Refugees

 

 

I was listening to the ongoing tragedy of the movements of people, fleeing from and to.  From the horror of poverty and war to uncertain destinations defined only by less of both.  Theirs is the only hope.  We who are secure in our safety and security and wealth have little hope of doing much about this except shake our heads at the efforts of those between the sources of the flow and its destination.  These countries a bit better than the hells from which those fleeing come, have reached their limits.  They are building walls, shutting down railways, they have made being a refugee illegal and helping them equally punishable. 

I was wondering why I should be thinking that if only each of us could take one family into our own homes...  It occurred to me that I come by such sentiments honestly.  In the 1950’s when I was a small boy, a family came to stay with us from Hungary.  They were fleeing the failure of the revolution there, walking across minefields to seek something else, something safe.  I asked my father why they were coming to live with us.  He opened the Bible and read me the 25^th chapter of Matthew.  “Mercy is our business, David.”  It was that simple. 

I’m afraid nothing about this is simple.  There is no indication that happy endings necessarily go along with the strategies recommended by Jesus.  There is only the indication that to be about such business, to allow mercy to be our normality is to be changed by that same normality.  And to limit it is to remain secure behind our walls and status and excuses.  And if we pay attention to the lessons of history, there is no security there.  It’s that simple.

What’s our business?

Dumpsters

 

As I write, the carpet guys are tearing up the old floors in the church office and the lobby of the church house.  There are all kinds of analogies that come to mind about getting rid of the old to let in the new.  Jesus said we can’t put new wine in old wine skins.  You get the drift.  But I was wondering about all those old floors, ripped up, now discarded.  What do we do with them?  Piles of what we’ve torn up or down, getting in the way of the ‘new wine’ of our lives. 

Dumpsters.  They come on a truck, rooms with no ceilings, deposited on our property, ready to receive anything we lob or shove into them.  And then they disappear.  Poof!   Trash and garbage and anything that is not the new, improved, better, unbroken.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get dumpsters to park in our lives and use to rid ourselves of our bad habits, the twenty pounds we need to lose, the credit card debt we carry, our guilt, our anger, our fear?  Poof!  The psychic garbage company would come and take it away to be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner (some of that stuff is pretty toxic). 

The trouble is, we don’t want to let a lot of it go.  We come up with blame and guilt and excuses that keep us buried in our trash. Every once in a while when we find some exciting new part of life we’d like to claim, it’s hard to fit it into a trash infested house. 

I hope as I go on in life, I get better at throwing things out, that need to be tossed, and give things away that need to be kept, until my life is as clear as the life of our lord.  Then God’s light can shine through without any of my excuses in the way.