Fifth Sunday in Lent – C3

Fifth Sunday in Lent – C3

Years C
Philippians 3:4b-14

Are you confident in the flesh? Do you have your understandings all in a row? Are you sufficiently certified? Are your advantages being played to the hilt and your disadvantages minimized? In other words, have you padded your resume?

Surely, you have you have an explanation for such intractables as poverty. I've been following a Lenten Reading Program that is about to get to the chapter on poverty in Bob Edgar's new book, Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right. In peeking ahead there is this provocative line, "It is time for a New Revised Standard Version of international capitalism, and it must begin with the simple proposition that each of God's children deserves love equally." (p. 188)

To have the power of resurrection in our back pocket without getting it out and "straining forward" to apply it to individuals and systemic processes is to not have it at all. Nowhere will resurrection show up more dramatically than in the ratio of poor to rich. This is an accurate moral measure of our lives, individual and corporate.

The above book indicates that if someone handed you a one-hundred-dollar bill and in return you gave seventy cents back, every one of the Millennium Goals could be achieved and the lives of more than one billion of the least-of-these would be transformed. Even such a small thing we find it impossible to do.

What social holiness will come from your knowing the power of Christ's resurrection?

= = = = = = =

a degree on the wall
I passed Jesus
I am authorized
to pass judgment
and never lose another game
just watch me point
point at my degrees
at least 34 of them
it is so hard to forget
all that went into getting here
and so easy to remember
that with all that I am
and all that I have
I don't have to strain
quite so much as I used to
to make the train
when the heavenly call
goes out

to be continued
even a progressive pilgrim moves
into a slough of despond
before having their degrees
unloaded
and replaced
with a dance of joy
naked

to be continued
with others