Love life. Live love.

Yesterday was National Daughters’ Day. One of the great gifts in my life has been my two wonderful, thoughtful daughters, and my granddaughter, a joy and delight just as her mother and aunt have been. 

But the day reminds me of other daughters in the faith, young women God has graciously put in my life to teach me and challenge me and remind me that simple answers are rarely the right ones, and grace is a gift that flows in every direction. 

Yesterday was also the day President Trump announced his third selection for Supreme Court judge, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg still awaits burial. The rancor and division grow deeper as precedent is ignored, previous statements about appropriate timing are forgotten, and the court becomes ever more a tool of party politics. 

I wrote in 2012 about my experience as a young mom, marching in pro-life marches as part of a group called NOEL: National Organization of Episcopalians for Life. I wrote then: 

For me, this is a topic where justice, mercy, and humility collide, and I find myself grieving, repenting, and wishing I lived in a time that allowed sackcloth and ashes. I’d go find some.

Here’s what I grieve: 

• Political rhetoric that makes light of the experience of rape, that dares to suggest that some rapes are more worthy of sympathy than others. 
• Junk science masquerading as fact that somehow ignores the experience of an estimated 32,000 women with rape-related pregnancies each year.
• The flurry of punitive and mean-spirited laws promoted, in some cases passed, with no clear justification: how many men who voted for transvaginal ultrasounds had any idea of what that might be like? 
• Attempts to limit access to contraception, cut food aid to mothers and children, limit early education. 

Since then, I’ve watched my people, white Evangelical Christians, put their trust in a man who has boasted about forced sexual encounters, whose close friends exploited underage women for the benefit of wealthy, powerful men, a man who mocks the disabled and calls fallen soldiers "losers." 

In ministry I often referred to a passage in 2 Chronicles 20, where King Jehoshaphat showed great wisdom as he put his trust in God’s provision. Lately I’ve been musing on the end of that story, where Jehoshaphat put his trust in an unholy alliance, rather than God himself:

Later, Jehoshaphat king of Judah made an alliance with Ahaziah king of Israel, whose ways were wicked. He agreed with him to construct a fleet of trading ships. After these were built at Ezion Geber, Eliezer son of Dodavahu of Mareshah prophesied against Jehoshaphat, saying, “Because you have made an alliance with Ahaziah, the LORD will destroy what you have made.” The ships were wrecked and were not able to set sail to trade.

In the evangelical alliance with Donald Trump and the harsher side of the GOP, evangelical churches are destroying their witness and demonstrating a tragic lack of trust in God and lack of understanding of who he calls us to be. 

I’ve argued elsewhere that Trump’s ways are wicked. The evidence now is far greater than what I knew in 2016, when I wrote about his recurrent pattern of fraud and mistreatment of women. Since then he has manipulated every institution he can reach to his own profit and political ends, sowing seeds of doubt in our elections, our postal service, our courts, our medical professsionals.

If the goal is to preserve life, we need to ask:

• Why did he hide the danger of Covid-19 and refuse to use all means he could to put testing in place and provide needed supplies? The mounting death toll here in our country could have been averted with leadership that put lives first. 
• Why does he hold rallies, with thousands in close quarters, without masks, in defiance of all medical recommendations, risking the lives of his own supporters? 
• Why does he undercut and discount attempts to address climate change, which costs thousands of lives each year and will soon decimate island nations and coastal communities around the globe? 
• Why does he fail to speak out on behalf of black lives lost to unjust use of force? 
• Why has he pushed for federal application of the death penalty, zealously endorsing the execution of poor people of color while commuting sentences of his powerful cronies? 

If the goal is to see fewer abortions, there are better ways to get there than packing the court with partisan judges. I continue to wonder why those who claim to be pro-life are not more eager to ensure policies that would make parenthood more possible. There are plenty who have written about this in more detail than space allows. 

