A Prayer

I prayed the following offertory prayer today at Anderson's First Baptist Church:


Merciful Father,
Thank you for these moments when we bow our heads and try to still our hearts so we can speak to You and let You speak to us.  
Our minds are cluttered with worries we carried in here.  Angers.  Frustrations.  Things left undone.  Things done wrong.  Trouble with our children.  Trouble with our parents.  Bills we can’t pay. Jobs we don’t like.  Inability to find jobs.  Perhaps a spot on an X-ray.  A car needing brakes.
Lord, we aren’t asking You to help us get rid of those thoughts.  Rather, we ask for grace to believe You are more concerned about those things than we are.  You’ve told us to cast all our cares on You because You care for us.  As the old song said, “Take you burden to the Lord and leave it there.”  That’s not easy, but help us to give it a try.  Right now.
We pray for the people right around us here in sanctuary.  We don’t know the loads many of them carry, but You know and You care.  So open us as a loving community to the cares and sorrows of all Your children.
Guide the music and sermon of this hour.  Guide those who teach Sunday school.  Guide in the food and fellowship and deliberation of those who gather for the business meeting.
Beyond this church, we pray for the leaders of our town and county, our state, our nation, our world.  Bring them to awareness of their opportunity, their responsibility to lift those under their watch-care, the need to work for peace among the nations.
As we dedicate these financial gifts, we also offer all these concerns as part of our stewardship of love and life.  We pray in the name of Jesus, who, though He was rich, became poor for our sakes, so that we through His poverty might become rich in the things that really matter.  Amen.         

Making fun of people in need

The Kingston Trio used to sing about a man named Charlie who got on the Boston subway when it cost a dime to ride.  Charlie had only that one dime with him. But while he was on the train, the fare jumped to fifteen cents.  And without the extra nickel, they wouldn’t let him off the train.  
As the song story goes, Charlie rides all night “‘neath the streets of Boston.”  He seems trapped there forever because he wife goes to the Scollay Square station each afternoon and hands Charlie a sandwich through an open window on the train.
There’s a thread of fact in “The M. T. A. Song.”  At one point, Boston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority instituted an exit fare rather than go to the expense of modifying all the turnstiles in the system.  So, Charlie’s situation might actually have happened, in theory at least.
The song ends as a campaign message for a mayoral candidate who opposes a fare increase.   That, too, turns out to be based on real life.  A man named Walter A. O’Brien had that as a plank in his platform. In the song, he's called George O’Brien.
Charlie’s story is a parody on a Civil War era song, “The Ship That Never Returned,” which asks, “Did she ever return?” Then comes the answer, “no, she never returned An' her sad fate is still unlearned.”  Likewise, at the end of the subway song, Charlie’s fate is still in question.
Of course, the logic of the M. T. A. story breaks down when you ask why Charlie’s wife didn’t hand him some money instead of a sandwich so he could get off the train.  But that would spoil the fun of the song.
At the time the song was popular, a group of us were singing and laughing about the idea in the story.   Everyone was having fun because we couldn’t take it seriously.  Well, almost everyone was having fun.  One woman in the group took Charlie’s predicament to heart.  She saw nothing funny in the song:  We shouldn’t laugh at the situation, even though the song was intended to amuse.  Because this woman felt such compassion for a fellow human in need, she couldn’t laugh, even at a made-up difficulty.
The concerned woman in our group compared us with the rich man in Jesus’s story of Lazarus the beggar (Luke 16:19-31).  In his luxurious clothing, the man “feasted sumptuously every day” while Lazarus lay nearby starving.  There’s no indication that the wealthy man ever noticed Lazarus, much less reached out to offer him even leftovers.  
The bottom line in Jesus’s parable is that the tables were turned in the afterlife, with Lazarus in heavenly bliss and the rich man in torment.
Maybe our somber friend had a point.  Do we ever make make jokes about real people who face real need?  Do we make light of the jobless, the homeless, the elderly?  Is it ever appropriate for Christians to have fun at the expense of others?  Or do we simply ignore their plight?
Some people try to dodge responsibility for the needy because Jesus said the poor will always be with us (Matthew 26:11).  But Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 15:11 which says, “For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore I command you, You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land.”

The everydayness of everyday

Roger frequently referred to “the everydayness of everyday.”  
An odd expression. 
I’ve worked in several church settings, but Roger had the kindest, most accepting spirit of any minister I’ve worked with on a day to day basis.  We were in a small town in the Georgia mountains, and I thought of Roger as the pastor of the whole town. 
He felt the pulse of daily life -- that “the everydayness of everyday" -- across denominational lines.  As he and I walked down the hill from the church to the small business district, people along the way would greet him as they would their neighbor.  As we sat on stools in a small cafe drinking coffee, everybody seemed to know Roger.  
“What was the doctor’s report on your mother, Sara?” he asked the chair of the altar guild at St. Matthias’ as she and a friend walked by us.  Sara said, “We’re waiting for the biopsy report, Roger.” It wasn’t “Reverend” or “Preacher.” It was “Roger,” from a communicant in the high church Episcopal congregation in response to our low church Baptist preacher.   
As we made our way back up the hill to the church, burly, sandy-hair Bill Compton hollered, “Hey, Roger!” As he trotted to catch us, we stopped and waited.  He panted as he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his hip pocket to mop his brow.  
“How’s it going, Bill?” Roger asked this lay leader from Confidence United Methodist out in the country.   
“Jacky got clobbered in scrimmage yesterday.”
“What happened?”
Bill sputtered, “That overstuffed Gatlin kid knocked ‘im flat and then fell on ‘im.  Probably on purpose.  That boy must weigh four hun’erd pounds. Jacky’s got some busted ribs.  Maybe even a ruptured spleen.  Reckin you c’n git by to see him at the hospital?”
Cancer scare.  Injury for a star quarterback.  All this and more was part of “the everydayness of everyday” in our town.
We’d rather not think of these traumas as part of daily life.  We prefer the old Irving Berlin outlook: “Nothing but blue skies from now on.”  But I’m reminded of a painting in the basement shop in St. Martin in the Fields Church in London.  The artist depicted people in a rainstorm, some with umbrellas, others with no protection from the elements.  In the title, “With Sunny Spells Later,” I think the artist was telling us to expect stormy times in life, with occasional bursts of sunshine.
I recall a daily cartoon strip featuring a man named Ebenezer and his wife Florence.  But they were known simply as Eb and Flo, suggesting the Ebb and Flow of life routines, perhaps “the everydayness of everyday.”
Like the two-faced god Janus, whose name is embedded in the first month of the year, the start of each new year -- and the start of each new day in the new year -- provides opportunity to look back to evaluate and look forward to anticipate the colossal, the common, or the catastrophe, all part of “the 
everydayness of everyday.”

Psalm 90:12---So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.