The Second Reformation Has Begun

Where there is no vision, the people perish. -- Proverbs 29:18

A Tale of Two Cities

MY NEIGHBORHOOD OF Columbia Heights runs along 14th Street, a scene of Washington, D.C.'s much-publicized, so-called "riots" following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in the bitter spring of 1968. The now infamous "riot corridor," as the area is still called, even today bears the scars of the frustrated and angry violence that erupted when people's hopes were suddenly and brutally cut down. Burned-out buildings and vacant lots remain after more than 20 years.

Several years ago, my sister Barbara was walking through the neighborhood with her 5-year-old son, Michael. They were on their way to the Sojourners day-care center. Michael surveyed the scene on the block and, looking up at his mother with puzzlement, asked, "Mommy, was there a war here?"

Indeed, the empty shells of buildings, piles of rubble, and general devastation all around could easily give that impression. Perhaps the eyes of a child can see what jaded adult vision quickly passes over or too easily accepts -- there was and is a war here. It goes on every day, and the casualties are everywhere.

The people who inhabit this and similar neighborhoods are not only neglected and ignored by political decision makers, they are war victims. They are the dead and wounded of a system that has ravaged their lives and their communities. It is no wonder that those who make it through refer to themselves as "survivors." But many are not surviving. The forces that have declared war on them are global and impersonal, but the consequences for the people here are very personal indeed.

For most of the 14 years Sojourners Community has lived in Washington, D.C., the inner-city neighborhoods of the capital have been invisible to the nation. Everyone knows "official Washington" with its marble, monuments, and malls. But "the other Washington" has been off limits to the blue-and-white tour buses and to the consciousness of the rest of the country.

Here are substandard tenements instead of stately government offices. Here children play in back alleys strewn with glass, trash, and syringes instead of running in beautiful parks. Here the only monuments are to neglect, indifference, and the stranglehold of entrenched racism on the city that proclaims itself a beacon of freedom to the world. Here the homeless huddle literally in the shadows of the great houses of state power, trying to keep warm by sleeping on the grates that expel hot air from the heating systems of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the halls of Congress.

EVEN THE NAME WASHINGTON, D.C. tells the tale of two cities. The white residents and professionals who run the federal capital live in "Washington." The black residents who are the city's vast majority (70 percent) are from "D.C." -- the District of Columbia. This capital of the "free world" is still virtually a segregated city, especially in housing, schools, and social interchange.

A word heard often in D.C. is "colony." The District of Columbia didn't obtain even partial home rule until 1974. But still, District residents (700,000 people) have no voting representation in Congress, and all actions taken by the elected city government are subject to congressional veto.

The forces of housing gentrification and real estate speculation are slowly pushing black residents into more overcrowded neighborhoods or out of the city altogether. Once-poor ghetto neighborhoods are being transformed into upscale yuppie enclaves with prices too high for any of their former inhabitants.

But neither Washington, D.C.'s extremes of wealth and poverty nor its racial polarization have been well known beyond the "beltway," the highway encircling the metropolitan area. For most Americans -- at least most white Americans -- the nation's capital has been best known as the site for great high school trips, or for the Cherry Blossom Festival, or as the home of the Redskins. Mostly, Washington, D.C. is known as the most powerful city in the world, and it's no wonder that its powerless underside has been so easily and so long overlooked.

But suddenly Washington, D.C. began making national and international headlines -- not as the center of power but as the "murder capital" of the nation. Quickly the media cameras so used to turning away from "the other Washington" focused their attention on neighborhoods overrun with drugs and guns. D.C. got famous. Newsweek did cover stories that spoke of the "two Washingtons," while nervous local officials rushed to assure anxious tourists that the killing was limited only to "certain parts of the city."

Columbia Heights has become the murder capital of the murder capital, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. The killings continue unabated on the streets where we live, and in recent months they have come very close to home. At a recent meeting in the Sojourners Neighborhood Center, one local resident asked, "What does it mean to live in the most murderous neighborhood in the most murderous city in the most murderous nation in the world?"

IN 1983 I TRAVELED TO THE WAR ZONES of Nicaragua on the first team of a project known as Witness for Peace. In a refugee resettlement camp, I met a 13-year-old boy named Agenor, who made a great impression on me. His baseball cap, tattered shirt, and beat-up tennis shoes reminded me of the kids who run up and down the streets of my own neighborhood. But this thin Nicaraguan boy carried a heavy automatic weapon on his back. He was a member of the citizens militia, defending against contra attacks and a feared U.S. invasion. As I returned home, Agenor's face, with his searching brown eyes and shy smile, was etched in my memory.

