The following is a guest e-mail devotional I wrote for my home parish, Saint Andrew Christian Church in Olathe, Kansas, which was published today.
In the four weeks that I have been on the job at my new pastorate in Washington State, I have already had to field multiple calls a day from impoverished people asking if the church can help them pay a utilities bill before their water or gas or electricity gets shut off. Navigating the disbursement of the pastor's discretionary aid fund is NOT something they teach you how to do in seminary, and I have probably spent more emotional energy worrying over how I was going to split up a very small sum of money than I have spent worrying about my weekly sermons. And amidst those emotions, I have learned one inescapable, unspinnable truth-the Americans who need the church's economic help the most do not fit the hurtful stereotype of a freeloader seeking a handout, and that invoking that sort of a stereotype is insensitive to the people who are pushed into poverty every day because they played by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters.
And so I've been watching the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement with great interest and admiration, hoping that they may live up to their billing in speaking to the wealthiest and most powerful 1% on behalf of us, the other 99%, because in this line of work we call ministry, the 99% are given names and faces to you on a daily basis. This is something that the Bible, for all of its powerful testimony on behalf of the poor and the outcast, does not often give us. We receive the names of the heroes of the Gospels and the early Church, but far less often in the Bible are we given the names of the people who were actually helped by Christ's ministry.
We may not know their names, but we can only hope that Jesus did as He spoke and taught on their behalf over and over and over throughout His ministry. I'd like to think that those names were on His mind as He went to the Jerusalem temple during His Passion week, prepared to confront and expel the moneychangers and the predators from God's house. And I'd like to think that amid the voices of protest and pain that are arising from America's middle and underclass today, we still have it in ourselves to be Christ like, to go to the latter-day temple and offer the Good News for the 99%, for it is our Gospel, too.
"He said to them, 'It is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of robbers.' The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them." -Matthew 20:13-14
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 12, 2011
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