Here's a quick sample from Red Letter Christians: 

The fact is that banning abortion is not the best way to safeguard the unborn. Three of the five nations with the lowest abortion rates are nations where abortion is legal. Further, the regions of the world where abortion rates are the highest are where abortion tends to be illegal. No doubt many factors account for this fact. Regardless, all in all, there is no correspondence between the legality or illegality of abortion and abortion rates.

What many pro-life Christian also don’t know is that abortion rates in the United States have been dropping and are now at pre-Roe v Wade levels. Some would like to claim that abortion rates are dropping because of the restrictive laws that have been put in place that have closed abortion clinics or otherwise made it more difficult for women to get abortion. But the facts don’t support that claim.

States where abortions are easily available have seen abortion rates fall as much or more. One report observes, “Five of the six states with the biggest declines – Hawaii at 30 percent, New Mexico at 24 percent, Nevada and Rhode Island at 22 percent, Connecticut at 21 percent – have passed no recent laws to restrict abortion clinics or providers.” Further, other developed nations have seen abortion rates drop without laws that have restricted abortion.

Those of us who oppose abortion have a responsibility to be honest about what does and doesn’t work. Something besides a desire to protect unborn life is at work if most of the anti-abortion efforts are dedicated to pushing an approach that has not been shown to be consistently effective. The desire to control and punish women seems to be over-riding the desire to reduce abortions. This is deeply misguided.

So what works? Essentially, it comes down to three things: (1) easy access to cheap or free contraceptive, (2) sex education which includes information about how to correctly use contraceptives, and (3) a strong social safety net.

That safety net would include paid family leave, affordable child care, affordable housing. I’m offended by anyone who claims to be pro-life and opposes policies that make it easier to care for children.

I know women whose lives have been shattered by abortion.

And I know teen girls burdened with care for small lives when they weren’t ready to manage their own, young women whose futures were shattered by circumstances far beyond their control, women who found themselves drowning with guilt and regret and judgement from all sides.

Punitive policies aren’t the answer.

I think of Jesus’ gentleness with the woman caught in adultery, with the woman at the well, with the bruised and broken women drawn to his words of mercy.

I think of the verse from Isaiah that says “a bruised reed he will not break.”

I think of the way he called the women around him – older, younger, clean, “unclean”: daughter. 

And I think of his words for the Pharisees eager to be right but lacking in love and mercy:

 do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. 

The load of an unwanted pregnancy is a heavy one. 

Strange that the people most likely to impose that on women they don’t know have been most vocal in refusing to wear masks to protect the lives of those they do know. 

It’s not for me to judge. 

What I know for sure is this: the Lord of life is also the Lord of love.

Our policy needs to be shaped by both: love of life. Lives of love.

If you listen to podcasts, here’s one to consider: Freedom Road Podcast: It's time to talk about abortion and reproductive justice. I love a concluding comment from Susan Chorley, an ordained American Baptist minister and director of an after-abortion counseling hotline: 

I think my prayer and what I have continued to uncover and recover is that the love of Jesus is big enough. And any of these limits that we’re trying to place on Jesus’s love are false. And it’s a real opportunity and actually a revival of the Christian community to trust in the abundance and never-ending love of Jesus.

If our arguments don't reflect the never-ending love of Jesus, they're just arguments. Clanging cymbals. Sounding brass. Campaign slogans meant to inflame. 

We don’t need more of Donald Trump.

We need far more of Jesus and his unfailing love. 

Are there other Christians speaking out against a one-issue embrace of Donald Trump's presidency? There are many. If you need more, let me know. 

A short video by a pro-life doctor: The core of the pro-life ethic is respect for human life. Don’t let your vote be held hostage by a president who shows no respect for human life.

Liberty professor Karen Swallow asks Must Pro-llfe mean Pro-Trump? We have placed too much faith in the political calculus and not enough faith in God’s power.  At what point do our actions imply that God wants us to do wrong because he needs us to help him do right?

Mother of six Jennifer Abel describes The Heavy Weight of Disillusionment and asks her fellow Christians: Why are you so willing to turn a blind eye to so many behaviors that are completely, blatantly in opposition to the heart and character of Christ?