I met Eddie on the street the day I got back. He also was 13. While telling Eddie about my trip, I had a terrible thought. If the U.S. government continued to escalate its war in Nicaragua and eventually sent troops, Eddie -- a young black man from a poor family with few other options -- would be among the first to go. That had been the pattern in the Vietnam War.

In that moment, I imagined the awful possibility of Eddie and Agenor meeting on some Nicaraguan battlefield, raising their guns to aim at each other, and one or both being killed. The great ideological confrontation between East and West would come down to Eddie and Agenor shooting each other -- two young men, one black and one brown, dying in the name of a global conflict between two white superpowers. Instead of that horrible picture, I tried to imagine Eddie and Agenor playing baseball together.

Eddie never died on a Nicaraguan battlefield, as I had feared. But Eddie did die last March on the streets of his own neighborhood. He became, for a short while, the latest victim and the newest statistic in the city's epidemic of violence. One month later, we at Sojourners were all gathered in church on Sunday morning. During the intercessions, the news was announced that another young man, Anthony, had been killed a few nights earlier. I watched faces around the room grimace in pain and the tears begin to flow. Anthony had attended our community's day-care center many years earlier. We know the whole family. After the service, Martha, who had been Anthony's teacher, flashed with anger, "He was such a sweet and sensitive boy. It has to be the system!"

After church that day, I found myself in a funeral home, viewing the body of a handsome, vital young man, now cold and dead. His grieving mother and brothers and sisters were all there. There wasn't much to say.

Vincent Harding, author and historian of the civil rights movement, recently made a trip to West Germany, where he led retreats for black American soldiers. Many told Harding that they were re-enlisting in the Army so that they could keep from coming home to their own neighborhoods, where they were afraid of being killed. Young African-Americans were deciding to stay in the Army to save their lives.

We are losing a whole generation of young people in our cities to poverty, drugs, and violence. Washington, D.C. is a city out of control, reeling from the brutal consequences and tremendous suffering of a global economic, social, and spiritual crisis that has yet to be named, understood, or addressed. It is a crisis of the highest magnitude, and it points to a global reality that we must recognize and squarely face.

THROUGH THESE PAINFUL AND SOUL-SEARCHING events, something has become quite clear to me: Washington, D.C. stands now as a parable unto the world. The crisis in the capital of the wealthiest and most powerful nation tells the story of the crisis the whole world now faces. In Washington, D.C. today, we see a mirror of what the global system has become. The brutal paradoxes of the most famous city on earth have become a parable that can teach us what we must learn if we are to survive.

Washington, D.C. is literally the symbol of power. People stream to the official city to exercise power, to influence power, or just to be around power. The power holders and the power groupies alike are intoxicated with the smell of it. The key word here is access. Access to power -- that's what everyone is always fighting for in this town. Power, like money, becomes its own justification. How you get it or what it is used for are beside the point; having power is what's important.

As power defines official Washington, powerlessness defines "the other Washington." Here are the people who clean the hotel rooms, cook the food, and drive the cabs for the powerful -- if they have work at all. The work force has been reduced to an underemployed labor pool supplying the bottom rungs of the service economy.

If Washington is the most powerful city in the nation, D.C. is the most powerless, without control even over its own affairs and destiny. As the "Last Colony," D.C. symbolizes the relationship many other parts of the world have with official Washington.

The revealing paradoxes exist on almost every level of life in Washington, D.C. Housing costs are among the highest in the country, as are the rates of homelessness. Infant mortality is at Third World levels in the same city with more lawyers and real estate developers than any other. Black youth unemployment is upward of 60 percent, while white professional couples with two incomes search for investments. Scholastic Aptitude Test scores for D.C. public school students are 100 points below the national norm, while the city's private school students score 100 points above it.

Nineteen million tourists spend $1.5 billion each year here, while the D.C. jail runs out of money for toilet paper. The downtown hotel business is booming, while more and more women and children move into the city's shelters or onto the streets.

Washington's affluent suburbs are rated among the most desirable places to live in the nation, while the death rate in black D.C. increases due to a lack of good health care. Young white men pay some of the highest college tuition rates in the country at local universities, while their black counterparts are nine times more likely to be the victims of a homicide.

