My Brother's Keeper?

And the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I don’t know! Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis 4:9

“We will work for food,” shouted the sign propped against the minivan parked on the side of the road. As I drove past, I could see a Dad, Mom, and three kids lounging around.

It sounds like a scene from the Third World, doesn’t it? But it‘s not. This was right here in the St. Louis suburbs on the outskirts of Ladue, Missouri, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, and therefore one of the most affluent places in the world.

Like the priest and the Levite in the “Good Samaritan” story, I didn’t stop to help these people. I just passed them by. As I drove home on that four-lane divided highway, accompanied by many glossy, late-model domestic and foreign cars, my thoughts raced:
“I should have stopped!”
“Why? It‘s not your problem! What could you do?”
“Well, I could have let them know I cared?”
“What good would that do? They don’t want people staring at them, just because they are poor.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped to stare at them!”
“What would you have done then? Offered them a job? You‘re not an employer. Told them you‘d pray for them? Who made you your brother‘s keeper? What would you have done if you had stopped, anyway?”
“I don’t know.”

And I still don’t.

But, my thoughts keep going back to those people. For me, whose middle-class life has been comparatively easy, the pleasant life is no more of my own making than the poverty of most of the world’s poor is of their own making. And in my mind’s eye, the faces of the poor I had seen in person or on TV on the streets of our world’s big cities keep coming back.

The really hard part is to engage with the REALITY of poverty. And it seems to me that that can only be done in person, by actually looking into the eyes of a poor person and realizing that he is just like me - just as puzzled about many things in life, just as desirous that it be worth living, just as helpless to change circumstances.

Why didn’t I take the time to look into the eyes of these people in the minivan? Why didn’t I “engage” with them? Why wasn’t I prepared to endure the pain?

One reason, I suppose, was the all-too-vivid memory of an incident about thirty years ago in San Salvador, the capital city of the country of El Salvador. My wife and I had taken the opportunity for a vacation in El Salvador. This was during the time of much unrest in the country, tourism had dwindled, and we were offered a “cheap” vacation package to the country. Figuring that it was still relatively safe to travel there, my wife and I along with my uncle decided to go.

After landing at the airport outside of the city, we were quickly hustled into a van for a trip which went through the downtown part of the city and out to the Sheraton Hotel which sat on a hill on the outskirts overlooking the city. It was a beautiful hotel with all the amenities we have come to expect in the U.S. There was good dining, a fine swimming pool and live music going all the time.

As we settled in, I could not help thinking of all the tin-walled, ramshackled “homes” we had passed by near the downtown area on our trip to the hotel. But we had scurried by them rapidly without much of a close view. But there were so many of them!

The hotel offered low cost sight-seeing trips which we decided to take advantage of. On one trip, we were taken by bus to the main river which flows from outside the city about 30 miles to the ocean. A motor-boat took us to the ocean where we spent the rest of the day lounging on a beautiful oceanfront beach which was owned by the hotel. We then returned to the hotel that evening.

On another hotel-sponsored trip, we were taken to the largest Inca ruins in El Salvador with a massive pyramid containing a sacrificial altar on its summit.

Of course, all the native people we contacted on these trips were either hotel employed or at least very tourist oriented. They had smiling faces and wanted to be accommodating.

A little before we were to leave, we tired of hotel food and decided that the area around the hotel seemed safe enough to walk through. We had spotted a Hardee’s fast-food place a few blocks from the hotel which seemed to be the only chain restaurant around. So we started a walking tour and found many fine homes to view near the hotel. As we arrived at Hardee‘s, it had a gravel parking lot with brush growing around the edges - and on the lot was a long-horned cow grazing on the border brush. We remarked to each other that they probably didn’t kill the beef until you ordered.

As we approached Hardee’s, there was a beggar covered with sores squatted in the gravel and who was swarming with flies. As we neared him, he began waving his arms in anger and disgust at us. As much as he needed money from us, when I looked into his half-blind eyes, I saw smoldering hostility there which he could not contain. He needed a handout but he couldn’t contain his resentment for our apparent “good life”.

