In a presentation at the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly meeting in 2002, Marian
Wright Edelman painted a picture of today’s American family that must have caused an “Oh, God”
moment for her listeners.² Here are some highlights:
Imagine a very wealthy family with five young children.
Four have enough to eat and comfortable rooms in which to sleep. One does not. She is often hungry
and lives in a cold room or sometimes on the streets or in a shelter and sometimes has to go live with
strangers.
This family gives four of the children nourishing meals every day - the fifth one goes hungry.
Four get all their shots and regular checkups before they get sick, but the parents ignore the fifth child
who is plagued by chronic infections and respiratory diseases like asthma.
Four get stimulating preschool experiences; the fifth is either left alone or gets sent to an unsafe, poor
quality child care setting with underpaid and under-trained caregivers responsible for too many other
children.
Every night the family reads to all of the children, but the fifth one is unread to, untalked to, and
unsung to - or propped up in front of a TV screen that feeds her violence and ads for material things she
can’t have.
The fifth child grows up.
He is sent to a crumbling school building with peeling ceilings, leaks, asbestos, lead in the paint, not
enough old books, teachers untrained to teach their subjects, and funding unequal to richer school
districts.
She comes to school not ready to learn, falls further and further behind, wants to drop out, and is in
serious risk for getting pregnant or in trouble.
I could tell you more, but there isn’t enough time - but I think you can see that from God’s point
of view, life in the vineyard God has planted isn’t the way it’s supposed to be - and that God, the owner
of the vineyard, God, who is the father and mother of us all, would be most certainly grieve and be
justifiably angry about the condition of this fifth child.
I’m also not going to pretend that I have the answer about what to do about all of this, but I do
want to talk about some spiritual issues that have everything to do with this.
I think we have several temptations when we look at such a large and complicated problem as
childhood poverty.
The first is denial - not to see it in the first place.
In his book Amazing Grace about children in the South Bronx, Jonothan Kozol describes the
lives of the poor children who live there. But - just to give the illusion of a happy place and happy people,
the city has painted murals of flowers, window shades and curtains and interiors of pretty-looking rooms
on the walls of empty buildings. It’s easier not to see the fifth child and how she lives.
I also hear Christians quote this from scripture. “Oh, well, Jesus said we will always have the
poor with us. They have to take responsibility.”
Which brings us to the next temptation which is to avoid responsibility by blaming someone else:
the victim, the government bureaucracy, the system.
Like the people in the crowd who came to Jesus. They are very human in their concern about
two tragic events that happened in their lives, one an act of evil, the other a natural evil. They want to
know: why did this tragedy happen to those people? Who was guilty? And maybe they are just a little
worried about whether such tragedies could happen to them.
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