WASHINGTON, D.C. IS A MICROCOSM of the dynamics that now govern the world order. The current drug war brings all these contradictions into sharp relief.

No one knows the exact numbers, but an extraordinary percentage of D.C. youth is involved in the drug traffic. As in source countries such as Colombia, drug trafficking has become a livelihood for the poor. In the high-stakes atmosphere of drugs and money, life becomes cheap indeed. In Colombia now, it costs only 40 dollars to have someone murdered. In both Colombia and Washington, D.C., poverty sets the stage for tragedy, and the drama of drugs simply carries out the executions.

In the current economic and cultural environment, it becomes very difficult to tell young people, "Just say no to drugs." What we are in effect telling them is to be content working part time at McDonald's (the eighth largest employer in D.C.) and pursue the American Dream as best they can. In a changing economy, the better jobs and brighter future we want to promise inner-city children are just not there.

Meanwhile, the dominant images that assault them daily -- through television, movies, and popular music -- tell young people that their very worth and status as human beings come from how much they can possess and consume. Fancy clothes, new cars, a nice house, and lots of gold around their necks become the aspirations of inner-city youth. In that, they are no different from most Americans.

The crucial difference is that these inner-city youth are virtually denied legal access to the alluring attractions of American consumer culture. They are blocked out by an economy that has no room for them.

Washington, D.C., like the rest of the global system, is now run by a two-tiered economy. At the top is a highly lucrative and booming sector of managerial and professional elites, while at the bottom is an increasingly impoverished population that services the high-tech economy but whose labor and even consumption are less and less needed. Whole sectors of the global population are now simply defined outside of the economic mainstream. And to be shut out of the global economy means to be consigned to death. Like Jesus' parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, millions and millions of God's children are now shut outside the gate of the global economy.

More and more children live in poverty in America. One out of every five children and half of all black children are born poor. The gap between rich and poor has steadily grown as a changing economy leaves more and more people behind. The swelling ranks of the hungry and homeless, now including many families, points to a highly visible moral contradiction in a nation that prides itself on its standard of living.

The earth itself suffers along with the poor. Our politically neglected and continually poisoned environment faces real threats from global warming trends, ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic and nuclear wastes, creating contaminated water, unhealthy food, polluted air, and ravaged wildlife. We will not escape the consequences of our behavior.

As Native American leader Chief Seattle said years ago, "This we know. The earth does not belong to people. People belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the people of the earth. We did not weave the web of life. We are but a mere strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves!"

IN THE UNITED STATES, public school education, health care, low-cost housing, the family farm, and the industrial work place are all in a state of crisis. Crime is out of control, while the proposed solutions fail to deal adequately with either underlying causes or individual responsibility, neglecting both perpetrators and victims.

The fight against racism has been halted at the highest levels of government, and its ugly resurgence is upon us. Hard-fought progress made by women for equal rights is now under attack from many quarters. The nation's foreign policy continues to violate its expressed values and causes untold human suffering principally to poor people of color. Our collective conscience has been numbed, and the sanctity of life is diminished with each passing year of moral accommodation to nuclear weapons and "national security" systems based on mutual suicide pacts.

Things are especially hard on the black and brown minority youth that inhabit our inner cities. They are the ones whose dreams and hopes for the future have been denied. There is no room for them in this society, and they know it. With no place, no stake, and no future available to them, they are finding their own road to "success." And it is a very dangerous road indeed, with many casualties strewn along the way.

In our neighborhood, children of 8, 9, and 10 years wear beepers on their belts. It is not because they are young lawyers and doctors, but because drug dealers call the children at play when a drug run has to be made. It is safer for the dealers to use children for their drug runs, with detection and punishment less likely.

Young people can make more money in a day or a week than they ever dreamed possible. Thousands of dollars are available to them in an economy that has never offered them more than uncertain, part-time employment at minimum wage. And many are taking the option.

IN A SERIES OF ARTICLES CALLED "At the Roots of the Violence," The Washington Post described the unwritten "code of conduct" of the drug dealers in their own words: "Never back down ... Be willing to kill or die to defend your honor ... Protect your reputation and manhood at all costs ..." The drug dealers who live by this code are known on the street as "soldiers." A reporter asked one of them why they are always so ready to shoot. "I guess it's greed for that money" was his answer.

