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