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RSSNarrowing the Gap
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
10/1/2007
Proper 21, Pentecost 18, Year C
Jeremiah 32:1-3a,6-15
Psalm 91:1-6,14-16 or Amos 6:1a,4-7
Psalm 146
1 Timothy 6:6-9
Luke 16:19-31
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall... – Amos 6:4
You don't want to eat a lamb, not if you're poor. You must wait and eat mutton, stewed for a long time because it tough. Your lamb must grow up: you'll need her wool for as long as she lives, and you'll need her to breed other lambs. In the Bible, only the rich can afford to eat lamb.
The same goes for veal, the tender meat from a calf. You don't want to eat that, either. You'll need her milk, for as many years as she can give it. You'll have to wait out her natural life span, a life of so much benefit to you and yours, and then that life of service can complete itself. Mostly you don't eat much in the way of meat at all; these animals are worth more to your family alive and producing than they are as meat.
When Amos talks of eating the meat of lambs and calves, he's talking about conspicuous consumption, living a life of luxury that ignores the need to plan for the future and also ignores the needs of others. A life, in other words, rather like the lives we in the world's developed countries all live. It's not that we live as we do in a deliberate attempt to oppress the poor. We just don't think much about the great gulf between us and them.
When we offer support to them across that great gulf, from our distance prosperity and from our great geographical distance, we do so with an eye to their future reality as well as their grim current one. A can of food is one thing -- if you're hungry, it's a huge one. But the capacity to feed oneself in the future, as well as today, multiplies a gift immeasurably.
Except for the sudden, immediate needs that a disaster brings -- shelter, food, water, medicine, NOW! -- our Episcopal Relief and Development's work among those in need focuses on the building of that capacity. The capacity for a life that can live into the future. The capacity of communities to feed themselves, to educate their own children, to grow their own economic life. Our work through ERD is our gift that will help the the poor narrow, through their own effort, the great gulf between our prosperity and their abject need. A gift they can grow into something for the future, not just something for today.
