Reflection on "How will what we do now effect the poor."

I went to our diocesan convention this past wek- I wish I could say that i look forward to being around a bunch of clergy but the old introvert in me holds on to the old saying which goes"Clergy are like manure- they need to be spread around in order to do some good , but if it is piled up in only one  place it burns the ground and stinks to high heaven!"

But one gem came forward this weekend when the Bishop, who is leaving, talked about a meeting he attended. The meeting started off in silence for 2 minutes and then had three minutes for discussion of the question: "How will what we do now  effect the poor." If the central message of Jesus was to proclaim good news to the poor in mind, body, and spirit; then it seems to make sense to ask ourselves that question on a regular basis.

I presided at a funeral for the husband of a parishioner yesterday. Over the past several years, I had only met him at his house because he did not come to church but his wife was a regular attender. He had been one of those people who had been fed up with institutional religion and had decided that he could no longer in good conscience be a member of a body which was so out of touch with the real world. He retired some years ago from had a busy OB-GYN practice and his patients had trusted him and I heard of  women who called his widow to tell her about how wonderful he had been in caring for them in the traumas - thirty, forty, fifty years ago. It was his very caring that got him in trouble with his church..His church preached, on the orders of the old men in the hierarchy, that  it was a sin to practice birth control and to make it available. He decided that it was a sin  to not make birth control available for his patients.  The pastors in the church were willing for a blind eye to be given to his successful practice but they wanted to regularly attack birth control as sin  to please their theologians. I saw his leaving of the church an honorable choice-- I would have preferred for him to fight within his church but I think he felt the cards were stacked against him.

During the service I suggested that on the final day when the "Son of Man" comes in his glory and he will say to those on his right "Well done, good and faithful servant for instead of prancing around the altar- you ministered to me when I was sick, or in labor, or in fear." Then this man for whom we had the service will say, "But when did I  minister with you when you were sick, or in labor or in fear?" And the "Son of man" will say; "If you did it to the least of these my sister, you did it to me. Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your master."