When I sat down with Marlena Graves on Created in the Image of God, I expected a thoughtful conversation about justice, poverty, and race.
I did not expect to be transported into the woods of rural Pennsylvania, standing beside a little girl who smelled like smoke, chopped wood to buy gas, and preached to the trees from a rock she had painted white.
That child is the key to understanding everything that came later—her embrace of the African concept of Ubuntu, her refusal to practice selective compassion, and her insistence that both individuals and governments bear responsibility for the poor.
Her theology didn’t arrive first in a seminary classroom or in the footnotes of a PhD dissertation. It came in the cold, by the light of a smoky fire, in the pages of a Spanish Bible read by a grandmother with a third-grade education.
From there it grew into a way of seeing the world that is far more Christian than much of what passes for “biblical” discourse in America.
A Girl Who Smelled Like Smoke
“I grew up very poor,” Marlena said, matter-of-factly.
She was born in Puerto Rico, spent a few early years there, and then moved back and forth between the island and the mainland. Most of her childhood unfolded in northwest Pennsylvania—rural, cold, and spread out.
Her family lived close to the edge.
Sometimes there wasn’t enough food between paychecks. Sometimes there wasn’t enough money to have the fuel-oil truck fill the tank that fed their furnace. They had a fireplace, but the chimney likely needed cleaning; whenever they used it, smoke filled the house.
That smoke got into everything.
“I would get on the school bus,” she said, “and I knew I smelled like smoke. I was so embarrassed.”
They lived at the farthest edge of a very large school district. Friends were 17 or 18 miles away. In the days before cell phones and cheap long-distance, calling a friend meant a bill the family couldn’t afford.
So there was a lot of solitude.
When she wasn’t doing homework or splitting and loading wood so her father could sell some for gas—even on Thanksgiving and Christmas—she found herself alone, thinking.
Looking back, she calls herself a contemplative child. At the time, she only knew that she loved to sit quietly in the woods, or stare up at the moon, and sense that there was “something beyond.”
And then there was her abuela—her grandmother.
Her abuela had only completed third grade. When her own mother died, all eleven children had to work to keep the family alive. There was no chance to finish school.
Yet every morning, abuela sat down with a Spanish Bible and read.
“She never told me to read it,” Marlena said. “She just did it.”
A child watches that sort of thing. A child notices.
“Abuela reads her Bible,” she thought. “I should, too.”
So she did. Two to four hours a day. For years.
Her home was what she calls “a hybrid Catholic–Protestant household.” There was talk of God and Jesus; there was church; there was certainly no elaborate evangelical subculture. No one told her what women couldn’t do. No one told her what political party God favored. No one had yet tried to explain away Jesus’ wine as grape juice.
She walked a mile to a small country church with her siblings, sometimes catching a ride. She listened. She read. And she drew some simple conclusions:
If God did things for the people in the Old and New Testaments, He could do things for her. So she prayed. For impossible-seeming things—money for a humanitarian trip at 16, doors to open where there were no connections.
God answered. Often through people, sometimes through opportunities that made little sense on paper.
And then there was that painted rock in the woods.
One day, as a fifth- or sixth-grader, she dragged a can of leftover paint out into a little wooded lot, found a rock, and coated it white. It became her pulpit.
She stood on that rock and preached—to her brothers and sisters, a couple of neighborhood kids, the birds, and the trees.
“I thought, ‘The animals are part of creation too,’” she said. “From a Christian perspective, I wanted them to hear about Jesus.”
Later, she’d discover that St. Francis of Assisi had preached to the birds. At the time, she was just following her instincts.
Somewhere between the woodpile, the smoke, the walk to church, and that white-painted rock, a conviction took root:
- God is real and attentive.
- Life is more than survival.
- Other people’s lives are bound up with hers.
She just didn’t have a word for that last part yet.
I Am Because We Are
Years later, in a doctoral program focused on culture, immigration, race, and poverty, Marlena encountered a concept from southern Africa: Ubuntu.
She’d seen the word before. Now it started to resonate.
Ubuntu is hard to capture in a single English phrase, but one common formulation is:
“I am because we are.”
It’s an affirmation and a warning.
My identity is not sealed off and self-contained. Who I am is inextricable from who we are. My flourishing is tied to your flourishing. Harm to you is, in some way, harm to me.
