Episode 97: Jeremy Everett on hunger and poverty

Jeremy Everett has devoted his life to the causes of hunger and poverty. Listen to him explain why he was called to this work and what it really means to fix the systemic problems that lead to poverty.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: Jesus said, "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat." Addressing hunger on a broad scale and even on a small scale is an important part of our faith tradition, whatever that may be. What motivates someone to answer a call to give their life specifically to that end? Jeremy Everett of the Texas Hunger Initiative is going to be our guest to talk about his journey in this work. Stay tuned for Good God. Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm pleased to welcome to the program today, Jeremy Everett. Jeremy.

Jeremy Everett: Good to be here.

George Mason: Glad to have you with us.

Jeremy Everett: Thank you.

George Mason: Jeremy is the executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. All right? Say that with me everyone.

Jeremy Everett: That's right.

George Mason: All these long titles and whatnot, but it actually goes descriptively into what you do.

George Mason: And all of those words matter, don't they, Jeremy, in terms of how you're addressing things collaboratively as a style. Also, because it's coming out of Baylor University, very connected, I think, to the School of Social Work also, is it not?

Jeremy Everett: Yeah, it was originally a part of the Texas Hunger Initiative, which was born in the School of Social Work.

George Mason: Okay, very good.

Jeremy Everett: That's right.

George Mason: Terrific. And you are an author and this new book is titled, I Was Hungry. The strike-through is significant as well so that we begin to develop our imagination about that being a thing we can say in the past.

Jeremy Everett: That's right.

George Mason: I Was Hungry, but the subtitle is Cultivating Common Ground to End an American Crisis. We'll talk more about the book along the way.

Jeremy Everett: Great.

George Mason: But I know that eradicating hunger, elevating people, all of this comes out of a deep spiritual calling for you, and I think it would be really important to say that there are a lot of people who seem to have a desire to do public policy work, a desire to see people helped. Sometimes that work is exhausting, and unless you have a sense of that inner core, a place from which it springs, it's really difficult to sustain it. So I'd be interested to know about how this comes to be for you.

Jeremy Everett: Yes. That's a great question. I think oftentimes when I'm talking to our students, I talk about if you want to deal with a big social problem, it doesn't matter if it's hunger or poverty or human trafficking, that you really need to be steeped in three things. One, proximity. So you have to have proximity to the problem. And as Bryan Stevenson says, you can't solve a social problem from a distance.

George Mason: That's right.

Jeremy Everett: The second thing is research. So you need to understand the issue, even beyond your own personal experience, even when you have been immersed in the issue. And the third is your faith tradition. Your faith tradition both helps you have a framework for understanding your call to love your neighbor as yourself, your responsibility to your brothers and sisters who oftentimes live in broken social situations where injustice is pervasive. But it's also what restores you. It's what keeps you going.

George Mason: Yes. It really does, isn't it?

Jeremy Everett: It is.

George Mason: And both of us are Baptist, and Baptist ministers, and we come therefore out of a branch of the Christian tradition that has a high value on personal experience with God.

Jeremy Everett: Right.

George Mason: Right? So while we are not maybe as doctrinally ordered, we are highly spiritual in terms of the individual relationship that we have with God, and yours also was steeped in ministry in your family history. So you were very much set up for this in certain ways, weren't you?

Jeremy Everett: Well, we joke that ministry is the family business. And so my father and grandfather were both Baptist ministers, my uncles are Baptist ministers, my mom's father was a farmer, but led singing at a primitive Baptist church in rural Alabama. So it was-

George Mason: Yeah, but let's listen to that. He was a farmer. Agriculture, hunger. A lot of streams coming together. Which probably also goes, Jeremy, to the point, when people hear us talk a lot of times about calling, if you aren't steeped in the tradition of what vocational calling is, you might think that's "answer the phone" type of thing. Or you might think it's one of those unique, rare experiences of saying who hears a voice, right? Normally it comes through these more natural channels doesn't it?

Jeremy Everett: It really does. And many in many respects you begin to see to your point, who you were created to be maybe from the get-go. I thought that when I was first trying to identify who I was called to be, the first place I went was Jeremiah 1. Here I was named for the prophet Jeremiah, which I always lament because I have a tendency to cry every time I tell a story. And I'm like, why the weeping prophet! Why not another prophet?

George Mason: The weeping prophet. About "lament".

Jeremy Everett: That's right. But in Jeremiah 1, God is saying before were even in the womb, I knew who you are. And, and so I think those are the moments that help connect us. I never in my life would have, certainly growing up would have imagined that I would be working on issues of hunger and poverty or being able to see the correlation between one grandfather being a farmer and another being a minister, and seeing both of those bear literal fruit in certain circumstances for people in poverty. But it's been interesting. So calling is very much a part of how I identify what I experienced to address this issue.

