag in her living room).

The Mother Teresa of Grant Park appears to have a poorly ordered life. She doesn’t plan ahead much. She says she needs to stay free to respond to the impulse of God’s Spirit. And that she does. Through her, God works quiet miracles day after day.

I, on the other hand, love order. I am of a people who love order. I was taught long ago to appreciate a neatly made bed and a well-trimmed yard. I am passing this value on to my children. We eat our meals together when everyone is seated and after the blessing is said. A calendar attached to our refrigerator door helps us organize our family activities. Order is a fundamental goal of our household.

Order is also a fundamental tool of achievers. It enables us to control our time, our money, our efficiency. We can arrange our thoughts, build computers, and soar to the moon. If a task of humanity is to “subdue the earth,” then doubtless we achievers will provide the leadership. We are quite sure that God is a God of order. Our worship style and systematic theologies are clear reflections of that.

To the poor, order is a lesser value. Most pay little attention to being on time, budgeting money, or planning ahead. They may spend their last dollar on a Coke and a bag of chips to fill them up for three hours instead of buying rice or beans to last for three days. A mother may keep her children out of school to babysit so she can see the family’s caseworker—trading the future for the present. A family seems not to mind tall grass, old tires, and Coke cans in the yard. Mealtime is whenever people get home. They seem to react rather than to prepare. Often their faith in God appears simple, emotional, even illogical. God helps you when you’re in trouble and “whups” you when you’re bad. He’s good and does a lot of miracles.

Perhaps it cannot be otherwise when survival dominates a people’s thinking. But something disquiets me when I reflect on these poor neighbors of mine and the Mother Teresa of Grant Park. Their “disorderly” lifestyles keep them from going anywhere, from achieving, from asserting control over their futures. Unless they change, they will never be upwardly mobile and self-sufficient. They will never be able to create successful organizations nor enjoy the finer things of life. They will remain dependent, simple, poor.

Now here’s what bothers me. Why would Christ say, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)? Could it be that our achievement values differ from the values of his kingdom? And his comments about the first being last and the last being first in that kingdom—what does that say to us well-ordered leader types? You see why it disturbs me, don’t you?

WE BELONG TO EACH OTHER

Gray hair bushing out beneath her knit cap, she appeared to be in her late fifties. With one hand she tightly held a large purse that looked like a shopping bag; with the other she knocked persistently on the church door. She was visible through the security glass as the pastor and I walked down the hall, our early morning meeting on homelessness still fresh on our minds.

The pastor greeted her with as much compassion as possible for a busy urban leader running late for his next meeting. “Are you here for clo——?”.

“No, no!” The woman interrupted him before he finished his sentence. Her countenance fell. “I’m here to help sort clothes.” But the damage was already done. The spirit that moved this woman to spend her morning energy helping to clothe others was wounded. A simple error. Understandable. Unwitting. Irreversible.

“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” said Jesus. But for this woman the blessedness of rising early to give to others was marred by her identification as a recipient. Her face reflected the hurt of lost self-esteem.

Receiving is a humbling matter. It implies neediness. It categorizes one as being worse off than the giver. Perhaps this is why we tend to reserve for ourselves the more blessed position.

In recent months I have been troubled by the lack of authentic reconciliation between the haves and the have-nots in our inner-city congregation. The woman in the knit cap may be showing me where our difficulty lies.

I came to the city to serve those in need. I have resources and abilities to clothe the ill-clad, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless. These are good works that our Lord requires of us. And there is blessedness in this kind of giving. But there is also power that allows me to retain control. My position as a helper protects me from the humiliation of appearing to need help. Even more sobering, I condemn those I help to the permanent role of recipient.

When my goal is to change people, I subtly communicate: Something is wrong with you; I am okay. You are ignorant; I am enlightened. You are wrong; I am right. If our relationship is defined as healer to patient, I must remain strong and you must remain sick for our interaction to continue. People don’t go to doctors when they are well.

The process of “curing,” then, cannot serve long as the basis for a relationship that is life producing for both parties. Small wonder that we who have come to the city to “save” the poor find it difficult to enter into true community with those we think needy.

“It takes everyone of us to make His body complete, for we each have a different work to do. So we belong to each other, and each needs all the others” (Romans 12:4,5).

I need the poor? For what? The question exposes my blindness. I see them as weak ones to be rescued, not as bearers of the treasures of the kingdom. The dominance of my giving overshadows and stifles the rich endowments the Creator has invested in those I consider destitute. I overlook what our Lord saw clearly when he proclaimed the poor to be especially blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20). I selectively ignore the truth that monied, empowered, and learned ones enter his kingdom with enormous difficulty.

The community into which Christ invites us is one of interdependence. We are called to mutual sharing and the discovery of gifts Christ has concealed in the unlikeliest among us. And to those who consider themselves leaders, our Lord offers humility—the salvation of the proud that comes from learning to receive from the least, who are the greatest in the kingdom.

PLEASE SIT IN MY CHAIR

She’s sixty-six, mildly retarded, dangerously overweight, twice a great-grandmother and a devoted member of our church. She lives with four generations of extended family in an overcrowded, dilapidated house, but her buoyant spirit is undaunted. Since losing her youngest son in a senseless murder last Christmas Eve (he was shot while riding with his uncle in a taxi cab), she has redirected much of her affection to me.

