THE HOMELESS: A MOMENNT OF TRUTH

 

Homelessness is a stark reality in our North American cities. 

 

My fellow citizens have expressed deep concerns about the pain and suffering of anyone who does not have secure shelter. They are expressly concerned about the abuse and suffering that homeless women suffer.

 

You must always evaluate a society by the care and concern it demonstrates towards the poorest, the most vulnerable in its midst. How Canadians treat the homeless is a test of who we are as human beings and as a society.

 

First, the problem of homelessness grows directly as the price of real estate goes up. Your parent’s house increases in value every year. Their wealth in real estate is going up. But at the same time, the cost of rents at the lower end also goes up. People who were able to afford minimum hosing are low pushed out completely. Homelessness is the downside, the black side, of prosperity.

 

People’s lives are precarious, and for many, they live on the edge. They have weak or non-existent family and social connections. There is no family that will take them in. In the old days one of your family members could take the old dad to live with them. Today, that social reality does not exist for so many homeless people.

 

Among the homeless there is a great deal of mental illness and serious addiction issues with drugs and alcohol. We want to be very careful not to criticize any family member who cannot deal with serious drug addiction. Very few of us can deal positively with a close relative who struggles with heavy drug abuse.

 

We also must recognize that human lives can fall apart. I remember one of our young (age 27) street people came to the door, hungry. It was a cold winter day. I asked him, “Where are your gloves?” (I had given him a pain of winter gloves two weeks previously.) He shrugged his shoulders. Probably he had lost the in a drinking spree. I made him two sandwiches but his life was very unmanageable. 

 

The human reality is that many people can pick themselves up from disasters, get organized, take care of themselves and thrive. But the downside is that some human lives will fall apart. The very poor appear to be living a life in steady collapse.

 

We all know that we need social housing. This is easier said and done. All our governments are strapped for money. Social housing is expensive and must be maintained. If any level of government builds social housing, this is always a long-term commitment. 

 

The concern of our Christian people is genuine. They not only make a sound judgment about the problem of homeless in Canada, but there is genuine feelings of concern and compassion in their lament. 

 

How we respond to homelessness is a complicated matter. Our response as a Canadian society must be multi-pronged. There are many issues that must be dealt with; there is no one solution that is a fix-it for homelessness.

 

Just because it is a very difficult situation does not mean that we will run away from it. Thank you for being concerned and having your heart move for anyone who is on the streets this cold winter evening.

 

 

 

FAITH IS ALWAYS A TUG-of-WAR

 

When people really get into the story of our salvation they conclude that there is a push-pull: God seeks the people and makes covenant with them. They promise fidelity but later drop away from following the covenant with God. They turn towards false gods.

 

God does not give up on them.  Once again God goes seeking for his lost people. The prophets of the Old Testament spell out this struggle in painful detail.

 

Religious faith is not a once-for-all-got-it event. There are ups and downs there is struggle between God and the people.

 

No one should be surprised that they experience this struggle within their own life. We may have grown very slack in our religious service. We may block the grace of God by our practice of greed, racism and just down-right violence towards the other. 

 

God does not leave us in our sin and darkness. The Spirit of God is ever active, seeking us, challenging us and looking for us as the parent searches for the wayward adult children.

 

The story that Jesus gave of the farmer who leaves the ninety-nine sheep at home in the pen and goes searching for the lost (the wandering one) is not some nice story from the past. This is our lived experience today. The lost sheep could be ourselves, or our brother who has completely dropped out of anything religious or the co-worker who is struggling with drug addiction. The lost sheep is one of us, here and now.

 

You have a co-worker who has been very hurt by his siblings over the settlement of the will and property of their father. He carries deep resentments and angers. His life is so limited by his relentless efforts to get even with this siblings. But the spirit of God is ever acttive in his life to seek healing and restoration.  The healing power of the risen Jesus is directed towards your co-worker’s woundedness.

 

Wherever there is war, the first victim will always be the truth.  The bully and  the aggressor are waging a propaganda battle to justify their invitation of the territory of a weaker country (which possesses oil resources). How must the heart of God cry out in pain when human beings go to war?

 

The people of your local church call you to become involved with the life and mission of Jesus. They are asking you to live what you profess. They are challenging when they call you to conversion of life. Obviously, they want you to feel dissatisfied with the way you are living your life today. When they call you to conversion, you experience  feelings of resentment.  But, is not the call of God coming through their invitation and their concern for your well-being?

 

Life never comes pre-packaged. God invades our lives. God calls us once again to a new life. We might be slow and resist. But here we are living this tug-of-war between the faithful heart of God and our waywardness.

