Friday, September 28, 2007
Urban Mobility???????
I was recently perusing the 2007 urban mobility report issued by the transportation researchers at Texas A and M University. Yes, I know that’s pretty weird, but I travel a lot and have a lot of time to read. Like when I’m trying to drive through Richmond, or Nashville, or anywhere in or near Washington DC. I used to get mad at the congestion, but now I have achieved enough enlightenment to recognize a chance to catch up on reading when I see one. Which brings me back to the mobility report.
According to the report we spend 4.2 billion hours of travel time each year “stalled in traffic”. This delay, sitting idling, or creeping along at a furlong per fortnight, burns up 2.9 billion gallons of gas each year. The cost of all this in wasted gas and lost time at work is about 78 billion dollars a year! I’m just guessing here but it seems to me that with gas as expensive as it is, maybe we ought to take the train, or the bus….. and if our illustrious “leaders” had any sense they’d be advocating building more public transit instead of trying to pave us out of our transportation problems.
The point of this tirade is that we’ve got an “oil shortage”, an ongoing “oil crisis” in this country and everybody knows it’s going to get worse. We can’t afford to feed our poor people, fix our broken schools or even maintain the bridges on our existing interstate highway system, and yet we can throw away nearly 80 billion dollars a year sitting in traffic, watching incontrovertible evidence that we’ve just got too *#^* many cars on the road! In response to all this our fearless leaders advocate building more highways. What solution suggests itself to you? My humble suggestion is that we begin by throwing these halfwits off the train so we can build more tracks.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Proper Lifestyle
I find people’s fascination with money fascinating. We operate as a society under the unwritten presupposition that you can’t have to much money. People who don’t have very much of the stuff are considered “poor”. People who have a great deal of the stuff are considered “successful”. And the “stuff” itself….. well, it costs us 10 cents to mint one nickel, if that tells you anything.
I personally think you can have too much money. The finer things in life (the ones that money can buy you at any rate) are, people tell me, addictive. Wouldn’t know myself. Although I will confess harboring a serious weakness for well made guitars. Aside from that I haven’t got much use for lots of money.
We started the ministry at Society of St. Andrew under the presupposition that the earth was a good thing provided for our use… (You ought to use what you need). We also assumed that the earth belonged to all of us collectively…… (you ought to share what you don’t need). Our final assumption was that we were managers, not owners of this God given gift. That means that we are expected to have enough sense to distinguish our needs from our wants. Given the advertising bozo’s ongoing efforts to convince us that every want we ever had (and some we didn’t even know we had) are actually “needs”, this is a fairly tall order.
I struggle with it every time I go past a music store. The demons of the dulcet tones reach out and grab me almost every time. Some days I’m strong and other days….. not so much. And so it goes. Good luck to you with your demons, and remember, it’s an advertising jungle out there.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Crisis among Children
We live in a world of immense promise and immense disappointment. It is possible for the first time in the history of our species to create a world where the ravages of poverty are a thing of the past. Our science and technological advances have created that possibility for the human race. Our spiritual and moral backwardness as a species continues to prevent us from making that possibility a reality.
It seems obvious that our scientists and technicians are a great deal better at what they do than our preachers and theologians are. Or maybe it’s just that when a scientist tells us that E = MC squared, we believe him. And when Jesus tells us “when you see your brother hungry, feed him” we do not believe. What ever the reason, we have a true crisis on our hands in the churches of our land. Our response to that crisis will determine whether we fulfill our role as moral and spiritual leaders in the world, or we become an irrelevant waste of time.
We are constantly bombarded with news of “crisis." Every week the newspapers bring a new crisis to our attention. On a good week we are treated to two or three! Most of these so called “crises” are designed to sell newspapers and very little more. However, there is a real crisis out there. It can be found right in your home town and all around the world.
In this day when we have the wealth, the capability and the know how to eliminate hunger, thirty-five thousand children die from malnutrition every single day. Ten million children die from “poverty related causes” every year. Twelve million children during the decade just past have been made homeless. In that same decade more children die from war than do soldiers. And it’s getting worse. The poorest fifth of the world's population now shares less than 1.5 percent of the world's income. Those most severely hurt by this inequity are the children.
Closer to home we find the same phenomenon. The gap in income between the richest and poorest people in the United States is widening. The poorest 20 percent of our people have only 5 percent of our nation's income. The disparity has not been that wide since the before Second World War. The hunger, homelessness, violence, neglect, retribution and despair that are ravaging our society are bred by such inequity. Those most devastated by all this are the children. And it’s getting worse.
In fact, if statistical trends continue, conditions will get much worse. We must speak and act in these times as the true followers of Jesus. Our actions must be full of the compassion of the Christ who fed the hungry, healed the sick, and befriended the outcast and the orphan. Our words must be full of the indignation of the Christ who drove the officially ordained and elected thieves from the temple because they made it hard for the poor to get to God’s house. Our actions must be full of the resolve of the Christ who lived, ate and drank with the “unclean” because he saw that God much preferred their company to that of the successful “Righteous ones."
Speaking and acting for and with the poor is not an option for us as people of faith. It is the only path to salvation.
Edited on: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 11:02 AM
Categories: Hunger and Justice Issues
Friday, September 07, 2007
Children and the Poor... What is the Church all about?
People join organizations for many different reasons. But generally, when you boil it all down, we join organizations because we want to do or be whatever the organization does or is. These are perilous times for the church. Not only is membership shrinking in the “main line” denominations, (which indicates that we’re not doing or being what people joined up to do or be), but the church (main line and otherwise) is clearly not doing and being what God intends in the first place. We are a living comedy of errors. Is it any wonder that the society we are supposed to be giving moral guidance and inspiration to is adrift and sinking?
You don’t have to be a Bible scholar. Just a cursory reading of the Old Testament will show you God is fundamentally and foremost on the side of the poor and marginalized people of this world. God has always had a peculiar idea in mind as to what kinds of people he wanted his people to be.
He didn’t rescue the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery because he especially likes Hebrews. He rescued them because they were slaves and he especially dislikes slavery, and every other evil thing that we humans do to degrade and take advantage of each other. He didn’t punish those same Hebrews because they disobeyed ritual laws or any other “religious” crimes. He punished them because they “ground the faces of the poor” and trusted in their own power and wealth to make them great.
When Jesus came he was born among the poor. That was not an accident. When he started his public ministry he quoted Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That was not an accident either.
Jesus preferred to associate with the “outcasts and sinners” of society. This wasn’t because he doesn’t love respectable folks. It was because he especially loves those that we respectable folks make into “outcasts and sinners”, you know, the kinds of people you’d be embarrassed to invite to your church this Sunday.
If you look seriously at the priorities of Jesus and his Father, and compare them with the priorities of most of our churches today, it is difficult to see why we insist on calling ourselves the church of Jesus Christ in the first place. It would be more honest, given our present priorities, to call us “the church of the status quo”, “the church of more for me”, “the church of “just get me to heaven, Lord”, or the church of “let’s all just be nice”. We could lay claim to all those names and more. But the church of Jesus? I don’t know.
If we want to be the church of Jesus, we simply have to start identifying with those people he identified with. We have to be among the poor and outcast, and have them among us, like he did. Not so much as a great benefactor to them, but as a friend who knows how to find the Father’s kingdom.
The church’s faithfulness to the example of Jesus will be measured by the presence of the poor and the children among us, and by our response to them. The bad news is that we are a long way from being faithful in this regard. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