George Mason: In your book, you talk a bit about your calling and about your Franciscan moment. And I think you should say a little more about Saint Francis and the role that he played in your call experience and trying to understand that because it also helps make sense of a much larger part of your mission as a result, not just a calling to serve God, but the way you do it.

Jeremy Everett: So I, being a Baptist preacher's kid, we joked that my dad only has three years worth of sermons. And so we moved a lot. And oftentimes we might be at a place where my father would pastor a congregation where maybe the member of Congress or the mayor or the business leaders of a community might be a part of, but then I would play basketball with kids that came from a very different context. Oftentimes I've lived in the projects and so I might spend some of my time with friends who are from very affluent areas and then other times playing basketball in a housing project. And when I got to college, those two things, the inequity that I saw on a daily basis, which really didn't resonate with me probably until I got to college, really began to be called to the conscious level.

Jeremy Everett: And once it was at the conscious level, I was wrestling with it for years and asking religious leaders and professors, what do I do about this? And also probably feeling guilty about growing up in a middle class household. And they, many of whom told me listen, you should feel grateful for what you grew up with. And that's probably true for most people. It wasn't true for me at that time in life. And I didn't find truth until I found the story of Saint Francis. And that was by happenstance turning on a TV and the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which was an early '70s film, happened to be on. And watching the story of Saint Francis unfold where he ultimately realizes that his possessions are prohibiting him from loving his neighbors himself and choosing to live outside of the safety of the city in a life that's intertwined with beggars. And it had a profound impact on me.

Jeremy Everett: And so at that point, that's when I knew... that's my answer. And so for me, I gather up all my stuff and I was in college in Birmingham and drove over the little mountain into downtown Birmingham from where I was and gave away my stuff to the homeless living in downtown Birmingham. And at that point I knew I was called to the issue of poverty. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that was what God was prompting me to do.

George Mason: So from that, you began quickly to have an awakening of how just giving your stuff away doesn't necessarily transform the ones you're giving it to as much as maybe it does you. Right? Which, is also a part of this important thing of solidarity. The reciprocity of this sort of ministry is very important. A lifestyle that allows us to be acted upon and us to be effected by our engagement with people is where we need ultimately to be, I think, spiritually when we're involved in these things, and you were, you were learning that in that moment. But, the backpack story. I think the camping equipment story is also interesting to me in terms of how you realize that there has to be a larger systemic change that happens than just the anecdotal "Give your stuff away".

Jeremy Everett: That's right. When I gave away, my prized possessions were my backpacking equipment and I gave it to up a homeless man and went back the next week to check on the man, try to build a relationship, and he had taken those possessions and sold them for drugs, and I didn't know at the time the high rate of debilitating mental health issues that many of our homeless people deal with and how drugs and alcohol are oftentimes their coping mechanism because they can't afford medication and our mental health system is inadequate to say the least.

Jeremy Everett: That was an eye opener for me that this was not going to be like a 1972 Zeffirelli film with me walking off in the sunset, holding hands with the poor. It was going to be that this situation was complicated and that it was probably going to take a lifetime worth of commitment to address the issue. So I think you're right. But at the same time, before that act had happened, I saw people as a means to my end. And so it wasn't until the giving away of my possessions that I began to see people as an end in and of themselves. Where they are created in the image of God, just like I am, and they are worthy of relationship, just to be in relationship with them. That if I am hungry and I want to eat a sandwich, that they're hungry and they may want to eat the sandwich too... And so just the very basic tendency to care for their basic necessities, but also just to be in relationship with people and to not use them for your own needs.

George Mason: So this goes back to the Saint Francis story as well. Because, I love that we're sitting here. Baptist ministers having a conversation about a 14th century friar whose influence is still profound upon us today. But here's Saint Francis who ends up stripping naked in front of the public in his town. The Bishop is there, his father the merchant is there, and he, in that moment, he has to say, in effect, "I no longer have a father on earth. I only have a father in heaven ".

George Mason: And the sense of solidarity with all humanity in that moment where he was not willing to define himself by the privileges of being the son of a wealthy merchant is what's so crucial in the significance of his influence, I think. Right? So when you say that people are not instrumental for us, they are ends unto themselves. I think this is part of the secret of that. And so much of what we, so much of what we deal with in our society is about finding competitive advantages for ourselves and our children, over other people and their children in our society. So when we look at public policy, when we look at choices of schools, when we look at how we make decisions, if everything is instrumental to that end for what it will do for us, it leads to one sense of consequence. Right? But if people are ends unto themselves, it really is a different calculus altogether, isn't it?