The Post then commented on the code of the streets, "It is a way of behaving that flies in the face of traditional American values."

Is that really true? What values are reflected in American foreign policy? What code of ethics governs the wars of Wall Street? Does not the enshrinement of greed and the glorification of violence every day on TV sets and movie screens reinforce cultural values?

What message does their society give young people every day about what is most important in life? Have they not been convinced, like most other Americans, that status and success come by way of material acquisition? Does the way people get rich even matter in America?

With great danger to themselves and others, are not these children of the poor pursuing the same glittering materialistic dream of others, in the quickest and perhaps only way they see open to them? Highly-paid entertainers and professional athletes become the role models encouraging young black children to reject the big money they can make in the drug traffic and settle for minimum wage.

When the president launched a new war on drugs, he took careful aim to avoid the causes of the problem, then launched volleys that fell far short of addressing even the symptoms. His critics cry out for more money to be spent on the symptoms, while still ignoring the underlying causes and corruptions of drugs.

However, on Nightline, after the president's speech, two incarcerated drug traffickers at local Lorton prison spoke prophetically. One said, "It's the materialistic values -- the cars, the clothes, the gold -- that's what's killing us." The other said, "It's the economics, the injustice in our cities. That's the core of the problem." The combination of the two -- a systemic economic injustice and an insatiable lust for possessions -- is indeed the formula that is causing the death and destruction.

Perhaps our dominant cultural values now reflect the emptiness of our situation most of all. It is television that now rules the popular culture. Consumption has become our highest cultural value and social purpose. In fact, material consumption is the only universal form of social participation that Americans have left. Everything else has been either marginalized or completely co-opted by the frenzied desire for things.

Consumption is the thing that both the rich and the poor, and everyone in between, seem to care most about. Not only does consumption define the culture, materialism has become the culture in America. There is no longer any doubt that things are more valued than people and that people have, themselves, become commodities. We are faced with an almost totally economic definition of life. The result is a culture that has lost its meaning.

Drugs are not the only narcotic here. The money that comes from drugs is the addiction that is leading to the violence. That addiction -- the addiction to materialism -- is fed every hour of every day in this society. It is not only legal to feed that addiction, it is the whole purpose of the system. It is our reason for being as a people -- to possess and consume.

The images dance before us every waking moment. The images attract, lure, create desire; they awaken the greed and covetousness of our worst selves. Our children are glued to the TV screen; the beat of incessant consumption pounds in their ears. Shopping malls have become the temples, shrines, and communal centers of modern America.

I read a magazine article recently that seriously suggested that one of the reassurances we have of global community is that you can travel all over the world and see the golden arches of McDonald's. One thing that we can all do is buy and eat hamburgers together -- now all over the world.

THE ISSUE HERE IS DEEPER THAN greed and selfishness. Material consumption -- buying and using things -- has become the only means left of belonging in America. If we can't buy, if we can't consume, we simply don't belong.

In New Mexico last summer, I read a newspaper column about a new product. It is a simulated car phone. For five dollars you can buy a piece of plastic that looks like a car phone. But it doesn't work. It's just a piece of plastic. That's not greed, that's belonging.

After creating such an overpowering, all-encompassing, all-defining addiction, we block its satisfaction to the poor. It is an unspeakable cruelty to create an addiction and then deny its satisfaction, the whole time feeding the desire. Materialism is literally killing the poor, while at the same time it is destroying the nation's soul.

The violent underside of American society is not a social aberration that we can safely and morally distance from "traditional American values." Rather, the frightening carnage is a frustrated mirror image of the twisted values that now govern the wider society.

The crisis of our inner cities will not change until we change. Social transformation will not occur without a transformation of values. It is not only the country's infrastructure (highways, bridges, factories, etc.) that is deteriorating; the moral structures and foundations of the nation are also unraveling.

We should know by now that we can't have an economic system that leaves masses of people behind without ensuring endless conflict. We should know by now that we can't have security based on weapons and technology that lead us to being participants in a mutual suicide pact. We should know by now that growth and progress that abuse, exploit, and destroy our natural environment will end up choking us to death. We should know by now that we cannot deny human dignity to our neighbor because of race or class or sex without destroying our own soul. The logic of the system is literally killing us.

New Vision

ANY NEW VISION WILL HAVE TO fundamentally challenge the system at its roots and offer genuine alternatives based on the critical moral values that we still possess. Since such a challenge and such an alternative are unlikely to come from the top of American society, the vision will necessarily have to originate from the bottom, the margins, and those middle sectors of society where dislocation and/or more independent social values offer the possibilities of new imagination.