In practice, Ubuntu assumes that every person carries a kind of genius, a gift the community needs. It also assumes that when structures or systems crush certain people, everyone is diminished.
For Marlena, the overlap with Scripture was obvious:
- Paul’s metaphor of the church as a body; when one member suffers, all suffer (1 Corinthians 12).
- Jesus’ teaching that “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me” (Matthew 25).
- His insistence that our neighbor is not just the person like us, but also the enemy and the outsider (Luke 10; Matthew 5).
It also threw into sharp relief how distorted much American Christian practice has become.
“There are a lot of people in the United States,” she said carefully, “a lot of Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, who do not understand that we are all interrelated. My well-being is tied to yours and everyone else’s.”
She pointed out something we all see on social media daily:
If people don’t know anyone in a particular situation—undocumented neighbors, Palestinians, Israelis, the unhoused, Black families in redlined neighborhoods—they speak as if they can simply opt out of caring.
“I think there are people who genuinely believe,” she said, “that if they don’t know someone in a particular situation, they don’t have to love them. That’s not the Jesus I see in the Gospels.”
Ubuntu says: your story is tied to theirs.
Jesus says: your treatment of them is treatment of Me.
Together, they undercut our most cherished loopholes.
Who Deserves Our Love?
One of the most striking stories Marlena told came from her time around Toledo, Ohio.
There, the local mosque—founded in part by a Muslim cardiologist—had built a sophisticated food bank. They had the storage, the trucks, the logistics. When economic shocks hit, they were feeding a lot of hungry people.
Some Christians saw the good work and said, “How can we help?”
Others said flatly:
“I’m not going to work with them. They’re Muslims.”
Marlena shook her head as she recounted it.
“These Muslims had the infrastructure and were doing a tremendous job,” she said. “Why would I oppose that? They were loving their neighbors in a very concrete way.”
Her church partnered. They sent food to the mosque, trusting them to get it to the hungry.
She sees the same issue playing out in subtler forms all over the place:
- We’ll support a food pantry if it’s run by “our” denomination, but not if it’s run by someone else.
- We’ll advocate for the unborn, but not for the undocumented mother raising them.
- We’ll champion religious liberty for our tribe, but not for other faiths.
Jesus anticipated this. His parable of the Good Samaritan is, among other things, a rebuke to selective compassion.
To His original audience, Samaritans were doctrinally suspect and ethnically mixed. Yet Jesus casts one as “good,” while the priest and Levite—religious insiders—walk past the man bleeding in the ditch.
When we discussed that, I shared a parable that has deeply shaped me: the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25.
It is not a comfortable text.
Jesus describes the final judgment, when the Son of Man separates the nations as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The criteria are not theological acumen or precise doctrinal adherence. They are painfully practical:
- I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat.
- I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink.
- I was a stranger, and you welcomed Me.
- I was naked, and you clothed Me.
- I was sick or in prison, and you visited Me.
What I noticed, when I dug into that passage years ago, still startles me:
Both the sheep and the goats are surprised.
The sheep say, “Lord, when did we see You hungry… and feed You?”
The goats say, “Lord, when did we see You hungry… and not help You?”
Neither group recognized Jesus in the people in front of them.
They both missed Him.
The difference is not that one group had perfect spiritual perception and the other did not. The difference is that one group acted—almost instinctively—when confronted with need, while the other did not.
The sheep didn’t seem to be pre-screening people based on identity, worthiness, or tribe. They responded to human need as it came.
The goats, we might say in today’s language, were more concerned with who was “in” and who was “out.”
When I shared this, I confessed what I had concluded back when I first preached on that parable in Estonia:
If you want to make sure you are not a goat, the only safe path is to practice indiscriminate love.
Not because distinctions don’t matter at all, but because we are simply not qualified to sort humans into piles of “worthy of my help” and “unworthy of my help” ahead of Jesus.
“I agree,” Marlena said. “We cannot have selective compassion. Jesus did not say, ‘Pick which neighbor you want to love.’”
Ubuntu would say the same, in different words:
“I am because we are. Your flourishing is my flourishing. Your harm is my harm.”
If that’s true, we cannot shrug and say, “That’s not my problem,” when someone goes hungry because a policy changed, or when a mosque is feeding the neighborhood and we refuse to help because of the sign on the door.
We also cannot hide behind spiritual slogans to excuse societal neglect.
Which leads us, unavoidably, to politics.