Jeremy Everett: It really is. Then there becomes an inherent question of equity. And we have to spend time really unpacking what that means. And you hear people oftentimes say you're looking for an equity of opportunity, maybe not an outcome per se, but if we're intent on seeing brothers and sisters... So in this passage, I really don't write about this in the book, but so Jesus is, for those who are familiar with it's Matthew 25 passages of the book is named for, "I was hungry, you gave me something to eat and I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink, a stranger and you welcomed me..." And he goes on to say that when people, when the righteous say, "When did we do this for you?"

Jeremy Everett: And he said, "When you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it for me". So in this passage, Jesus identifies people who are poor, who are hungry, who are immigrants as members of his family. The rest of us are judged by how we treated members of his family. And so, so it requires a complete reorientation of how we structure policy, of how we structure our cities, of how we structure our public schools of where we want our kids to go swim, and where we want to invest our resources.

George Mason: Let's put a pause right there and we're going to take a break and come back and I want to go back to Matthew 25, who are members of his family and talk about that a little more cause it does have everything to do with the consequences you're suggesting right there. So we'll be right back.

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George Mason: We're back with Jeremy Everett of the Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, which includes the Texas Hunger Initiative with an ambition to eradicate hunger in Texas as a state and collaborate on a larger basis than that. Jeremy, we were just talking about the spiritual motivation, the biblical vision that you highlighted and that you used in the title of your book "I Was Hungry". This is a phrase from Jesus in Matthew 25 and you were saying that what's so important is Jesus ends that passage by saying, "And as much as you did it unto the least of these who are members of my family, you have done it unto me".

George Mason: You identified the members of his family, with all those that he just talked about. The hungry, the stranger, et cetera. Now there's an important consequence of that you mentioned and that is that then we need to follow that into... Then how do we relate to members of his family if we're going to be judged that way? There is another interpretation of that passage that we are increasingly seeing come out of Christian circles that limits members of Jesus family, to his disciples, to those who were among his 12 and the small band who were hungry and thirsty and who were in prison and who were all of that. And the idea here is to say to people more broadly, the way you treat Christians who are vulnerable is the way you'll be judged by God. The consequence of that interpretation of course, is to further the division between us and them. Insider outsider as if you are part of the elect, part of the disciples of the church, who the church is.

George Mason: Now religious liberty issues are really about protecting Christians and then you'll be blessed by the way, if you do that, public policy, we don't really have to care for everyone who is hungry, who is a prisoner, who is vulnerable, We just need to make sure that we are protecting the interests of those who are hungry in the church. This then has a whole other political consequence to it, doesn't it? And it's really the argument going on in America today between those who support the current policies that are being put forward by this administration and supported by 81% of American evangelicals. What I'm getting at here is this is two radically different visions that grow out of a faith tradition and out of a biblical interpretation. And the consequences of it if we don't even see that they are eternal, they are certainly massive temporally. Aren't they?

Jeremy Everett: That's right, well, let's start with the text.

George Mason: Yes.

Jeremy Everett: So that this is the only apocalyptic or eschatological scene in the entire gospel of Matthew. And let's be literalist as we look at the text for a second. So when Jesus is speaking, when he's returned in this apocalyptic scene, he is returned as the King this time, and he gathers all of the people. Not some of the people. He gathers all of the people and he begins to separate them. The sheep and the goats, the righteous, the accused, and to the astonishment of the people gathered, he doesn't mention anything in this passage. Keep in mind, this is the only eschatological scene in the entire gospel of Matthew. He doesn't say anything in this passage about a grace, justification, the forgiveness of sins, he doesn't-

George Mason: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior and be baptized by immersion...

Jeremy Everett: That's right. It does not come up. The only thing that comes up, what constitutes is a decisive criterion for judgment is whether or not a person had acted with love and cared for the needy. Essentially when people responded or failed to respond to people in need, they in fact responded or failed to respond to Christ. So oftentimes we act like these actions are just extra credit. But in fact, they are part and parcel. They are the core part, the core tenant of our belief system, if we are going to take scripture for what it's suggesting in Matthew 25.

George Mason: And this doesn't have to alter our sense of what orthodoxy is theologically. It's actually though it should orient it differently. Right? So now what we may have to do is to go back to examine who is Jesus and if he is, as Richard Rohr likes to call him "the universal Christ", that is to say, everything that has to do with this apocalyptic scene has to do with what God is up to in Christ in the world. And Jesus becomes shorthand for the larger way in which God is dealing with the world. Not the snapshot of this moment in history where we get an "eject" button somehow if we're in the right position and say the right words.

