The First Saturday of Lent

What is the fast that you have chosen?

It’s still Lent. With all the goings on at work this week (Think merger. Health care is a business like any other in the United States.), I had forgotten that it is Lent and I have work to do…or not do as the case may be.

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6 NRSV)

As a hospice chaplain working (for now) at a not-for-profit hospital system, I think about injustice often. The lack of access underserved populations have to good heath care is distressing. Even in dying, they are abandoned. We try to alleviate that struggle by accepting patients who do not have ready resources that the economically privileged might have. In Richmond, this means being in poor and working class black neighborhoods a lot. We try to “loose the bonds of injustice.”

Such a fast is communal work, societal work. It depends upon individual action, but at its heart, this is the work of society as a whole. The social structure of the United States must be challenged and changed. Health care, including care for the dying and the bereaved, is a basic human right. Our cultural habit of insisting that profit making is The Virtue that Makes All Other Virtues Possible is killing us. It is a spiritual poison.

Today’s Franciscan Nugget: “Day Seventeen - The Second Way of Service - Study - "And this is eternal life: that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (John 17:3) True knowledge is knowledge of God. Tertiaries therefore give priority to devotional study of scripture as one of the chief means of attaining that knowledge of God which leads to eternal life.”

Jesus healed. He insisted that communities reallocate resources (Luke 4:16-30) to care for the last and the least. This was as unpopular a notion then as it is now. What we see in our own communities where religion has become a tool of economic caste systems is what Jesus saw in society in his own day. We are not alone in our struggle. We are not doing something new. Nor should we expect different results. The more we act like Christ in the world, which is the vocation of the Tertiary, the more the world will reject us. Our response is to be the same as God’s, who so loved this world. We are to love the societies that would reject us and the Gospel.

Thus endeth the sermon.

Today there will be coffee, happy meds, and breakfast. Later there will be ice skating. My son has been invited to go out with some friends. It is also the 24th anniversary of our first date. So, my wife and I will go out tonight and see a play at The Firehouse Theater. It’s a full weekend.

Y’all be excellent to each other.