Pro-life conservative columnist Mona Charen: Why this Pro-Live Conservative Is Voting for Biden: Being pro-life is part of an overall approach to ethical questions. It’s wrong to take innocent life. But other things are immoral too. It’s also wrong to swindle people, to degrade and demonize, to incite violence, to bully, and while we’re at it, to steal, to bear false witness, to commit adultery, and to covet. . . Donald Trump is a daily, even hourly, assault on the very idea of morality, even as he obliterates truth. His influence is like sulphuric acid on our civic bonds. His cruelty is contagious.

Conservative columnist David French asks Do Pro-Lifers Who Reject Trump Have ‘Blood on their Hands’? Short answer: no. The long answer: 1. Presidents have been irrelevant to the abortion rate; 2. Judges have been forces of stability, not change, in abortion law; 3. State legislatures have had more influence on abortion than Congress; 4. Even if Roe is overturned, abortion will be mostly unchanged in the U.S.; and 5. The pro-life movement has an enormous cultural advantage.

From Christianity Today: On the Front Lines, Some Pro-Life Activists Think Twice About Supporting Trump.

A foster and adoptive parent speaks on behalf of unwanted children: Pro-life should be more than pro-birth.

Church of the Redeemer pastor Tim Keller Encourages Christians to Vote Their Conscience, Stop Demonizing Other Political Parties: “The Bible binds my conscience to care for the poor, but it does not tell me the best practical way to do it.” “The Bible tells me that abortion is a sin and great evil, but it doesn’t tell me the best way to decrease or end abortion in this country, nor which policies are most effective.

Mennonite pastor and professor Ron Sider: Does Abortion Trump Everything Else?  "What does the bible say God cares about? . . . God cares both about the sanctity of human life and ecnomic justice for all, especially the poor. God cares both about marriage and racial justice. God cares both about sexual integrity and peacemaking and care for creation. . . Poverty, health care, racial justice, climate change, capital punishment; Abortion is by no means the only pro-life issue in 2020. Biblical people must support a biblically-balanced agenda, not one-issue politics."

The Time that Is Given Us

I’ve been reading this week in the book of Esther. It’s a familiar story, but troubling when I pause to  consider details.

Abusive power, sexual exploitation, unbridled ambition, deliberate instigation of racial violence. It’s an amazingly detailed narrative, set in 5th century BC Persia.

Esther, a young Jewish woman chosen to be queen, is warned by her cousin Mordecai that her people are in danger of genocide. He urges her to act, saying “who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

With grace, courage and amazing diplomacy, Esther intervenes, risking her own life to save the lives of her fellow Jews scattered throughout the Persian empire. She is rewarded with the estate of her enemy, Haman, and with an edict allowing the Jews to kill and plunder those who sought to kill and plunder them.

That one phrase of Mordecai’s, “for such a time as this,” echoes through times of conflict in Scripture. Gideon, Moses, Joshua, David, Rahab: individuals in the right time and place become pivot points for historical change.

The same is true through history: individuals make a difference.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday night, after a valiant fight with pancreatic cancer. While many grieve, others rejoice. I find myself reflecting on her courage, tenacity and incredible discipline. Early in her life she envisioned a world in which women’s rights were equal to those of men, and fought for those rights with every tool she could find. 

In her early career she was denied jobs or was paid less than men because of her gender. In the 1970s she co-founded and led the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I look back to the changes won in that decade and those following. I look back to my own jobs lost to gender discrimination, to lower salaries because I was a woman, my own tangles with workmen who wanted to my husband’s signature rather than mine. 

For some, Bader Ginsburg will be remembered solely for her unyielding defense of a women’a right to abortion. In her 1993 confirmation hearing she said, unequivocally,

 “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices." 

Hold in balance the world she envisioned: a world where men value the work of women, share equally in the care of children, where housing, medical care, education, paid family leave are available to every person, every parent.

