What Bono says about God & the poor

Bono is an anomaly, a Jesus-follower, a rock star, and an
activist. Here’s what he said about the
poor at the presidential prayer breakfast this past summer:

God may well be with us in our
mansions on the hill… I hope so. But the
one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the
vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the
cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother
who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is
in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted
opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yolk from your midst, the
pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the
hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in
darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually
guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places”

It’s not a coincidence that in
the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. [You know, the only time Christ is judgmental
is on the subject of the poor.] ‘As you
have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto
me.’ (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

There’s a gigantic chasm between
the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

Because there’s no way we can
look at what’s happening in Africa and, if we’re honest, conclude that deep
down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn’t
accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all
misnomers, “mother nature”. In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe.