Saturday, September 19, 2020
When the hard cold of Winter comes,
Will you have a warm home?
Will you share your warm home with someone
who has lost theirs and become another homeless person
struggling to survive the winter?
Job 9:4
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength – who has resisted him, and succeeded?
Romans 12:16
Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Words of Grace For Today
The original sin is to claim to be what one is not. The story of Adam and Eve, the first of original sin, recounts how they sought to be wiser than they were, accepting the serpent’s ‘wise words’ as better than God’s Word of Promise and Guidance.
In the face of a tiny virus, the world has shutdown or suffered a fast and deadly spread of illness and death. The rapid spread sometimes still came despite measures to shutdown, since not everyone complied or there were too many loopholes. Bodies piled up … and still do.
We ought to be quite humbled by the last six months.
Instead people are defiant, claiming openly that they are done with the pandemic, that it were a hoax, or that there were easy remedies to stop it … and … and … and on go the complaints about other people’s good work to slow it. Stopping it would have required such drastic measures that no one would anticipate enough people would comply as to make them even as effective as the half measures we do have. And on go the shear stupidity in words and actions that people engage in.
Of course stupid people throw caution to the wind and behave as if there were nothing that one ought to do different to protect oneself and others. These stupid people are rarely the people who get deadly sick. It’s always the innocent bystander (to whom the stupid ones have come too close to, touched, or breathed on) who gets rip roaring sick, is permanently maimed, or dies.
Which are you, the overly cautious (no caution is too much really) or are you one who helps keep the virus spreading and killing, maybe not you, but others?
Who are we?
We are very small specks in the scope of God’s universe, and yet God knows us intimately and walks with us always.
Now, from prison people have run and escaped; not all but some. Across closed borders some people have run and escaped to freedom of a sorts; not all but some. Like the Berlin Wall, those who made it alive were few and far between. Most were shot or electrocuted in dem Grenzgebiet. Or the Mediterranean Sea, where boatloads of people have drowned in the crossing to ‘freedom’ and others upon arrival are detained within camps of squalor no person should ever know of, yet alone have to live in, or they are returned home to a certain death. But a few have made it into Europe and it’s ‘freedom’ and ‘life’.
Doch, no one can escape from God, who walks with us. No one. Not one. Resistance is futile! There is no way to escape from God’s creation and God’s walking with us. It is not death that comes with our failing to escape. It is the promise of life, and life abundant.
What are we to do, instead of trying to cut out on our own? As if we could be more than we are by escaping or denying God! The Holy Spirit calls and guides us to imitate Jesus and obey his commands to love one another as ourselves, especially our enemies.
The company we keep is important. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, the low life of his time. Can you hear the words of Jesus? Can you see the people Jesus calls us to love? They are the invisible ones, the lowly ones, the homeless and forgotten.
With this Covid 19 shutdown, relaxed as it is, and almost certainly coming back in a second wave, there are going to be a lot more people out on the streets, homeless. Good people, poor people, sick people, healthy people, people of integrity, people of hope; all people who could not manage to keep a roof over their heads with the challenges of Covid 19’s shutdown.
Are we ready for that?