Poverty is the one subject that everybody agrees is central to what Jesus was about, so far as we can discover that from the texts that we have. More than Jesus talked about sex - infinitely more than Jesus talked about sex for that matter - more than Jesus talked about the Law, Jesus talked about poverty. Poverty, in other words, lies at the centre of his consciousness. That is beyond dispute.

It is equally beyond dispute that this is one of the issues that none of the Christian Churches, ours or any other, have really ever come to terms with, whatever coming to terms with poverty may mean. But rather you can read great ranges, maybe all of Christian history, as a series if side-steppings of this issue. The classic one, of course, is this terrible deformed version of John Calvin's teaching whereby we can look at the poor and say, "Well, by God, they are poor because they are bloody deserving to be poor! They are worthless! They are lazy! They are shiftless! And above all they are evil! Poor people are poor because they are sinners!". And the beauty of that (that is not what Calvin said, of course, is that we do not then have to worry about the poor, I mean, if they are sinners they are hell-bent and so, "Too bad!". So we can merrily go trotting along, ignoring them.

But there are other strategies that are used to make the poor disappear. I mean, one of the great whipping boys for preachers for centuries, and particularly today, is materialism.

The opposite of materialism, of course, is spiritualism. Well, what is spiritualism? I do not know, frankly, but it is really nice to say that materialism is bad without saying what the alternatives are. It is very handy. Materialism means, presumably what? Just our regular acquisitiveness; we want more stuff. And God knows we have more stuff here in North America than anybody in the whole history of the world has had. We have more stuff. Those of us who are not poor have more stuff. What is wrong with that?

To find out, let's look at another preacher object of contempt: hedonism. Hedonism, "Yes, all of these evil pleasure-seekers running around!". Of course the Church has a long tradition of being against pleasure: "Well if it is pleasurable, by God, it must be sinful! So you must watch out for hedonism!". The problem with the complaints about hedonism and materialism I believe, as I suggested, is the same problem - - they miss the point. The heart of the real problem with materialism or hedonism is that they are basically destructive of the human community. We talk about them as some kind of private ill: "Bloody pleasure seekers! Bloody acquirers!". And the real difficulty, of course, is that the pleasures are sought or those goods are acquired on the backs of other people. In other words, this human fabric is split by materialism and hedonism. Historically, that is the way that it has worked out. And that is where the problem lies.

Unfortunately, as I said, we have not been very faithful in the Church to this vision of Jesus that says basically, as Paul will say, "You are members of each other. You are really members of each other". But for most of us, most of the time, the poor are, in Michael Herrington's great phrase, invisible. Who knows about them? We do not. And, meanwhile we can distract ourselves by ranting about hedonism, sex, and materialism, stuff that did not seem to bother Jesus all that much whereas the position of the poor in the society clearly did..."If you want to be perfect, go sell everything you have and give your money to the poor and follow me". "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven". "Blessed are the poor". These express the central axis of Jesus' consciousness. Why? Because, as Luke, from whom we have this reading today, has it. In his first public Jesus quotes Isaiah to this effect: the great sign of God's intervention in human history is that the good news is preached to the poor. The people, in other words, who were left out are now included. The community is built if the poor are there, and if the poor are not there you cannot talk about the community. If the poor do not exist for us, you certainly cannot talk about the community.

This is hard at the best of times. I do not know how to deal with this. I bring it up because it is in the text. I bring it up because it is clearly what Jesus was largely about. I bring it up because the Church has done so badly by it. I bring it up, finally, in our context because there is a chronic problem in the University in North America, maybe all over the world. Every year, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveys all the incoming first-year students in all of the universities in the United States and I think Canada as well. And they ask some questions: "Why do you come to university? What do you really want?". The thing that hits the highest percentage, 76-80%, is : "To make more money. To get a better job. When I am feeling whimsical I think: What if we were to advertise a university education as providing people such a sensitivity to the poor that they would see the poor as their fellow human beings and go operate on that basis. We would empty this place faster than you can imagine.

So what do we do? I do not know. Personally, I have wrestled with this for a long time. As I said, in the history of the Church there have been some noble experiments. Francis of Assisi, this little Italian who married lady poverty. After he died, Brother Elias took over and said, "Now we have to get this on a more business-like footing. Now we have to get a little better organized here. And so, instead of all of those rags that Francis had we are going to have tailored costumes. That are going to be really nice".

The only other recent experiment I know that seems to have really been faithful to Jesus is Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker in our own time. Dorothy Day died, in 1968. If you do not know about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker you really should. She called herself a Catholic Anarchist and she said, "Yes, to be a Christian is to be a fellow with the poor," not, please note, therefore, to say that "Oh, I need the poor so I can give some money away and that will make me feel good!". I do not need the poor just to practice my virtue on!

Let me finish with something that I read a couple of weeks ago It is one of the best pieces of theology I have read in a long time. Thas man, a Belgian who has lived in Brazil and Chile for forty years, makes this comment. He talks about the eruption of the poor. The eruption, like a volcano erupts or a boil erupts. This is what he has to say and I think he is dead on:

"The meaning of the eruption of the poor is essentially theological rather than sociological.It describes not a social phenomenon but rather the Gospel. Thus, the eruption of the poor takes place within the context of Christianity. For proof one need only read the Gospels or the entire Bible, for that is where the poor erupt. For our contemporaries, the poor are nowhere to be seen. It was with the Gospel that the poor began to be seen in the world. The Church recovers its Gospel vocation, the poor make their way into human awareness thanks to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What makes the poor a class is only their poverty. The poor are the polar opposite to the rich. For Christians, that is enough to dictate the path to follow. Between the rich and the poor one must choose the poor and stand alongside them."

And then this next couple sentences are very interesting given all those wonderful economists at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the great economic think-tanks. He says,

"This option does not require any analysis. To identify the rich and the poor one needs no analysis. The difference between rich and poor is obvious and immediate. You only need open your eyes and in a moment and at a glance it is clear who is rich and who is poor. An eruption of the poor takes place whenever the Gospel is made manifest, whenever the Church is renewed, whenever the Church returns to its origins."

In other words, we only really hear the Gospel when we become aware of the poor. And if the Gospel does not bring us to that point, then whatever it is we are hearing is not the Gospel.