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Risking Weakness

If society is judged on how we treat our most vulnerable, then surely our brothers and sisters in Washington have work to do. The latest movement of the House of Representatives aside, our elected officials at the local, state, and federal level should be encouraged to give some serious thought to how we care for those most in need – even if they have been sick or depressed, lonely or in crisis, in control of their faculties or struggling to remember – for some time. What some would call pre-existing conditions, others call a way of life.

So this morning, I turned, as I often do, to a book my parents gave me when I left home. Today’s reading was from Matthew 25. The sheep and the goats. How appropriate. For so many years, I thought about this as only a call to care for “the least of my brothers (and sisters).” Sure, it’s a call to help others. But maybe it’s more.

If you read the whole passage you begin to understand its context. Matthew is not just writing about the end time, when those who have helped others will go to heaven and those who ignored those in need will go to hell. It is, instead, a call to live as brothers and sisters of Jesus. Look at Matthew 12: the family of Jesus (his brothers and sisters) are those disciples gathered around him – men, women, children.

So to live like Jesus means to risk being homeless (“the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” cf Mt 8 and Luke 9). To live like Jesus is to be like Jesus, with less concern for the material things of this world and more concern for the welfare of others (cf Mt 19). We have to risk being hungry. We have to risk being ostracized. We have to risk being poor (all this is in Matthew too).

It’s not just that the rich must help the poor or those with much must offer what they have to those who have not, it’s more than that. To live like Jesus means to risk being weak so that we might receive from those whom we are called to serve. It is easy to think of Jesus as the only teacher in the crowd, but every good teacher learns from the student.

If society is judged – if any of us are judged – by how we treat those who are most in need, perhaps the judgement begins when we decide what we are willing to risk in service to others.

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Whatsoever You Do

“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

These lines, taken by Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus,” have been in the news of late as politicians and pundits quote the lines in response to the president’s latest executive order.

But if you know your history, you know that The Statue of Liberty, which arrived in New York in 1885 and was officially unveiled in 1886, was not very popular at first. No one likes it when a gift ends up costing money. Lazarus is credited as being among the first to really understand the significance of Lady Liberty. Still, her poem did not become famous until years later. In 1901 a friend rediscovered her words and in 1903 the last lines of the poem were engraved on a plaque and placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lady Liberty does not hold those words in her hand, as some on Twitter would have you believe. Someone who was paying attention had to place them where they live today.

If you want to quote something that underscores the fecklessness of the executive order, go back to another text, written hundreds of years before.

“Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:45).

I imagine that passage was not met with overwhelming popularity when it was first announced. Be nice to my enemy? Are you kidding? Open my door to the hungry, the homeless, the refugee? The ones who smell? Are you serious? They are so different than me. Welcome the stranger? But what if they hurt me? Shouldn’t I first test them to see what their intentions are, have them fill out paperwork, wait in line for years, and then help them? Wouldn’t that be safer?

I would imagine the best way to turn someone against you, to foster their supposed hate for you is to slam in the door in their face and tell them they are not welcome.

We have been preaching the Gospel of Matthew for a few thousand years.

The time has come to show our brothers and sisters in need whether we really believe what we preach. As the great Fulton Sheen reminded his pupils, “If you do not live what you believe, you will end up believing what you live.”

God is love. That is not an alternate fact. It is Truth. Those of us who say we believe in God should remember that.

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The Things We Care About

When I was a teenager, I told my mother I went to see “The Color Purple” at the movies when I really went to see “The Breakfast Club.”

I do not really know why I wasn’t supposed to see “The Breakfast Club” and now, having seen both, it was really the tamer of the two, but those issues notwithstanding, I lied. I got caught, and I got punished.

I thought about that this weekend as the networks raged on about the size of the crowds at the Inauguration last Friday. Like a little boy who embellished the number of attendees at a party, the newly-minted leader of the free world seems to be bothered by very accurate reports that the crowds who attended his party were not as big as the crowds that attended parties in the past.

We even have new language, thanks to our new leader’s friends and advisors: “alternate facts.”

Yes, the press secretary lied. Yes, he presented “alternate facts.” But herein lies the problem. Alternate facts are not facts, they are just noise that gets in the way of a truth that, in this case, no one really cares about. In his must-read book, This Is How, Augusten Burroughs writes that “the truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.”

He continues:

Truth is an unassailable fact. Not your opinion of the fact. Nor is the truth you report of the events from your own, uniquely distorted and biased view, where there could be a disco ball hanging in the way blocking the most important element.

One in five children in the U.S. live in poverty. One in five.

Four children are killed by abuse or neglect in the U.S. each day.

Seven children or teens are killed by guns each day in our great country.

The United Nations reports that a record 65 million people were forced to flee homes 2015. That’s one out of every 113 people in the world.

These are facts. Unassailable facts. True statements. I could go on.

The reality is this: the country is divided. People on the left do not trust the people on the right. People are the right are afraid of the people on the far right. To move forward, we have to find common ground, mutual trust, and at least pretend we are interested in conversations about what the other side wants.

Because while some are busy introducing “alternate facts” into the conversation, the homeless, the hungry, and the marginalized still stand on the periphery struggling to be heard.

These are the things worth talking about.