“It’s the Church’s Job, Not the Government’s”
In southeastern Ohio—Appalachia—Marlena took a job with a nonprofit tied to Ohio University while her husband was in graduate school.
Her work was concrete:
- After-school programs for kids in the poorest county in the state.
- Food distributions that kept some children from going to bed hungry.
- Literacy efforts that gave kids a fighting chance at education.
The funding came from TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Then the state legislature cut TANF.
Not because of a scandal or misuse. Not as a fine-tuned reform. Simply as a cost-saving measure.
The effect was immediate and brutal:
- Programs shut down.
- The food stopped.
- The kids she knew by name were suddenly on their own.
“I realized,” she told me, “this policy is putting people in hunger.”
At the same time, some of her fellow Christians were echoing a common line:
“It’s not the government’s job to help the poor. That’s the church’s job.”
It sounds spiritual. It’s often paired with verses about the early believers caring for one another, or about personal charity.
But in that moment, it rang hollow.
She started asking pointed questions:
- “Do you have enough money to pay for one family’s health insurance for a year?”
- “Does your local church have the funds to replace these food programs across the county? Across the state?”
- “Even if we all tithed far beyond 10%, could we cover all of this ourselves?”
The honest answer was no.
“I’m not saying the church has no responsibility,” she said. “We do. But we literally do not have enough money in the churches to provide all that is needed for the number of people in poverty.”
The slogan “It’s the church’s job, not the government’s” is therefore not just theologically suspect. It is practically impossible.
When Jesus speaks in Matthew 25 of the sheep and the goats, He speaks of judging “the nations”—not only individuals. That doesn’t reduce personal responsibility; it enlarges our sense of corporate responsibility.
When Moses established laws for ancient Israel, he didn’t say, “Private charity will be enough.” He built structural protections into the system: gleaning rights for the poor, periodic Jubilee debt resets, commands not to strip the fields bare.
In our context, policy is one of the ways we either love or neglect our neighbors.
Marlena’s point is not that government is the savior. It isn’t.
Her point is that in a complex, populous society, neither churches nor NGOs can bear the full load alone. To pit “church vs. state” in principle is to miss the larger biblical picture.
Ubuntu wouldn’t understand the distinction at all. From that perspective:
- If kids are hungry, and the state has tools to address that, it must act.
- If churches have food and volunteers, they must act.
- If mosques have trucks and storage, they must act.
- If individuals have a paycheck, a spare room, a voice, they must act.
That doesn’t mean every program is wise, every policy is just, or every partnership is safe. Discernment is still necessary.
But the starting posture cannot be, “That’s not my responsibility.”
Not if we understand that we are created in the image of a God who sends rain on the just and unjust, who claims the hungry as “Me,” and who has said, from Genesis onward, that yes—we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper.
We live in a time when everything begs to be turned into a culture war: food banks, immigration, social spending, even who we choose to partner with in helping the poor.
Marlena’s life—smoke, wood, Bible, white rock, PhD, and all—is a reminder that the way of Jesus is both simpler and harder than that:
- Simpler, because it boils down to love of God and neighbor without exception.
- Harder, because it refuses to let us pick which neighbors count.
If a poor Puerto Rican girl from a trailer in rural Pennsylvania can emerge with that clarity, maybe the rest of us can, too.
Not by our own brilliance, but by returning, again and again, to the One who said:
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me.”
And then asking, honestly:
- Who have I been stepping around?
- Where have I been practicing selective compassion?
- What policies am I quietly supporting—or ignoring—that are putting others in hunger?
The answers to those questions are not abstract. They are the stuff of judgment—and, if we will let them be, the seeds of repentance and renewal.
Because in the end, none of us will flourish alone.
I am because we are.
And we are because He is.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
Next week I’ll be joined by Dr. Devin Singh, associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College and author of God, Mammon, and the Ethics of Exchange. If you’ve ever wondered how faith and economics really intersect—beyond the clichés of the “prosperity gospel” or vague talk of “stewardship”—this conversation is for you. Devin’s research traces how Christian ideas about God, debt, and value have shaped modern economic systems, and how those systems in turn influence the way we think about God. We’ll dig into what it means to serve God rather than Mammon in a complex global economy, and how we might imagine more just and humane forms of exchange.
Join us for episode 224 on February 24th: God, Mammon, and the Ethics of Exchange.