 

May God always win!

 

 

 

EMBRACING OUR DEPARTED LOVED ONES

When you lose a loved one, you lose a part of your own life. All relationships become a part of the fibre of our life, just as we become a part of the fibre of the lives of those who love us. And when they die, no matter how elderly they were,  a part of our life is torn away. Always think of death like having an arm torn off. Such a precious part of our life is no longer touching, speaking and smiling at us. 

 

But the departed loved one does not disappear into thin air. They live on in eternal life. Now, we are not so presumptuous to think that heaven is automatic; you die and then you just move on into the eternal realm. That would be the sin of presumption. 

 

We pray that God calls the departed loved on into eternal life and eternal glory. We pray that our departed loved one is embraced with the open arms of the risen Jesus. Heaven becomes the final gift, the final action of a loving God towards us human beings. But it always is the action and movement of the Holy Trinity towards us.

 

Now in our theological language we have a wonderful way to describe the final journey of the faithful soul. We call this the “communion of saints.” We are all connected with and through the Holy Spirit to one another: the believing people on this earth and the ones who are called into glory. We are connected; we belong to one another.

 

This is why we are not afraid to ask our departed mother, who was a prayerful person, to intercede for us who are going through this tough time on earth. Perhaps you are having difficulty relating to your twenty some daughter, who you can see it moving into a very harmful lifestyle. You do not hesitate to call out to your departed mother, addressing her by name, and asking her to pray for this very difficult family situation.

 

Or maybe you just lost the thirty-some nephew through an overdose. You pray for him. You ask God, our triune God, to reach out to this very broken and suffering soul. Death, even such a tragic death, does not mean abandonment. Fortify his final journey with your prayers and your persistent love, even if he practiced such a destructive lifestyle.

 

During this month of November, we are encouraged to bring forward our departed loved ones. We are connected in the communion of saints. We hold them up in prayer and \ask that God grant them the fullness of eternal life.

 

While we are doing this prayer and enjoying our memories of the loved one, remind yourself that you are not meant to be on this earth for very long.  You are destined for eternal glory. You are destined for life, and life everlasting. There is so much more that awaits us as we bring to a close our time on this earth. 

As you pray for your departed loved one, be surrounded by the great plan of God. You are meant for a life much greater than the life you are living now. You are meant to shae the very life of God, in glory, and forever and ever!

BE A TRUTH-TELLING PEOPLE

I am writing this reflection on he morning of November 05,2024, the day of the American election. One perceptive person shared about our condition in the world today: “Nobody tells the truth any more!”

 

The thinkers who study what is happening on a global level label this as a “post-truth society.” This means that telling the truth is no longer valued. It has been abandoned by so many of our citizens. Now, we live in a time when gaining power is all that is important.  People do not get upset when their leaders, or the media tell out-right lies. 

 

Truth-telling is to our life as a society is what our blood filled with oxygen is to our body. If the red blood cells are not carrying a fresh supply of oxygen  to our muscles and organs we will suffer a major collapse of the systems in our body. We need oxygen to survive moment to moment.

 

We need truth-telling to survive as a society and as the human race from hour to hour. When people do not tell the truth all social order will collapse.

 

When our political leaders and the social media tell lies, spread conspiratory  theories, we are challenged to speak  the truth. Speak the truth even when it upsets many people on social media.   

 

Maybe you had a Grandmother who spoke clearly. Sometimes she was a little too blunt, but she spoke it as she knew it to be true. There were times when she ruffled your feathers but you always knew that she cared for you. In all her bluntness, she embraced you;  faults and all!

 

There was a very good chance that as you matured into  adulthood you did not allow her bluntness to cause you pain. You became as ‘truth telling’ as your grandmother. She was a truth-teller, and you became a truth teller.  And you function very well as a family!

 

Now, when we recognize that we are living in a post-truth society it is imperative that we take responsibility for telling the truth. The truth as best we know it. This will take a lot of courage. Some of your fellow workers will disagree; some will become angry but that does not lessen the responsibility to tell the truth about what is happening in our government, our social media and in the local community.

 

We must train our high-school students to have a sharp sense, a critical sense, to separate the truth from what is false. No longer can anyone take a true what runs by your social media account. Young people need to go forward with a sharp sense of shaking out the truth from the falsehoods.

 

And this brings us to the ultimate reality: God!  Always, our God is truth-teller. We can rely on God to be trust worthy even when we do not want to follow his directives.

 

We live with a truth-telling God. What strength and courage that gives us to live well today.