I’ll post on that question, of abortion and women’s well-being, next week. What moves me as I reflect on her life today is her tenacity and courage. Her only sister died of meningitis when they were tiny. Her mother died of cancer the day before her high school graduation. She nursed her young husband Martin through law school while caring for a toddler daughter, continuing her own legal studies, fighting for the right to take challenging positions never before given to female students. Together they cared for their two children and four grandchildren, until Martin’s death to cancer in 2010. And for twenty years continued as a Supreme Court justice while fighting her own recurrent bouts with colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer.

When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said:

 "Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid."

I find myself returning to a quote from Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo is lamenting the unsettled times, the unsought adventure confronting his small band of fellow travelers:

 “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg right in the way she used her abilities?

Was the full outcome of Esther’s intervention the best she could have brought about?

What is it WE are called to do, today, tomorrow, these times we’ve been given?

Talking with a friend pulled in too many directions, I said “I’m trying to do each day the things that only I can do.”

In 2014 I wrote about the Examen included in Tyler Wigg Steven’s The World Is Not Ours to Save. Some of the questions he asked are ever more in our current context:

• Do we give our support in finances and time to efforts that work for peace among the nations, according to the measure we have received? ·
• Do we consistently seek to pour out any national status accorded to us, using our status to undermined the imbalanced and unjust structures that create status in the first place?
• Where we are disadvantaged, do we refuse to be defined as victims?
• Do we renounce or redirect gain that we receive from injustice, employing any benefit we might receive in the service of those who are oppressed?
• Where we do not occupy a privileged status, do we conduct ourselves in a way that forces oppressors to encounter our full humanity, our being made in the image of God?
• Do we stand firm in the face of unjust threat?
• Do we refuse that anyone in our community be made to fear?

So many in our communities are living in fear, as we wrestle with our own fears, our own anxieties. Injustice compounds in ways that leave us feeling helpless. 

I find myself, more than ever, starting each day in prayer:

• What is it I’m to do today?
• How will I be available to the need of the world?
• How will I use the gifts I’ve been given, the opportunities before me, to further the work God has given me to do?

Years ago someone gave me this poem written by Bonaro W Overstreet in 1955. I quoted it in an early blog post during the sleepy election season of 2013:

(To One Who Doubts the Worth of Doing Anything
If You Can’t Do Everything) 

You say the Little efforts that I make
will do no good:
they never will prevail 
to tip the hovering scale
where Justice hangs in balance.

 I don’t think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
in favor of my right to choose
which side shall feel
the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Since those days, I’ve seen more clearly than I could have imagined: when those stubborn ounces of our weight are used in obedience to God’s calling, doors open, opportunities multiply. We are not the ones who decide the outcome, yet our obedience, courage, discipline, tenacity, are part of the story God is writing in our time. 

In the Storm

I’ve written before about The Porter’s Gate, a sacred arts collaborative founded in 2017 to be a "porter" for the Christian church: "one who looks beyond the church door for guests to welcome." In the last week they came out with two new collections: Justice Songs and Lament Songs, both deeply needed and very much welcome. 

I find myself drawn to a song that echoes the call of the disciples in the boat, tossed by wind and waves, begging Jesus to wake up and save them.



In this time of storm and sorrow, I echo that cry: when you gonna wake up? Rise up and save us!

It’s a biblical cry, echoed throughout scripture: 

• Psalm 44:23: Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
  
  
• Psalm 7:6: Arise, LORD, in your anger . . . .Awake, my God; decree justice."
  
  
• Ps 44:23–26 Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
  Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression . . .
  Rise up and help us; rescue us because of your unfailing love.
  
  
• Ps 74:21–22: may the poor and needy praise your name.
  Rise up, O God, and defend your cause . . .
  

Here’s the question that haunts me: why doesn’t God intervene, set things right, restore justice, heal us from this wretched pandemic?

 

Some of you shake your heads and insist, sometimes with disdain, sometimes with sadness: there is no such thing as a God who intervenes.

 

Yet, as the psalmists affirmed, as the disciples in the boat were so slowly learning, I believe God does speak and storms are calmed. He does lead his people out of suffering and into places of plenty. 