Jeremy Everett: That's right. Well you bring up Rohr in thinking about the Franciscan tradition. Francis really entered, really introduced the idea of not just orthodoxy. Right? Beliefs. But also orthopraxy right? Practice. And so I think holding those two things in concert are certainly what we see in this passage. Oftentimes people think, "Well first I need to take care of my own family, and make sure that my own family is well taken care of". And that certainly makes sense. And then you might even extend that to your own congregation or even your own Christian household. But it certainly doesn't stop there. And if we really believe that all people are created in the image of God, that we need to treat them that way. And just as we would hope that they would treat us if circumstances found us differently, if we are members of Jesus's family. And whom he does not say are people that have said a particular creed, but people that are experiencing injustice on this side of the sweet by and by as we might say it in the old hymn.

George Mason: Okay, so let's talk about injustice for a moment because you raised that word and you raise the concept and now we're talking about the hunger in particular. There is a distinction between charity and justice that I think is important to make here. Much of the work you do is going beyond charity to much more structural question to a much more compelling public vision of our life together in the world, that is not just about the wealthy who are philanthropic and who are helping people on an ad hoc basis. Not that that's bad, but... So it seems to me that what we have is a system that is currently in place, where our laws and policies and our operating principles together publicly are making people vulnerable. So to begin with, the structural things create insecurity, then charity is supposed to come underneath those to strengthen them and to heal those insecurities, so that we can get level when it seems to me that's just the opposite of what it should be.

George Mason: It's backwards. So if you start out with the idea that we all understand in our common life together enabling us, that we got to get this infrastructure right. That we need, all of the justice matters taking place. Now if charity comes on top of that to move people from a starting place of security to opportunity, what a difference that would make publicly. But instead, we're always starting with this charitable and then we get to cherry pick someone got out of the hood. And if everybody would just be... That's not the way you operate though. Your whole work is to strengthen the infrastructure and to change the conversation there. So how do you help people understand that distinction when you go talk to them?

Jeremy Everett: Yeah. It's a great observation. And a great imagery that you're using in terms of charity and justice and I think why I find charity important is that charity helps people through today. And it may not bring about just systems, but because there is so much brokenness in our communities, because you have 40 million people who live in poverty and hunger and true poverty, it's probably more like the 200% of the poverty level in terms of, that's really where you need to be, if you're going to be able to make ends meet. And that's a hundred million Americans when you're talking about that. So if you think about it from that end, these folks oftentimes need some interventions that are going to help them through today.

Jeremy Everett: And those are important. The problem is if we stop there. And we're not also working to build just systems. Analogy, I use a lot with our folks is, so the first inner city house I moved into was this old house in North Waco. And it had a really bad plumbing problem. Every time we ran the sink or turn on the shower, we could just hear it echoing down underneath the house and creating puddles in that. That plumbing problem was unpleasant. And eventually that unpleasant plumbing problem seeped out into our front yard. And so it was nasty. And we called our landlord repeatedly to get him to come fix it, and they never did. And finally the police threatened to have our house red tagged, essentially have it torn down and vacated if they didn't come fix the problem.

Jeremy Everett: Still took a while to get the landlord to send somebody over, but eventually he did. He sent a plumber over. The plumber assessed the situation and basically said, you're going to have to re-pipe the whole house. And so he told the landlord that and the landlord sent the plumber to The Home Depot or some shop and when he came back, he returned with concrete steps and he put the concrete steps through the sludge in the front yard, and he got back in his truck and he left. And we were just shocked that was the solution to the plumbing problem that we had for our house, was putting in concrete steps. And those concrete steps, they probably prevented us from getting sick, because we don't have to walk through sludge. But if that was the longterm solution, they probably would've eroded over time repeatedly and ultimately probably would've cost more than fixing the problem.

Jeremy Everett: When the police officer came by and saw that was the solution to the problem, he was ready to have the house vacated immediately, and then that caused the landlord to ultimately come back, and send the plumber over and fix the pipes in the house. If you think about that, where we're at as a nation, we need those charitable interventions. We need those, those concrete steps of charity that help people make it through today so that they're not experiencing something awful. But at the same time we've got to get out of the house and build the pipes of justice. Then if we don't fix these broken pipes of injustice, then ultimately we're going to lose the investment that we've built. We've built this nation in many respects it's a wonderful country but if we don't take the time to build a system that is just for everybody, it's going to ultimately cost us our whole house.

George Mason: I just think that's a beautiful place for us to push the pause button here again, because I want to have you back to do another episode on this, but the pipes of justice. Fixing the pipes of justice and the truth is, we don't all do that willingly. We have to sometimes exert pressure on people to do so, and that sometimes gets uncomfortable. And for people of faith to organize, to challenge people, to change their behavior, to change public policy, to confront municipal state, federal officials, to get them to do the right thing, is sometimes unpleasant for us because as people of faith and in congregations, we like to make everybody happy. But sometimes this is the important work we have to do and we'll get to talk to you more about the Texas Hunger Initiative now, and hunger itself in our next episode. But Jeremy, thank you so much for being with us on Good God.

Jeremy Everett: Of course! Thank you.

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