Two crucial constituencies for such a task are the poor themselves and places within the religious community where fresh thinking and renewal are now taking place. The future will not be constructed from the mere shuffling of elite personnel at the top, but rather will be a response to a transformation of values and action at the grassroots.

Despite the lack of recognition, we are indeed in a social crisis. It is a crisis that confronts us with choices -- critical choices of national values and direction. Honest truth telling and bold moral vision for the future are urgently needed. The combination of the two is in fact the essence of what political leadership must be in the days ahead.

A discernible hunger exists in the nation for just such leadership. The American people deserve to be offered such a choice. And, even more important, we have a religious responsibility to offer it. That has always been the prophetic vocation.

The biblical prophets challenged the way things were, while at the same time helping people to imagine new possibilities. They were not afraid to confront the king, to defend the poor, or to say that what God had in mind was far different from what most people had settled for. Rankled by injustice, sickened by violence, and outraged by oppression, the prophets defined true religion as "doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with your God."

Our political convictions must grow out of that kind of faith -- a faith that does justice. We should be less interested in the ideologies of Left and Right than whether justice is really being done -- especially to the marginalized and downtrodden for whom the God of the Bible seems to have such a special concern. That same biblical perspective sees the accumulation of wealth and weapons as the wrong road to national security and instead offers the possibility of an economy that has room for everyone, an environment treated as a sacred trust, and a commitment to resolving our conflicts in ways that do not threaten the very survival of the planet. That political vision directly confronts the barriers of race, class, and sex which so violate God's creative purpose and still wreak such violence among us. To enjoy a culture in which human values and creativity can truly flourish will mean being set free from our captivity to consumption and its totally economic definition of life. What is most human rather than what is most profitable must become the critical question.

ON A FLIGHT HOME RECENTLY, I found myself on an airport shuttle bus with other travelers. Two handsome young white couples were having a loud conversation about their favorite restaurants around the world. Many of the rest of us would have preferred not to listen, but the close quarters left us no choice. Finally, one of them exclaimed in praise of his very favorite place, "It's just a wonderful restaurant -- you can spend $300 for dinner in your shorts!"

The next day was Saturday, and the food line formed early outside the Sojourners Neighborhood Center, only one and a half miles from the White House. Three hundred families receive a bag of groceries which is critical for getting through the week. Just before the doors are opened, all those who helped prepare and sort the food join hands to pray.

The prayer is normally offered by Mrs. Mary Glover, a 60-year-old black woman who knows what it is to be poor and who knows how to pray. She prays like someone who knows to whom she is talking. You can tell that Mary Glover has been praying to her God for a long time.

She thanks God for the gift of another day. Then she prays, "Lord, we know that you'll be coming through this line today, so help us to treat you well." Mrs. Glover knows very well who it is that waits in line with the hungry and huddles with the homeless to keep warm on the steam grates of Washington, D.C.

A few years ago at a press conference of the Reagan White House, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese declared to the nation that there are no hungry people in America. Who is it that knows the heart of God better? One of the most powerful white men in this country? Or a poor, black, 60-year-old woman who in society's view doesn't really count for much?

In Matthew 25 Jesus says, "I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was naked and you didn't clothe me. I was a stranger and you didn't take me in. I was sick and in prison and you didn't come to see me."

And the people said, "Lord, Lord. When did we see you hungry and thirsty and naked, a stranger, sick, and imprisoned? We didn't know it was you. Had we known it was you we would have done something. We would have responded. Had we just known it was you, we would have at least formed a Social Action Committee. But we didn't know it was you!"

Then Jesus says, "As you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me." To those who would name his name, Jesus asks, "How much do you love me? I'll know how much you love me by how you love them."

Mary Glover understands Matthew 25. Her prayer is the best commentary on the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew I've ever heard. She helps me remember who and where Jesus is.

God is in this with us. God is not distant and far away and somehow in charge of making things turn out right. God is enmeshed with us in the human situation. "God with us" -- Emmanuel -- the heart of Christian faith is the incarnation.

In Jesus, God hits the streets. God is now walking in our streets, and in our shoes. God knows the pain of Anthony's mother when I held her hand in the funeral home as she wept at the loss of her 20-year-old son.