Sometimes.

Iwashita Hiroshi, Japan, ca 1970?

Then there are the times when the storms still rage and we find ourselves asking why. 

As I pray in this strange, difficult, sad season, I find that song raising difficult questions that make me uneasy.

 

What if the work to be done is ours?

 

What if God has already given us all that we need to turn the tide of division and sorrow?

 

What if the moment of storm is occasion for us to grow in courage and grace?

 

What if WE are the agents of intervention, and the wait is not for Christ to rise, but for his people to remember who they are and rise to the occasion?

 

I often return to this passage from Isaiah 58: 

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,

   with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

   and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

   and your night will become like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you always;

   he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land

   and will strengthen your frame.

You will be like a well-watered garden,

   like a spring whose waters never fail.

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins

   and will raise up the age-old foundations;

you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,

   Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

There’s a big IF there. 

• If you do away with oppression.
• If you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry.
• If you satisfy the needs of the oppressed. 

Are we even heading in the right direction?

 

In this time of protests, raging fires, schools opening and closing as COVID-19 spikes, the weight of division and suspicion weighs heavily on us all. Strange theories are repeated as if gospel truth. Accusations multiply, some well-founded, some much less so.

 

I find myself reviewing familiar words, and asking again: what do these words mean? How can I live them more visibly, more faithfully? How can I plant my feet more firmly on rock when all around me is storm and sand?

 

2 Timothy 1:7: For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

 

James 3:17-18:  But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.

 

2 Peter 1: 5-7: Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge;  and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love

 

I’ve been trying to do a lot of listening. Trying to understand what fuels the fear around me, trying to understand why people think as they do, why they plan to vote as they do.

 

I find myself wanting God to rise up and calm the storms that surround us. 

 

But what if His goal is to shape us so deeply that we feel his calm when chaos descends and we feel the stress load rising?

 

What if the intent is that we ourselves become agents of calm to those caught in their own storms all around us?

 

Voices of peace? of wisdom? of love?

 

Not voices of endorsement.

 

Not voices of acquiescence.

 

But voices of quiet strength, able to say: Enough. Be still.

 

I pray it would be so.

Labor Day Lament

 I have been thinking and praying for weeks about a Labor Day post

There is so much that is broken in our current model of labor and commerce it's hard to know where to begin.

As I turn my thoughts to work and labor, what wells up in me are the too many conversations with friends struggling to provide for their families, always on the edge of financial disaster, always on the brink of homelessness.

For decades the plight of low wage workers has become increasingly grim. It was once possible to provide a reasonable life for an entire family on one low-wage income. Now, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, a minimum wage worker working full-time could not afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.

The average minimum wage worker must work nearly 97 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom rental home or 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom rental home at the average fair market rent. In no state can a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the Fair Market Rent.

There was a housing crisis before the pandemic. Now, housing experts forecast a coming housing ‘apocalypse’ as eviction bans and unemployment benefits expire.

The homelessness of the working poor is personal to me. My own family was functionally homeless repeatedly during my high school years.

Not familiar with the term "functionally homeless"?

Most of the homeless in the US are not sleeping on the streets. Rather, they’re sleeping on couches in friend’s apartments, or in extra bedrooms, or in other makeshift arrangements.

 

For me, that meant three months in a cold attic bedroom with my grandmother, in the household of a couple we didn’t know, from a church we’d never attended, in an unfamiliar school district.

 

It meant the first three months of my senior year on a cot in the bedroom of a friend and her younger sister, then two months in a half-rehabbed cottage with no heat or plumbing, in yet another school district, with my school clothes and belongings in storage.

In my home state of New York, for a kid with a gift for standardized tests, there were avenues out: grants, scholarships, access to college. I learned much about God’s grace and the kindness of strangers during those hard days. But those experiences also lit a flame of anger that flares when I hear people talk about the poor with condescension, or suggest that if only “those people” would arrange things more wisely, work a little harder, all would be well.

No.

