Year A - Pentecost +9 or Community Practice 9
August 10, 2014
For mere pieces of silver do we betray. We do it consciously and unconsciously.
Consciously we pass legislation that advantage a few against the many. Consciously we sell armaments to both sides of a conflict, telling them “you and them fight” and then picking up the spoils after the gingham cat and the calico dog have torn one another to pieces.
Unconsciously we don’t attend to the polluting of ground and groundwater until it is too late and we have to declare another environmental disaster site. As long as it is profitable for someone we are willing to put everyone at risk. Unconsciously we dismiss people from our view. Native peoples are removed to reservations until we find mineral resources on the very land despised as worthless and only good for a more-or-less concentration camp. When we find worth where didn’t expect to find it, we then remove the invisible ones one step further.
Look at Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Lake Erie, Fracking earthquakes and chemical injections, exploding oil trains, spilled pipelines, institutionalized poverty, decaying infrastructure, “black sheep” in families, people declared “incompatible” with one limited category or another, and the list goes on and on.
Where have we not thrown a sister or a brother or a friend away to bolster our own position or self-image?
Where is the prayer needed to put life into a clearer perspective that allows mercy to temper our rush to judgment and forgiveness to beckon forth and resolve our fear, our prejudice, our preference for short-term gain and long-term decay?
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