Perhaps an image of God for us in our times is a black grandmother in the inner city weeping and mourning the loss of her children -- a whole generation of young people who are simply being abandoned and destroyed. If we become angry -- with all of our sin, complicity, and limited compassion -- how angry must God be at what's happening?

AT THE FOUNDING OF SOJOURNERS Community and magazine, we were seminary students in Chicago. Something very exciting was happening among us. We were wrestling with the gospel that had captured our hearts, which we believed was the only hope we really had.

One of the things we did in those early days was to make a study of every reference in the Bible to the poor -- every single verse in the Bible that talked about God's love for the poor, about God being the deliverer of the oppressed. We discovered that the Bible was full of poor people.

In the Old Testament, the suffering of the poor was the second most prominent theme. Idolatry was the first, and the two were often connected. In the New Testament we found that one out of every 16 verses was about the poor. In the gospels it was one out of every 10; in Luke one of every seven, and in James one of every five verses.

One member of our group decided to try an experiment. He found an old Bible and a pair of scissors, and he cut out of that Bible every single reference to the poor. It took him a very long time. When he came to Amos and read, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he cut it out. When he came to Isaiah, and he heard the prophet say, "Is not this the fast that I choose...to let the oppressed go free...?" he just cut it right out. All of the Psalms in which God is seen as the deliverer of the poor just disappeared.

In the New Testament, when he came to the Song of Mary -- which promised, "The mighty will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things, and the rich sent empty away" -- he cut it out. You can imagine what happened to Matthew 25. He cut out Jesus' Nazareth manifesto in Luke 4: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty all those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." It was all cut out. "Blessed are the poor" and "Blessed are the poor in spirit" -- they were gone, too. All the beatitudes had to go.

When he was all through, that Bible was literally in shreds. It wouldn't hold together; it was falling apart in our hands.

I used to take that old Bible with me out to preach. I'd hold it high above American congregations and say, "My friends, this is the American Bible -- full of holes from all that we have cut out." Evangelicals and liberals, Protestants and Catholics in America -- all have Bibles full of holes. The poor have been cut out of the Word of God.

What we must begin to do in our day is put our Bibles back together again, restore the integrity of the Word of God in our lives, in our faith communities, and in our world. Our fidelity to scripture will not be tested by our dogma and doctrine, but by how our lives demonstrate that we believe the Word of God.

The good news is that it is already happening. It's already going on. Our Bibles are being put back together. The Word of God is being restored in our time.

The God of the Bible is a deliverer of the poor. God has a special love for the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, those who are on the bottom of everybody else's priority list. If that isn't clear from the Bible, then nothing is clear from the Bible. It is clear from start to finish. And the poor of the world, who are the growing church all over the world, are the ones who understand this. To them it is a tremendous source of hope, comfort, and power that God is with them in their struggle for life, for justice, and a decent future for their families.

A STORY COMES TO US FROM South Africa, about a widow whose husband had died young and left her alone with eight children. She was poor, she was black, and she was South African. That's pretty close to the bottom in this world.

They had an old dilapidated house that she wanted to fix up, but she was a seamstress and made only two dollars a week. She worked hard, and worked extra to save enough money for 400 bricks to fix up the old house. So she ordered the bricks and counted them when they arrived. There were only 250.

She asked the man who brought the bricks where the rest were. He was a wealthy and powerful man, and he told her not to bother him, that she had all the bricks she was going to get. And she told him, "I will never forget this. But that's okay, you don't have to worry about the bricks. The God I believe in is the protector of the widow and the fatherless. And somehow you're going to know that."

One of her children, a 12-year-old boy, was listening. The words of his mother made a great impression on him.

Two weeks later, the same man pulled up to the house in a truck with his hired men to unload the rest of the bricks. "What happened?" she asked.

Two of the houses that he had been building had mysteriously burned to the ground, and he thought her God had something to do with it. He was embarrassed, and he was afraid. They completed the work as quickly as possible, and then he was gone. The young son was there looking on.

That young boy was Allan Boesak. Today he is helping to lead his people to freedom in South Africa. "I saw all this at age 12," says Boesak, "and it made a tremendous impression on me; because I saw that in a very tangible way, God does take care of the poor and the meek and the lowly and the oppressed. That was something I was never to forget for the rest of my life.

"So today I am literally impassioned about these things. I keep on telling people that this is the biblical message and that it doesn't matter what the situation looks like; God will make true the promises that have been made. And there is no doubt in my mind that God will."