Those people are already working harder than you might imagine, struggling to piece together lives and home with little help from a broken economic system. 

 

I find myself tearing up as I say thank you to grocery store workers who wear masks all day, trying to follow safety protocols, trying to manage their own sense of risk and discomfort, while paid not enough to live on.

 

I find myself staring into space after calls from friends who are trying to juggle children, minimum wage jobs, loss of free lunches, escalating tensions and violence in urban neighborhoods.  

The inequities are growing so quickly there appears no remedy.

 

Need some statistics?

Grapple with these from the Economic Policy Institute:

• Among S&P 500 firms nearly 80 percent now pay their CEO more than 100 times their median worker. Nearly 10 percent had median pay below the poverty line for a family of four.
  
  
• At the 50 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years to earn what their CEO makes in just one.
   
• Median CEO pay at these 50 off-the-charts firms last year averaged $15.9 million.
  
  
• Median worker pay at the same 50 firms averaged just $10,027.   

Throw into the mix escalating wage theft: the callous refusal to pay wages when employees are let go or forced to work overtime. I wrote about this back in 2016, calling attention to then-candidate Donald Trump’s notoriety in withholding workers’ wages. Since his presidency began, the problem has grown worse:

The opening months of the Trump Administration were full of bad news for low-wage workers. Among other things, the Administration announced it would abandon rules that sought to ensure that service workers would get their tips, help workers more easily recover minimum and overtime wages from employers . . . It also put in place a hiring freeze that reduced the staff of the federal agency tasked with protecting workers’ wages.

The pandemic has brought to light the plight of low-wage workers in industries where abuse and exploitation are rampant. Wage theft is part of the problem. Add lack of medical care, unsafe working conditions, retribution when they try to speak out.

Examples? The laundry industry, the meat packing industry, aqriculture, ranching, hospitality. That's just a start.

Followers of Christ should be the first and loudest in insisting any candidate for public office offer plans to address the needs of the working poor. 

 

Yet I’ve heard from Christian friends that politicians concerned for the poor are socialists.

That ideas to address economic inequity are unbiblical.

That our current capitalist model is God-ordained and anyone who questions it is heretical.

 

I find myself dumbfounded, and overwhelmed by the enormity of theological error. There is little in our current economic structure that would be endorsed by Levitical law, by the carpenter from Nazareth, by the tent-maker from Tarsus.

 

Here’s what I know for sure:

• The laborer is worthy of his or her pay.
  
  
• God’s preferred economic model provides regular recalibration to restore equality.

• Any system that tramples poor workers is an affront to God. 

The Porter’s Gate released a new album this week; Justice Songs. One of the first, The Zaccheus Song, is a reminder that there are immediate economic implications to a decision to follow Christ. 

Zaccheus, a tax collector, made his wealth defrauding the poor. After his encounter with Jesus, he immediately determined to set that right. 

Would that all followers of Christ would feel that same determination. What a witness that would be to the poor, struggling workers of this world.

The early church spread quickly with just such a witness:

Justin Martyr, in one of the earliest histories of the church, wrote:

We who used to value the acquisition of wealth and possessions more than anything else now bring what we have into a common fund and share it with anyone who needs it.

Clement, describing the change visible in any person who took on the name of “Christian,” noted:

He impoverishes himself out of love, so that he is certain he may never overlook a brother in need, especially if he knows he can bear poverty better than his brother. He likewise considers the pain of another as his own pain. And if he suffers any hardship because of having given out of his own poverty, he does not complain.

Clement, like the others who chose to live the resurrection, put a high value on love: your pain is my pain. Your poverty is my poverty. Your illness is my illness.

In Philippians 2, Paul says “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”  Imagine that as a prescription for our public policy, for our vote in November.

We are a very long way from any hint of that.

I've written in the past about lament, or "nacham": grieve, be sorry, regret, think again, console, be comforted, have compassion.

Today, Labor Day 2020, join in me in lament of the grave injustices that confront so many workers, here in the US and around the globe.

And in prayer that God's people will rise up as agents of justice and restoration.