My patience and compassion for the poor were severely shaken by this event and my wife and uncle also. Needless to say, we didn’t eat at Hardee’s and quickly fled for the safety and comfort of our air-conditioned hotel, to be waited on by Salvadorans with friendly eyes.
After our return to St. Louis, we read in the paper that two weeks later the El Salvadoran Secretary-of-State had been gunned down along with his bodyguards as he left his home just two blocks from our Sheraton hotel!

Being shocked yet doing nothing may be a natural, human reaction. But the question I am asking myself, and which I am sharing with you is, “What about our “natural human reactions”?

I see my purpose in living, since being born again in union with Christ, is to daily grow in an expanding awareness of Christ living in me - with the resultant effect of showing Christ to others in my own little world. What does that mean? In real life, how does an expanding awareness manifest itself? Does it have anything to do with An awareness of looking beyond our small, comfortable world?

One way to “see” an expanding awareness in action is to ponder the first truly aware person, Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth came face-to-face with humanity in all its gritty reality - from the earthy honesty (or even frank dishonesty) of the day worker, the prostitute, or the petty thief to the smug piety of the self-righteous. In a normal day, He ran across many who were maimed by the physical and mental diseases that still scourge much of our world. And He was always moved with compassion. It is obvious that Jesus did not heal everyone that needed healing, but He chose moments of touching people in accordance with their need.

But, even though He helped and healed some people, He didn’t become one of us to merely walk the length and breadth of His native land, ministering physical healing to everyone He met. Jesus came to offer global healing - to offer wholeness to the entire human race.

Was His initial human reaction to poverty, deprivation, and need any different to our reaction? I think not. I believe that He recoiled inwardly just as we do. But His immediate response came, not from His weak humanity, but from the Spirit of love and compassion that filled every atom of His being.

Jesus was fully human, reacting inwardly just as we do to pain and poverty. His need to draw on the power of the Father within was just as great as our need for Christ within. He knew, without a shadow of doubt, that humanly He had nothing to give. So He continually exercised His union relationship by seeking His Father’s presence, and it was from that intimate relationship that Jesus drew the compassion to be His “brother’s keeper.”

Being in union with Christ means that we carry the universal, all-encompassing, reconciling love of God to everyone we engage with. We don’t pass that love on every time it is needed by someone. But because of our union with Christ, the Spirit of God is just as available to us as He was to Jesus. As we humble ourselves and come into His presence as Jesus did, we will find that our world perspective will begin to change.

While I realize that the people in the minivan were not aware of any impact they had on me - and I did nothing for them - I have been changed by them. I reacted humanly, from the flesh. Then, the Spirit of the Lord began dealing with that reaction, so that my response to the pain came from His Spirit in me.

I don’t know yet whether I will (or should) respond to similar situations in the future by getting involved. I still see the anger and resentment in the eyes of that beggar in El Salvador. How dangerous was he to me? What would have happened had we stayed around that Hardee’s? In fact, what is danger to a Christ-indwelt person?

I have read about good-Samaritans who have stopped their cars along the highway to help others and been harmed for it or even killed. How will I respond the next time? I REALLY don’t know. But there is one thing that I do know.

I know everything that happens to me (and to others) is God’s call to be aware of HIM, to engage with HIM. All of the pain and emptiness in the world can ultimately only be filled by God. Actively seeking His presence as Jesus continually did is the only way my awareness will expand, allowing His love to flow out from me to my own little world.

For me, being aware of God means my intentional pursuit of His presence through silent, listening prayer, through pondering a word or phrase of Scripture, and through spoken, thankful prayer. All three of these ways of “being with God” are important to me.

And for all of us, it is only by being aware of God that we can stop looking at the world through the human view, and see it from God’s viewpoint. Then we can grow to act as Jesus did when confronted by human need - not merely as “my brother’s keeper”, but with love and compassion as “MY BROTHER’S BROTHER!

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