When Allan Boesak preaches about the God who is the protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, he is not preaching from some text of liberation theology. He is preaching out of what he learned around his mother's table, and what he believes is so unshakable that all the might of white South Africa cannot dissuade him from that stubborn hope.

WE FIND OURSELVES NOW AT A critical historical moment. Just when it seems that everything is unraveling, as the world system appears to be coming to the end of its rope, God is raising up something new, and from a very unexpected place.

We all remember from our history of the church something called the Reformation. It was a time when the church had lost its way. The church had forgotten essential insights of the gospel, and in forgetting had become comfortable and complacent. So God raised up reformers to speak the word that had been forgotten, that was so central to faith.

In that Reformation the central insight was this: Salvation is by faith alone. It was simple and yet profound. It spoke directly to what had been lost in the church's life. That simple and powerful insight transformed the church and the world.

Today, the church is again at a turning point. I believe that we are at the beginning of something that will become nothing less than a Second Reformation in the church's life.

We have forgotten something; there is something we lack. We have been corrupted, and we have lost our way. The central insight of the new Reformation will be this: The gospel is good news to the poor. That also is an insight so simple and yet so profound. It has the power to spark a new and Second Reformation in the church's life. Like the first, it will transform both the church and the world. Many of us are undergoing a second conversion, a conversion to Christ whose face we see in the poor. This second conversion is essential to the Second Reformation. The call for a new Reformation is coming to us from a new place, an unexpected place: the church of the poor. The poor themselves will be the evangelists to us of this new word whose time has come.

Jesus has been present all the time in the poor whom we have kept at arm's length in the affluent churches. In them -- in their flesh, their lives, their history, their sorrow, their joy -- in their struggle we will find the invisible Christ.

We are finding Jesus again. We are rediscovering Jesus afresh. We are going back to Jesus anew. That has always been what converts the church, and that conversion is prompting a Second Reformation in the church's life.

There is a new gospel tradition emerging in the Second Reformation. It is storytelling. The stories are mostly of the church of the poor, and those who are being evangelized and transformed by that story. The evangelists for this Second Reformation are ordinary people.

Today a global crisis of immense proportions is being confronted by an uprising of hope in a Second Reformation of faith led by the church of the poor. The face of Jesus is being discovered not only among the poor in Central America, South Africa, and the Philippines, but also right at home.

Everywhere you look, Christians and churches are feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, ministering to those with AIDS, welcoming the refugees, organizing with the disenfranchised, visiting the prisoners, and advocating justice for the oppressed. Wherever there are works of mercy and acts of justice, Christians are in the midst of them. In many places the church is heeding the gospel message to bring good news to the poor and the gospel warning that we will be judged by how we treat the least of these.

The most pressing issue today is that we really have no sense of solidarity with one another -- no communion, community, or common bond. A very telling example indeed is what is happening in my neighborhood.

A whole generation of young people is being destroyed. But for most Americans, this is just an inner-city problem, a crime concern, a drug crisis, or a violence issue. What is really happening is that a whole generation of us is being destroyed; but white America doesn't see it that way. It isn't us. It's them. How can we call people who are desperately poor and struggling to survive a "permanent underclass"?

In the slums of Manila, I saw whole families washing plastic and Styrofoam from the street for a living. At the end of the day you can make two dollars if you wash enough plastic. They are us, and we are them. And we are deeply connected.

If we fail to see these connections, we are simply not going to make it. All of our other problems stem from this one. At the heart of all of these issues is one single issue -- that we have lost our sense of being brothers and sisters, daughters and sons of God. We are the children of God, who are inextricably bound to one another. And we will either live together, or die as those who forgot that they were part of a common destiny.

It is time to heed the words of the prophet Amos: "Let justice roll" into the streets of oppression and drugs and hopelessness, and also into the avenues of luxury and fear. "Let justice roll" into the ghettos and barrios and squatter camps, but also into the affluent suburbs of comfort and indifference. "Let justice roll" into the board rooms of corporate wealth and the corridors of political power.

"Let justice roll" into a church made lukewarm by its conformity and isolated by its lack of compassion. "Let justice roll" and set free all the captives -- those under bondage to poverty's chains and those under bondage to money's desires. "Let justice roll" -- and let faith come alive again to all those whose eyes long to see a new day. The Second Reformation has begun.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.