A message from my Pastor

Every month I receive a copy of The Messenger from Faith Lutheran Church, and I'd like to pass on what Pastor Ron Luckey wrote for the January issue. Here it is:

Dear Folks:

I’ve been listening to the debates between the presidential candidates recently. Both parties. All umpteen candidates. They’re saying a lot. But they’re also NOT saying a lot.

THIS IS WHAT I HEAR THEM SAYING:

Not as much as before but still lots of tough talk about homeland security. Lots of vague ideas concerning the war in Iraq. Lots of plans for border fences and deportation. Some subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions concerning who is the “real” Christian in the race or who has the least colorful marital history. And some snarky swipes that certain candidates lack sufficient experience for the highest office in the land.

That’s what I hear the candidates saying. Mostly safe words, designed to be guaranteed vote-getters.

THIS IS WHAT I’M WAITING TO HEAR THEM SAY:

I’m waiting to hear a candidate quote this sentence from a recent UNICEF report: “Today, as every day, 30,000 children will die of hunger, disease, and other consequences of poverty.” I am waiting for one of them to hold up the New York Times and read from an article by Nicholas Kristof: “Poverty in both the U.S. and around the world remains the central fact of 21st century life . . . . Yet we manage, pretty successfully, to ignore it and insulate ourselves even from poverty in our own country. When it pops out from behind the screen after an episode like the Watts riots of 1965 or the New Orleans hurricane of 2005, then we express horror and indignation and vow change, and finally shrug and move on. Meanwhile, the world’s 500 wealthiest people have the same income as the world’s poorest 416 million.”

I’m waiting for someone in the bunch to say: “It’s not a sin to make a lot of money. It’s a sin to keep it.” I am waiting for the several presidential hopefuls who claim impeccable Christian credentials to quote another kind of hopeful with impeccable Christian credentials, Mother Teresa: “It is a special kind of poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” How refreshingly offensive it would be if a presidential candidate suddenly developed the courage to tell the American public it should repent of its idolatry to material things and its obsession with consumption so that a starving child might live (or, more accurately, so that 30,000 children might live another day in the world.) I’m waiting. One or two of the candidates are close, but as of this date there are still no cigars to hand out. Not that the candidates aren’t nice people. They seem decent enough. They just don’t seem all that brave to me, at least brave enough to tell us what we don’t want to hear. And so, I wait on them. The problem is, the longer I wait, the more self-righteous I tend to become. The more I cynically dwell on the candidates’ sin of cowardice. I’m like that.

But just about that time, wouldn’t you know it? God, who loathes self-righteousness, artfully sends me a sign—my credit card bill comes in the mail. Line by line, purchase by purchase, like an Old Testament prophet it rubs my nose in my idolatry to stuff, my selfabsorption, my own cowardice in the face of materialism, my own inability to say “no” to myself. Suddenly, the Prophet MasterCard announces: “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Pay this amount,’” and I realize the candidates and I are not all that different from on another.

So, I guess in large measure it comes down to this: While I’m waiting on THEM to say what I’d like them to say, Jesus, in the flesh of the children of the world and their mamas and daddies, is waiting on ME. Oh, man. I hate it when this happens.

In the shadow of the 30,000 and of the Jesus who loves them,

Pastor Luckey

[Image source: http://www.genderandhealth.ca/en/modules/poverty/poverty-childhood-experience-02.jsp]