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RSSONE Next Sunday
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
2/18/2007
Of course, next Sunday is the first Sunday of Lent. So that's one one. But it's another One Sunday that I am thinking of, I who love everything about Lent: its quiet, its soberness, its steady progress towards the tumult of Holy Week and the joyous release of Easter Day.
Next week has been designated "One Sunday" by our Presiding Bishop. It will be a time to make a commitment to do what Jesus asked us many times to do, while he was here with us in the realm of history: look to the poor. Become one with them. Make them first, not last. Make them more important than you are, for a hardhearted world has decided to award more importance to you than to them, and this is wrong in God's eyes.
Episcopal Relief and Development is the means by which we can each be part of making those in need first, not last. ERD, with the rest of the Church in convention, has accepted the UN Millennium Development goals, concrete plans to change the landscape of suffering in the world.
Why should the church embrace something that began in a political organization like the United Nations? Isn't that more properly the sphere of government activity? I don't think so. Government is people. Government is us -- we elect it and we support it. It represents us -- sometimes better than at other times, but that's what government is. It is us, in the aggregate. No government will be better than its people.
And it protects our private work: what we decide about our lives and our right to decide. Where we worship, and whether we worship at all. There is a way in which people of faith are citizens of the world, and participating in a life of service to those in need is part of that way. So you vote. You pray for the world. You pay taxes. And you give. That's how people of faith live in society.
You've got a week. Think about it. What it would mean to put the poor first.
