They Just Keep Coming

It was a gorgeous fall day, mid-afternoon on a football Sunday in Nashville  (home of the Tennessee Titans).  Church in the Yard, a ministry of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Nashville, worships at 2:00 in the yard adjacent to the church.  It's a very traditional service, straight out of the Book of Common Prayer.  About 50 people, primarily men, gathered for Eucharist.  Members of a coffee-house church brought lunch for 200 and the food was gone in 1/2 an hour.

It amazed me to see the number of men lining up for hot dogs and chips.  They came from a shelter just a couple of blocks away for food and fellowship.  One of the lunch servers commented, "They just keep coming".  They just keep coming.  The number of people living on the streets of America is staggering.  The injustice of homelessness is heart breaking.  Lack of adequate housing, too few treatment facilities, lack of support of veterans damaged by war, only a few jobs, and no jobs for people who have no place to bathe or store their belongings.  How can we allow how brothers and sisters to live in these dehumanizing conditions?  When will we, as Christians, rise up and shout "Enough!"?

We've all been hearing the news about the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Perhaps some of us are participating.  While the movement needs to find its focus, I am hopeful that "the 99%" will begin to open the eyes of the "1%" to the fact that we are all intimately interwined, part of one family.  The country, the world, cannot continue to widen the gap between the very rich and the very poor without dire consequences for all. 

A major biblical theme is that of justice for the poor in light of the extreme privilege of the wealthy and powerful.  Where is our compassion?  Where is our faith?  In Matthew 23:23-24, Jesus admonishes, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.  You blind guides!  Your strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!"

We are the scribes and Pharisees as long as we can allow the long lines to continue to form week after week after week.  Or we can follow Jesus.  We can speak up.  We can shout, "Enough!".  We can demand that our public policies work toward building God's reign on earth through support for adequate housing for all, for increased access to high quality alcohol, drug, and mental health treatment programs, for guaranteed food for everyone, and for excelllent educational opportunities for all.  All that will mean that we may have to give up something, for we may not be in the top 1%, but most of us are near the top 10%.

Does Christ have a firm enough grip on our lives to move us to action?