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Widows and Orphans
Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims—laws that make misery for the poor, that rob people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. Who will help you on Judgment Day? – Isaiah 10:1-3 abridged (MSG)
If you want, Microsoft Word will take care of widows and orphans for you. In fact, managing widows and orphans is the program’s default setting, which means Microsoft Word is caring for widows and orphans the whole world ‘round.
Who knew, right? Injustices against society’s most vulnerable—solved!
Not really, of course. The widows and orphans that Microsoft Word cares about are found in a page layout, not in your community. Typographically speaking, widows and orphans are bits of lonely text. An orphan can be two words looking isolated on the final line of a paragraph. A widow is the first or last line of a paragraph, separated from that paragraph and standing on its own at the top or bottom of a page.
It’s a pagination detail that Microsoft Word likes to solve. Just a touch of pre-programmed algorithm, and voilà! The widows are no longer stranded. The orphans are no longer alone.
If only social crises were so easy to solve. If only a pile of money, biased assumptions, and mercenary AI could be thrown at widows and orphans like a Microsoft Word program, so that the rest of us could be content in our apathy.
But the Bible doesn’t call us to care for widows and orphans—that is, for people whose health and homes, livelihoods and opportunities are insecure—through impersonal automations. We’re not called to care for immigrants by leaving them stranded in the grip of ICE. The prophets don’t rally us to care for prisoners by leaving them alone at the mercy of private corporations.
Microsoft Word gets one thing right: no one should be isolated from community.
The Bible calls us to do something about it.
Prayer: For the courage to be personally invested, we pray.
cross-posted with the UCC Daily Devotional
The Emperor’s Clothes
“But the emperor has no clothes!” cries the child in the crowd. And so cry we all, when our public leaders embrace an obvious scam without a trace of remorse, without a blush of embarrassment. “No kings,” we shout against unilateral political power. “No occupation,” we shout against military action in our own cities and neighborhoods. “No theocrats,” we shout against the imposition of puritanical laws.
Pointing our finger at naked hubris on parade takes childlike audacity.
Contending with our own naked hubris, however, takes maturity.
Those of us who are white American Christians have a very particular and blatant pretense to contend with, a twisted scam that has been run in the name of Jesus for centuries:
The belief that Christianity + whiteness = righteousness.
= authority.
= importance.
The impact of this historic and ongoing con is monstrous. Yet despite clear knowledge of our supremacy problem, white American Christianity as a whole continues to parade its pretense through the streets: uncompromising in our occupation of stolen lands; undeterred from our conviction that white American Christian values are best for the world (even as we fight amongst ourselves over which set of values that is); unashamed to view ourselves as exceptions to our own history. There are not enough protest posters in the world to make fig leaves that will adequately cover the extent of such hubris.
White American Christianity still seeks no king but itself, no occupation but its own, no values unless we approve. We are impressively naked, wrapped in the scam we’ve inherited and perpetuated. When our nakedness is pointed out, the white tears we cry do not veil our self-importance.
“Happy are those whose sin is covered,” observes the psalmist. “But when we hide our iniquities from our own awareness and before God, then we waste away.” (See Psalm 32:1-4.) Collective repentance, in liturgy and in life, is essential in our state of torment—not as an effort to cover the nakedness of white American Christianity but as a spiritual practice to strip it more completely of its long-running con.
Collective repentance requires our white American Christian theology to mature in its understanding of salvation. If indeed Jesus came to save us all, then Jesus is the Good Samaritan and we are the battered faith dying in a ditch. We are the lazy servant with our faith buried in the dirt of racism and fear. We are the hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned who so greatly resent a self-image of need that we built and still embrace social systems that force others into hunger, illness, and imprisonment. If indeed Jesus came to save us all, then our white American Christian theology cannot position us as salvation-bearers and eager-beaver-Jesus-helpers.
We cannot be disciples of a one-by-one savior, whether that’s a “personal Lord and Savior” or a “one-man justice act” called Jesus. Collective repentance of our supremacy sin needs a collective savior, and we white American Christians are no more and no less than those who need salvation.
cross-posted with the UCC “Witness for Justice” newsletter
Dreaming
When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. - Psalm 126:1 (NRSV) Am I the only person who reads Scripture and begins to hum a Broadway tune? “We were like those who dream,” pens the psalmist, and I start singing: “I dreamed a dream in...
Psalm 90
Let it be a dream this pain, this disappointment a fleeting memory in the growing light of dawn Let it be a weed that is turned over, turned under to make room for all that is good and growing Let it be set afire so that after the burning cools wisdom remains and...
Kicking the Can
The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah while he was still confined in the court of the guard: In this place that is waste, there shall once more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the...
Psalm of Job
From dawn to dusk, from dusk to dawn, O God guide our breaths, our lives, our loves. We are fragile and frail, O Eternal Glory. We are so full of pride that we downplay our faults, and so full of faults that we downplay our possibilities. What is the sky to a speck of...
The Eve before the New
Do not ask us to turn back, O Mother,or to return to what has been;although there is beauty in the past,we cannot remain therenor do we wish to relivethe milestones of pain and grief thatbrought us from the past to this day. Do not ask us to go back, O Mother,where...
Peace
Peace to your path, winding into the night; peace to your path, moving toward the light. Peace to your fear as it tramples the adder; peace to your fear when love makes it shatter. Peace to your prayers, crying out for comfort; peace to your prayers and the heart from...
Joy in the Morning
Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good? O taste and see that the Lord is good. - Psalm 34:12 & 8a (NRSV) The sounds of rain on the pavement and wind through the trees outside my window wake me up. The sun is content to bide its time this...
Forsaken
Consider, O God, those pounding at the door for your justice, for your steadfast love, for your deliverance. Will you not answer? We are fainting on your front porch, weary with grief. Can you not spare a cup of mercy? In your house is peace; will you not let us in?...
Sunset
Now I lay me down to sleep.I pray the sun's rays not to weepor linger o'er our earthly achesbut whisper "peace" as stars awake. Now to rest in awe of night,to wonder as celestial heightssing lullabies of mysterythat put our turbulence at ease. And now to trust within...
