It was a “social experiment” playing out on TikTok: A young Kentucky woman called churches asking if they’d buy formula to feed her (fictional) hungry baby. Only a handful agreed on the spot, and the stunt went viral, “proof” that Christians and other religious people are stingy hypocrites who can’t be bothered with the needy.
In reality, it proved nothing of the sort. A pastor who jumped at the chance to help was rightly honored. And while some responses were admittedly obtuse, there are also good reasons a church secretary wouldn’t instantly comply with a stranger on the phone. Baby formula—because it’s shelf-stable, relatively expensive, urgently needed, and subject to intermittent shortages—has long been a popular item for black market trading and schemes to defraud SNAP, the food stamps program.
And beyond baby formula, the generosity of Christians and other religious Americans is well-established. While not free of hypocrisy, we’ve consistently set the curve on giving. “The evidence leaves no room for doubt: Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people,” writes Arthur Brooks in Who Really Cares, a painstaking study of American charitable action. “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”
This generosity doesn’t just extend to houses of worship. Religious folks outperform secularists “in every measurable way,” Brooks documents—including giving to secular charities, volunteering, and donating blood. This has been true of Christians for centuries. Basil of Caesarea is credited with paving the way for the modern hospital, and the early church was renowned for its courageous care of the sick. Our culture’s deep assumption of the value of the young, weak, and vulnerable undeniably rests on the ethical foundation laid by the carpenter from Nazareth.
Still the perception remains: this idea that Christians are all words and no deeds, too busy doing empty religious rituals to see Christ in beggarly form. Even Christians sometimes fall into this line of thinking, wondering if there’s a tension between the church’s worship and the Lord’s work. Do love and adoration for Christ feed our impulse to feed the hungry? Or is churchly devotion to Jesus a mere distraction from tending to a broken world filled with dire needs?
Certainly, we should welcome prods to action: The Christian disposition to care for the least of these cannot remain a mere disposition. “The goodness of caring for the poor,” Joseph Bottum warns in An Anxious Age, can become “much less about actually caring for the poor … and much more about feeling that the poor should be cared for.”
Yet it’s a mistake to pit worship and service against each other—a mistake that will diminish our worship and service alike. Hearing, praying, learning, and singing the stories of Jesus’ mercy each week confronts us with the fact that Christianity is not a historical curiosity. It demands to be lived.
Christian devotion does not undermine charity but underwrites it. And going to church does not distract us from service but teaches us to serve. Far from competing with practical charity, devotion to Christ is what keeps his teachings in our lives.
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The church’s call to worship is a call to action. It is a call to awaken from sloth—from what theologian Ross McCullough describes as “the vice of failing to love [goodness] enough.” The virtue that Christians have traditionally prescribed to combat sloth is diligence, the Latin root of which is diligere, or “to love.” Love is an indispensable ingredient to the Christian life, as the apostle Paul says in one of his most-quoted chapters: “If I give all I possess to the poor … but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3).
When Christians neglect the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, it is not because we love Jesus too much but because we love him too little. Weekly fellowship with a church intent on doing justly (Mic. 6:8) is a practice and a source of diligence. The worship of Christ and the works of Christ are designed to go together, and any attempt to separate the two will ultimately fail.
This is the truth underneath the seemingly dismissive remark Jesus once made about the needy: “The poor you will always have with you” (Matt. 26:11). The line, a reference to Deuteronomy, comes in the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany. A woman breaks open an alabaster jar of expensive perfume and pours it on his head—much to the disciples’ dismay.
“Why this waste?” they ask. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor” (Matt. 26:6–9). But Jesus calls the woman’s action “beautiful.” She was anointing him for burial, he says, adding that the disciples will always have the poor (vv. 10–12).
What are we to make of this strange episode? Does it confirm the caricature of callous religiosity? Is Jesus justifying Christian selfishness?
The passage Jesus quoted points us to the answer. By invoking a fragment of Deuteronomy, Jesus was invoking the whole passage (a practice known as “metalepsis”), in which God addresses the ubiquity of poverty in order to command its redress: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut. 15:11, NRSVue). Students of the Galilean rabbi would have known the citation’s implications.
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The context in Matthew matters too. In the prior chapter, Matthew 25, Jesus points to treatment of the downtrodden as the criterion for eternal salvation and damnation, listing out feeding the hungry, giving a drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,” Jesus says, “you did not do for me” (v. 45). From the Sermon on the Mount to the end of Matthew’s gospel, no one walks away with a license to ignore the lowly.
But what of the expensive ointment at Bethany? Does extravagant worship lavished on Jesus undercut care for the poor?
Actually, the opposite. Matthew 25 says that whatever we do for the poor we have ultimately done for Jesus. And in Matthew 26, the principle is reversed: When the woman does a beautiful thing to Jesus, she also does it to the poor.
That is, she doesn’t just anoint his body for death; she anoints his very way of life. She anoints his fellowship with the least, his touch of the untouchable. She anoints his sermon that starts by saying the poor in spirit are blessed (Matt. 5:3). Her worship is directed at the one who “became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9)—not materially rich but “rich in good deeds” (1 Tim. 6:18).
When I was in college, a friend of mine had an idea to start a movement called Sunday Morning Worship. The idea was to convince students to stop attending their local churches and instead spend Sunday mornings downtown serving the homeless. The heart behind the idea was good, echoing the call of Isaiah 1:12–17 to stop privileging solemn assemblies over seeking justice for the oppressed and needy.
But the “living sacrifice” of Christian service (Rom. 12:1–2) is never in competition with Christian worship. On the contrary, Sunday morning is precisely where we learn of Jesus’ heart for the destitute. And as it happened, our congregation on campus already had vibrant ministries to the poor. The work was being done; we needed only to join in.
That isn’t always the case. Too many churches have been unfaithful to the ministry agenda of Jesus. We have not always mirrored his tender mercy. But fervent worship of Jesus is not the problem here. It is the beginning of the solution.
In his comments on the story from Matthew 26, theologian Stanley Hauerwas reminds Christians of the work and worship incumbent upon every congregation:
The wealth of the church is the wealth of the poor. The beauty of a cathedral is a beauty that does not exclude but in fact draws and includes the poor. The beauty of the church’s liturgy, its music and its hymns, is a beauty of and for the poor. … “The poor you always have with you” is not a description to legitimate a lack of concern for the poor, but rather a description of a faithful church. This woman, this unnamed woman, has done for Jesus what the church must always be for the world—precious ointment poured lavishly on the poor.
When Christians bend the knee to Jesus, we adopt his posture to the impoverished: humble service, devotion, and sacrifice. To mirror the posture of Jesus is to prepare to carry a cross.
Brett Vanderzee is preaching and music minister at The Springs Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma, singer-songwriter, and cohost of the podcast Bible & Friends.
