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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
Before I Go through the Gate
Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. - Psalm 118:19 (NRSV) I did not grow up in a “come forward” church. Our weekly worship did not include a routine in which people came from their seats to the front of...
The Problem with Kings
Abimelech, son of Gideon and of the enslaved woman from the Bent Place (where Joseph was buried), suggested to his mother's people that they might support his campaign to be king. His mother's people proposed this idea to the landholders of the Bent Place, and all...
Outcry
The One Who Is & Shall Be said to Abraham: "I am sending angels to the place of Violent Fire, to assess the veracity of the people's cries against it. If their cries are true, I will destroy it." Abraham pleaded: "Surely you have more integrity than those who are...
Reminders
“When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between [me] and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” - Genesis 9:16 (NRSV) The world needs more reminders. Guns need not just one safety lock but five safety...
The Breaks
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, so far from the words of my groaning? Yet you are holy … and sovereignty belongs to you, the ruler over all the earth. All families and all nations worship before you; all who sleep in the...
Going to Battle
King Neco of Egypt went up to fight at Carchemish, and Josiah went out against him. But Neco sent envoys to him, saying, “What have I to do with you, king of Judah? I am not coming out against you today. Cease opposing God, who is with me, so that he will not destroy...
Whose Glory?
Deborah, a prophetess, used to sit under a palm in the hill country of Ephraim. She summoned Barak and said to him, “The God of Israel commands you, ‘Go, take position at Mount Tabor; I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you with his chariots...
Praise
Praise the Lord! Praise God, sun and moon; praise God, all you shining stars! Praise God from the earth, you sea monsters and creatures of the depths, you fire and hail, snow and frost! (Psalm 148:1-2 & 7-8, NRSV adapted) What makes the T-Rex dinosaur a scientific...
Bad News
The spirit of the Holy One is upon me, because the One has anointed me and sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of divine favor, and the day...
