By Jimi Calhoun
This entry is the eighth post in a series of bridge-building, theological-cultural reflections by Jimi Calhoun, Pastor of “Bridging Austin,” in Austin, Texas.
When I was a kid growing up in San Jose, California, The Guiding Light was a popular soap opera. Its premise revolved around the moral and emotional struggles of everyday people, but with a strong emphasis on morality, loyalty, and family responsibility. Here’s a quote that illustrates the underlying theme of this long-running show: “There is a destiny that makes us brothers, none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others, comes back into our own.“[1]
Two well-known phrases from the Christian Scriptures serve as our guiding light at Bridging Austin: “For God so loved the world” and “Our Father,” which opens the Lord’s Prayer. Together, they emphasize that God loves the world and everyone in it because God is the progenitor of us all, and that means we each matter equally. Moreover, because we take these two statements seriously, we conclude that, as with the soap opera referenced above, every person has a responsibility to be loyal to others and to treat them both morally and justly. How?
Let me introduce the concept from Judaism of Tzedakah, which is the religious obligation to give freely, not as charity, but as a mandatory act of justice. To demonstrate a tension that can result from this idea, I’ll share a story from my time serving as a missionary in Central America. One Sunday, someone at our church argued that socialism is God’s chosen economic model. He kept referring back to that part in Acts where it describes how “all the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”[2]
In his mind, the fact that the early church brought their possessions to the apostles to distribute meant God endorses socialism. Yes, wealth redistribution did indeed happen in the Bible, but Tzedakah operates on a different level than today’s version of socialism —or, for that matter, capitalism. Tzedakah says, “Sure, you can have wealth, but with it comes responsibilities.” That’s why we believe caring about poverty is really a moral obligation, not political or economic ideology, and for us, that is a much higher standard.
I can confidently assert this because the Hebrew Scriptures are filled with mandatory provisions for people experiencing poverty. Prophets such as Isaiah, Amos, and Micah are relentless in arguing that economic justice is central to righteousness. For example, gleaning laws, debt forgiveness during Sabbatical years, the Jubilee year, and prohibitions against oppressing workers or outsiders in your midst are all given to ensure that people living on the margins are treated justly.
Jesus himself repeatedly refers to the ethics of the religious tradition of his birth, saying, “Blessed are the poor,”[3] as well as issuing warnings about wealth and acknowledging that the least of these actually exist. Our embrace of Tzedakah aligns with what many Christians call “social justice” (sometimes pejoratively). But the fact that we give the Hebrew Scriptures their proper place in our community keeps us confident that our view is not simply a recent political invention—it’s an ancient religious obligation. The idea that caring for the poor and redistributing resources is a core requirement of faithfulness has long been baked into the Biblical text itself. Unfortunately, that causes a disconnect for some. Here is how.
Many Christians today have absorbed a secular, Enlightenment-era understanding of property rights (very individualistic, very capitalist) and retrofit it onto their faith, then dismiss structural approaches to poverty as being “political” rather than biblical. But suppose you were actually to engage in concepts like Tzedakah. In that case, you would see that mandatory, structural care for the vulnerable isn’t “socialism” imported into faith but is literally living out some basic instructions found in the text that Christianity claims to be built on.
Let me leave you with this quote from an Eastern Orthodox Priest named Steven Freeman. In his book Everywhere Present, he writes, “With the universe divided and its secularly conceived component dominating our daily life, the transcendent begins to elude us . . . in the ultimate banality of the secular world (of) ‘what you see is what you get.”[4] In that frame, the light that should guide us toward love for the other is misdirected toward an inward focus on love for self. However, it is by Jesus’s guiding light that people at Bridging Austin discover that love for others isn’t a burden but a joy that multiplies with every act of kindness. For us, that ends with the path forward shining brighter than we ever imagined possible.
[1] https://soaps.sheknows.com/message-boards/t/the-guiding-light-poem/327040
[2] Acts 2:44-45 NIV
[3] Matthew 5:3 NIV
[4] Freeman, Steven. Everywhere Present, p. 11
You may contact Jimi Calhoun at Jimi@Bridgingaustin.org.