On Thursday, The National Day of Prayer, June and I stopped by Faith Lutheran Church’s twelve-hour (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) Prayer Vigil. While in prayer for about a half-hour at noon, in addition to there were several readings: one from Wendell Berry, two from Pastor Luckey, and this one by Jim Wallis:

This world of ours is not working. Even while we cling to the illusion that everything is all right, we know in our hearts that it is not. In our society the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than any time in our whole history. The threats to our environment seem to grow every day and the middle classes are afflicted with an anxiety, a loneliness and a fear that we know too well.

On a world scale, the poor are dying in enormous numbers now -- forty thousand children each and every day. The world is gasping for breath, pleading for mercy for us to stop. The credo of the affluent comes to us from bumper stickers which read, "I shop, therefore, I am." This is a faith statement, a theological affirmation of a culture that is in danger of losing its own soul. Now we are on the edge of war in the Middle East. We face a horrible catastrophe to protect our access to cheap oil. The President says the oil symbolizes our way of life, but it is really our national addiction to an over consumption that is killing the poor, killing the earth and denying us our own humanity. The questions we must ask are "Where have we gone wrong and how do we find the resources to move into a different future?" Where do we turn?

I was a seminary student in Chicago many years ago. We decided to try an experiment. We made a study of every single reference in the whole Bible to the poor, to God's love for the poor, to God being the deliverer of the oppressed. We found thousands of verses on the subject. The Bible is full of the poor.

In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, it is the second most prominent theme. The first is idolatry and the two are most often connected. In the New Testament, we find that one of every sixteen verses is about poor people; in the gospels, one of every ten; in Luke, one of every seven. We find the poor everywhere in the Bible.

One member of our group was a very zealous young seminary student and he thought he would try something just to see what might happen. He took an old Bible and a pair of scissors. He cut every single reference to the poor out of the Bible. It took him a very long time.

When he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?" he just cut it right out. All those Psalms that see God as a deliverer of the oppressed, they disappeared.

In the gospels, he came to Mary's wonderful song where she says, "The mighty will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things and the rich sent empty away." Of course, you can guess what happened to that. In Matthew 25, the section about the least of these, that was gone. Luke 4, Jesus' very first sermon, what I call his Nazareth manifesto, where he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to poor people" -- that was gone, too. "Blessed are the poor," that was gone.

So much of the Bible was cut out; so much so that when he was through, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. I held it in my hand and it was falling apart. It was a Bible full of holes. I would often take that Bible out with me to preach. I would hold it high in the air above American congregations and say, "Brothers and sister, this is the American Bible, full of holes from all we have cut out." We might as well have taken that pair of scissors and just cut out all that we have ignored for such a long time. In America the Bible that we read is full of holes.

In the silence after this reading, I can assure you that some of us were praying for the poor. We were asking God to help us respect, feed, clothe, educate, and house the poor--the beloved of God.