The Measure of Our Wealth

            Almost every day we get more catalogues in the mail, inviting us to buy more things.  Mostly we throw them away, but sometimes we see something that we want.  Not need, want.  We don’t really need very much, mostly housing and food.  Over the years, we have acquired many things that we love.  I’m always impressed with what people do when there is a fire; they rescue their families, their pets and their pictures.  They keep their memories.  This is a beautiful statement about what it is that is important to us; what we need and what we can do without.

            In 1993, Rosie and I lost the beach house that we had had for fifteen years.  We loved that place, went there every year and took our kids there.  When the ocean ruined it, we took down a truck and got out much of the furniture and the appliances.  What we have remaining at this moment is the large sign that I made to name the cottage:  Someplace Special.  That sign hangs in our garage as a reminder of those wonderful times; but the house is gone.  We and the kids retain the memories. 

            The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is a great reminder to me of what it is that is important in this life.  Poor Lazarus sat outside the rich man’s house day by day and begged.  As the Gospel says, even the dogs came and licked his sores, but the rich man simply walked by him as he left his house.  Finally, they both died and Lazarus was nestled in Abraham’s bosom and the rich man languished in Hades.  The rich man, no longer rich, called across to Abraham to send Lazarus to touch his lips with water, because he was very thirsty in this place of torment.  Abraham told him that there was “a great chasm” fixed between them and that no one could cross from one side to the other.  The rich man then asked Abraham to send Lazarus to his father’s house to warn his five brothers.  But Abraham told him that they have Moses and the prophets and it really wouldn’t matter if they saw someone who had risen from the dead.

            What a powerful story that is.  All that the rich man wanted was what he had denied Lazarus for all of those years, a small drink of water.  And it certainly was true that nobody would have believed one who had risen from the dead.  Certainly the world struggles to believe what Jesus told us, even though he rose from the dead.  

            Are we rich, or are we poor?  What is it that we do for those whom we meet who are in need?  This is the measure of our faith and our wealth.   Certainly,  God loves all of us, and holds all of us in great Love.  How we treat each other is the issue that faces us day by day.  Do we simply walk by, or do we provide what is needed?  That is how wealth is really measured.

Our Paralyzed Congress

             It would be wonderful if we could find some way out of the constant bickering in congress over the Affordable Care Act and take care of the poor people who need their food stamps and do something about the decaying infrastructure in this country.  Somehow our legislators seem paralyzed with their certainty and are unable to act unless they absolutely get their own way.  There is profound sin in all of this, some of it on the heads of the people in office and some of it on our own heads. 

            I don’t think that the next election is going to change much of anything at all.  We will continue to have an African-American president, which I think is a large part of the problem.  Until the Republicans in congress are able to get over that stark fact, I don’t think that they will do anything that looks good for him.  Their aim is to destroy anything that he tries to do.  It is a terrible thing, but I think we are stuck with it. 

            The sin that is on all of us is our inability to convey to the congress the magnitude of their destruction of our country.  We just continue to go on our way and hope against hope that somehow things will miraculously change.  They won’t.  We need to make our needs known in absolute terms to the people in office.  How we do that is something that we need to consider, but it needs to be done.  

            It has worked in the past.   When Martin Luther King descended on Washington with the march for freedom that ended with his iconic speech at the Lincoln Memorial, it changed everything.  That was the beginning of the remarkable effort that ended with the passage of the Civil Rights legislation that has meant so much to so many in this country.  There was a terrible price paid for it.  We lost Dr. King and many others to the violence that preceded this work; but we also gained a great deal.  

            We need to do the same thing again.  Somehow we need to impress on the minds of those in congress that we will not tolerate their constant bickering and delays and that we demand that the laws that we need so desperately are passed and this country’s problems are adequately addressed.

            What are our priorities?  Are they our own lives, or do we also care about those around us who are in desperate need?  This country needs health care that is affordable for everyone and we also need to have the poor fed and the rich kept in their place.  I don’t think that is too much for us to ask. 

Politics and Bigotry

            I read a wonderful old book recently.  It is The Man by Irving Wallace, written in 1964.  It was made into a movie starring James Earl Jones, but the book is a rich, full story of a senator who because of the death of the president and the speaker of the house, and the fact that the man who was Vice President had died earlier, is forced into the presidency because he is the president pro-tem of the Senate.  The crux of the story is that the man who has become the president happens to be black and the complications arise primarily from that issue. 