“You’re my buddy,” she says with a broad, snaggle-toothed grin. “I pray for you every day.” Then she gives me a long bear hug. She wants to sit close beside me in every church service, and although the smell of stale sweat and excrement is often nauseating, she makes me feel a little special. Her internal plumbing doesn’t work as well as it used to, and she leaves tobacco smears when she kisses my cheek. But I am pleased to have Mrs. Smith by my side.

She often hints, sometimes blatantly, that she would like to come home with us for a visit. Nothing would delight her more than to have Sunday dinner with my family.

But there is a conflict. It has to do with values that Peggy and I learned from childhood. We believe that good stewardship means taking care of our belongings, treating them with respect, and getting long service from them. Our boys know that they are not to track in mud on the carpet or sit on the furniture with dirty clothes. To invite Mrs. Smith into our home means we will have filth and stench soil our couch. There will be stubborn offensive odors in our living room.

My greatest fear is that she will want to sit in my new corduroy recliner. I wouldn’t want to be rude and cover it with plastic to protect it from urine stains. But I know it would never be the same again. Unknowingly, Mrs. Smith is forcing a conflict, a clashing of values, upon me.

Preserve and maintain. Conserve and protect. They are the words of an ethic that has served us well. Over time these values have subtly filtered into our theology. It is increasingly difficult to separate the values of capitalism from the values of the kingdom. Stewardship has become confused with insurance coverage, with certificates of deposit, and protective coverings for our stained glass. It is an offering, a tithe dropped into a plate to be used on ourselves and our buildings. Somewhere on the way to becoming rich we picked up the idea that preserving our property is preferable to expending it for people.

Why should it be so difficult to decide which is wiser: to open the church for the homeless to rest or to install an electronic alarm system to preserve its beauty?

Why should it be such a struggle to decide which is more godly: to welcome Mrs. Smith into my home and my corduroy recliner or to preserve the “homey aroma” of my sanctuary and get extra years of service from my furniture?

Is this not precisely the issue of serving mammon or God? How ingenious of our American version of Christianity to make them both one and the same.

We did finally invite Mrs. Smith to have Sunday dinner in our home. And she did just as I feared she would. She went straight for my corduroy recliner. And it never has been the same. In fact Mrs. Smith even joined a Bible study in our home the next week. Every Wednesday evening she headed right to my chair. She even referred to it as her chair!.

I thank God for Mrs. Smith and the conflict she brings me. In her more clearly than in Sunday School lessons or sermons, I encounter the Christ of scripture saying, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.”.

THE IMAGE OF GOD

Behold an infant. A normal man-child in most respects. A kind-natured child. A child with promise and potential.

Watch him as he enters a rancid, smoke-filled world that resounds with the shouts and crashes of parents in conflict. Listen to him as he begins to compete for affection and food, and finds both forms of nourishment in short supply. His cries and soon his words become demanding. He pushes and grasps for strong boundaries that will assure him he is safe and loved, but finds only weak indulgence. No clear limits. No consistent discipline. Just impulsive beatings and permissive disinterest from parents preoccupied with their own survival. He begins to question his own worth. School confirms his suspicions. He drops out. He roams the streets at will, disguising his fear as nonchalance.

Behold a young man. A kind-natured, strong, undisciplined young man. Watch him as he falls in love, marries, and starts a family of his own. See his dreams begin to crumble as he loses one job, then another. He is evicted from a string of dingy apartments. His neighbors and “friends” spread rumors of child abuse and deprivation. The county takes four of his children. His wife loses respect for him. He is falsely accused of beastiality, arrested, and thrown in jail. Watch now as inmates and officials violate him. Watch as the last glimmer of dignity is choked out.

Behold a man. A broken man, scarcely forty. Parents dead. Rejected by his family. He walks the streets alone, head bent, shoulders stooped, hair matted, teeth rotting, drool running down his unshaven chin. A kind-natured man now babbling foolishly a salad of loosely connected thoughts and phrases.

“Worthless, but good-hearted,” people say. Except when the volcano of hurt inside him erupts in rage. Then his eyes become wild. He claws and bats at his wife and remaining children. In time the wildness and heavy breathing subside, and he returns to his subhuman existence. He is prideless, worth less to his wife and children than the social worker that issues their food stamps.

Watch now as a miracle unfolds. A metamorphosis! The wind of the Spirit of God blows through and about Lester’s life. A man made in the image of God and reduced to nearly animal form is slowly being restored. God begins to convince Lester that he has worth, that he is loved.

The message comes from many sources. A family who invites Lester and his family for a picnic. A businessman who continues to hire, fire, and rehire Lester on a job, insisting on a standard of responsible work yet holding on to Lester with firm love. People who notice and praise Lester when he is bathed, shaved, or wearing clean clothes. A person who accepts a gift from Lester without chiding him for “taking food out of his children’s mouths.” A minister who prays with Lester. A counselor who intervenes to cool flaring family tempers and helps Lester expose his festering hurt and anger to the sunlight of God’s acceptance. The people of God, the Church, become actors in the unfolding drama of re-creation while the wind of the Spirit breathes in new life.

What potential is confined within this unattractive shell we know as Lester? Who knows save the Creator himself? But of this we are certain: when Lester prays or weeps with joy, when he caresses his baby boy, we see the image of God.

FROM A BROKEN TREE

I once saw a large tree that had been struck by lightning many years before. The trunk was badly split and bent, but the growth of recent years was sturdy and straight. Bark had grown over much of the once-exposed heartwood, leaving the trunk misshapen but well protected. How is it, I wondered, that a tree could grow to strength and maturity around such a crippling injury?

I once knew a yo...