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Things Need to Change
From Things Need to Change, quoting Rick Warren (via):
In the nine or so years that I've been Orthodox, I've come to understand the situation a little better, but I still see a need for more awareness.
That said, I witnessed just such a transformation in my local church. The church is not poor and has several lawyers, doctors, and business owners in it. Many of these people have homes worth half a million or more dollars.
But every year, a group of people from our church joins Project Mexico in building modest homes for the poor of Mexico. This year, one of those lawyer and his family went.
After they come back, the people who participated in the project all give a little speech in front of the church about their experience. Most everyone else had gone once before, but what this family said was amazing.
“Before we went, we would invite friends over to check out the new addition on our house or our new plasma TV. But, in Mexico, we built a home for people without one! The difference for them is so much more significant than anything we could buy for ourselves!”
They had gained an incarnate understanding of poverty.
Yeah, this is just another example of the the failing Church. And how people in the Church are saved from failure.
The American church as a whole needs to move from selfish consumerism to unselfish contribution. Those are poles apart. To start with a woman who's most interested in how many diamonds she's got in her tennis bracelet, and move her to sit under a banyan tree holding an AIDS baby- that's a giant leap.One of the things that frustrated me the most about the Orthodox church I initially encountered was (as this observer also noticed) what seemed like a lack of concern for the poor.
In the nine or so years that I've been Orthodox, I've come to understand the situation a little better, but I still see a need for more awareness.
That said, I witnessed just such a transformation in my local church. The church is not poor and has several lawyers, doctors, and business owners in it. Many of these people have homes worth half a million or more dollars.
But every year, a group of people from our church joins Project Mexico in building modest homes for the poor of Mexico. This year, one of those lawyer and his family went.
After they come back, the people who participated in the project all give a little speech in front of the church about their experience. Most everyone else had gone once before, but what this family said was amazing.
“Before we went, we would invite friends over to check out the new addition on our house or our new plasma TV. But, in Mexico, we built a home for people without one! The difference for them is so much more significant than anything we could buy for ourselves!”
They had gained an incarnate understanding of poverty.
Yeah, this is just another example of the the failing Church. And how people in the Church are saved from failure.
sounds like the same theme as that written in http://www.openweblog.com/users/dvf
Or from a conversation at the office. "I am not too sure about those lay ministers doing communion at the .... church. They are not properly ordained and trained."
"Yeah, you have to be careful about folks like Peter, James and John – that bunch of fishermen, who did they think they were anyway?!"
ordination
The failure of charity by proxy
I'm part of an organization that runs a reasonably successful fundraiser every year. We do it for the sake of the activity, but we've got it to the point where it brings in money. Now we're trying to figure out what to do with that money, and there's a lot of "we could give it to X", rather than "we could use it to this end".
It seems like that "incarnate understanding of poverty" is what most people go out of their way to avoid, and it's only by treating charity as something we roll up our sleeves and actively do that we not only get the larger good effects, but we get the closer to home notion of what it is we're actually working towards, and a better understanding of the sort of change in the world necessary to really bring that shift about.
Good Samaritan
Asked who is our neighbor, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan.
The Good Samaritan was of the wrong side of the track, the guy who did not adhere to the strict rules and ways of the holiest of the Israelites. So while the strict observers of the law walked by the beaten up man, the Samaritan looked, saw and responded. He took compassion on the unknown man who was his neighbor.
This weekend we had a church retreat where we focused on this parable and what it means to love as a Christian.
For the Samaritan it meant throwing away his traveling plans. He got off his donkey, touched the unclean, fixed up the wounds as best he could and then gave up his place on the donkey to take the injured man some unspecified distance to an inn. He gave up his schedule, his cold cash, his comfort in travel, his time. All with absolutely no guarantee of return. And he made a commitment to come back and check on the guy and pay any further expenses incurred.
As Christians, that is what it means to love our neighbor, we see injured souls all around us, we have Good Samaritan opportunities frequently, but pass on by because they will
-- interrupt our time schedule (Well the Lord Bless, you. I will pray for you, but I have to go now ... According to my planner I am due ....),
--they will demand our cash (but I can't afford to help out, I barely can make my car payment, my house payment, my credit card payment for all the stuff I bought to fill up my house and car and body),
--they will be messy and mess us up. (You want me to take off my coat and do what?!)
--they won't go away after all that, we still will have to think about and remember them enough to go back and check on the follow-up.
The last day covered practical things we can do. For me it is "oh man! you want me to call up and go visit that person?!" Personally I would prefer to go home, read a book or veg on the couch and watch television.
I know some Good Samaritan activities I have thought about doing the last couple months and always negated because ... it really would mess up my schedule. I would be inconvenienced to do them.
Jesus said his yoke is easy ... but it is still a yoke and I am not the one pulling the reins.