            In the course of the story, President Douglass Dilman comes to understand that others in the government are keeping him out of the loop and he fires his secretary of state.  This brings down the anger of the party, particularly the southerners on his head and they impeach him.  They offer four articles of impeachment, but at the trial in the Senate, his lawyer offers a fifth article that he says was inadvertently left out:  that Douglass Dilman is an African-American who has illegally occupied the White House.  The Presiding Officer, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, refuses to allow this article to be introduced, but it has been subtly put forward on the television screens to all of the country.  When President Dilman appears at the trial to testify, his color is certainly prominent.  In the end, the impeachment fails, but the story is certainly powerful. 

            It reminded me of what we have in this country today:  an African-American president who is stymied in every way possible by a reluctant opposition who see his color as an issue before us all and who oppose everything that he does, good or bad, simply because they don’t like him at all.  Here in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that we perhaps ought to be a bit less bigoted, but we have our history behind us, and it won’t go away easily.

            Fifty years ago this Sunday, on September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by Ku Klux Klansmen and four little Sunday School girls were killed.  This was a terrible tragedy that happened five years before the assassination of Martin Luther King.  This was an awful time in this country’s history.  Our blatant racism was laid before all of us.  Those four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were young martyrs in a terrible struggle that isn’t really over yet.  We still have a lot of work to do to ease the bigotry that lies in each of our souls and to be the inclusive church that our Lord created. 

            When I was in Seminary in Virginia, I worked for a while out of a Lutheran Church at Sixteenth and “V” street in Washington, in the area north of Thomas Circle that was burned out after the King assassination.  I walked those streets and saw the hate and the poverty first hand.  I understood very well what our racial bigotry has done to us and how it has kept good people out of the marketplace of ideas and continued to make us leery of each other.  This still needs to change, and has needed to be changed for a long time.

            In the letter to the Galatians Paul tells them that since we have put on Christ, that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free; neither male nor female, that we are all one in Christ Jesus.  To that we ought also to add black or white, red or yellow; that our races also have ceased to divide us because we are united in Christ.  That is a hope, not a fact.   Certainly we are divided and it always gets in our way.  The moment we can truly put aside our differences and receive each other for who and what we really are, that is the moment that the Kingdom will finally be realized on this earth.  May God move us in that direction and help us to put aside our hurtful bigotry and learn to love each other in the way that our Lord intended.  May God bless us in this important and necessary work. 

In the Hands of the Potter

            When I look back at my life, I wonder how many times that I have been made over.  What I mean is that what I was becoming was not particularly pleasing to God or to myself and I needed desperately to be changed.  I had no idea what that change ought to be, but somehow it showed up and I came to follow another path. 

            When I was just out of high school, I decided to pursue a career in forestry.  I was attracted to it by a supervisor that I had when I worked over the summer for my town.  He was a gracious man who seemed to always understand what I was doing and how I was doing it.  He had a wisdom that was beyond his profession.  It was a great pleasure working for him.  So I went to college to try to become a forester.  I learned dendrology, trigonometry, and spent a long time working in the woods coming to understand the logging industry and how conservation was an absolute necessity in this world.  At some point, I think I understood that this profession was not for me and I lost interest in it.  After I spent another semester trying to come to terms with what I was doing, both the university and I came to understand that I was obviously made for other things than forestry.  I left school, came home and eventually got into the broadcasting business where I had a twenty year career.  In the course of this, I met Rosie, we were married, and went on together.  My marriage changed me.  I came to understand responsibility in a different way.  When we had our children, I took on another role, that of father to kids who needed both of us. 

            After I went through a bankruptcy at a television station where I worked, I was out of work and needed to change again.  I had always been interested in my church, so I called my rector, spoke to the bishop and was enrolled in seminary to become an Episcopal priest.  This was another fortunate change for me.  In my career as a priest, I have had wonderful experiences that have changed my life.  I never would have predicted that it would come out this way, but looking back, it all seems of a piece, a smooth transition from one thing to another. 

            I think of all of this when I read Jeremiah’s account of God telling him to go to the potter’s house because he has something to tell him.  The potter is making and reshaping pots that haven’t worked out the way that he intended in the first place.  God tells Jeremiah that he works in the same way, making and reshaping people and groups when they go astray.  I know that God’s hand has been in my life doing this constantly.  I have been shaped and reshaped by God until this present day.  I also know that God is not finished with me.  What reshaping is in the future, I can’t say, but if it is in the same pattern as the rest of my life, I need have no fear.  It will give me God’s blessing as I have had it up to now.  This is an enormous comfort to me.  It makes all of the pain and strain of the changes that have happened make great sense.  I am in the hands of a gracious God who loves me and has an agenda for my life.  What more can I ask?