Reflections On Child Advocacy

The Preferential Option for the Poor

Jesus loves poor people. When we talk about this special love, we talk about “the preferential option for the poor.” In plain terms, God’s special affection for the poor. And we see this over and over again in the Scriptures. Do not send those children away, bring them to me. The woman at the well, on and on and on it goes.

Think about it now with me. Do you remember any story about Jesus healing the powerful regent? I don’t recollect that one. Do you remember Jesus saving the rich man so that he could be decked out in the finest jewels and robes? I don’t remember that one. I remember Jesus in all the dirty places, all the Samarias. I remember him at a simple wedding changing water to wine, I remember him with a woman who hemorrhaged but had faith and said if I can only touch just the hem of his garment. Just let me draw close enough to touch, and I will be healed. The preferential option for the poor.

To be sure, Hebrew Scripture is replete with references for the poor and the ways we are to live in relation to the poor. This is part of the concern for justice and for mercy that we noted above. Here we want to underscore what appears, by Biblical witness, to be Jesus’ deep personal empathy and love of those who are poor, on society’s margins. This emphasis on Jesus’ part is our focus here. If we live in imitation of Christ, we will exercise a preferential option for the poor.

This whole question of relationship between the powerful and the powerless was revealed to me in an unexpected way. Now, as a mother, what passes for a leisure time activity is doing the Saturday chores. I’m a Calvinist, so I never leave the house without two or three days’ worth of reading material, just in case there’s a line wherever I’m going. Heaven forbid I should just sit and do nothing.

It was my turn to take the car to the Jiffy Lube. Do you know Jiffy Lube, where you go and they clunk around under the car? I’m not entirely sure what they do but if you don’t do it, your car stops or something. I’m not being too technical for you, am I? I don’t know, maybe they change liquids. I don’t know what they do, but you have to do it sometimes.

Anyway, I took the car and I went in to wait while they did whatever it is they do. To my great horror, I found that I had arrived without any reading material. Now, the Jiffy Lube is something of a male precinct, I’ve got to say. There was something that I will euphemistically call a coffee table; that is to say, a flat surface, and on it were only two pieces of reading material.

One was a magazine called Field & Stream. It’s a most peculiar magazine. They sell things in there like worms. Worms. I said worms. By the gross. Now, I’m not really sure how many a gross is, but it’s a very lot. I’m having a reasonably happy life. I have never even bought one worm. What do the people do who buy those grosses of worms? It costs you $20 to have a gross of worms and $50 not to have one. They also sell boots that come up to your armpits. I mean, honey, if it’s that deep in there, I’d say don’t go in. That would be my personal advice.

Well, I pretty soon thought I had about all the enlightenment I could stand from that little publication, so I picked up the other one.

It was the manual that you study when you’re getting your boat driver license, like a driver’s license for boats. You have to take a test and all that stuff.

Now, I’m a Calvinist, as I already confessed. Calvinists start at the back of the book, and we do that in case we run out of time. We always know how it came out. We don’t know what it was about, but we know how it
came out.

So, I start at the back, and it’s talking about jigs and booms and ta rah rah boomdiyeas, for all I know. I didn’t understand much of it.

And then I got to a chapter on the rules for what happens when boats encounter each other on the open sea, in open water, actually, it said. I thought, well, that’s kind of interesting. You know, for cars we have traffic lights and traffic lanes and even that doesn’t work out all that well. I mean, you may come from a place where you can turn right on a red light, but I work in Manhattan where you can’t turn right on a green light. I thought, I wonder how they do that out there on the water where there are no lights or signs or anything. So, I started to read and it said something like this.

There are two kinds of craft. One of them has access to great power. It can accelerate and push its way through the strongest of waves. It can change direction on command. It can even stop on demand. It has great power of its own.

The other class of craft is dependent on the forces of nature, wind, tide, and human effort in paddling, or rowing, or maintenance of the sails.

And these two classes of craft are known as privileged and burdened. This book said — this is getting pretty interesting, huh? I mean, for a boat story — that these two kinds of craft have two different terms or classes. One class is privileged and the other class is burdened. But get this, now. The powerful boats, do you think they are considered privileged vessels or burdened? They, my friends, are the burdened vessels. The powerful boats that can make their way forward no matter what, under their own power, they are burdened vessels, burdened with responsibility to give way to the boats without power. And the powerless vessels, the ones that are dependent on the vagaries of tide and wind and weather, they are classified as privileged vessels. To them is accorded the right of way, for if the powerful vessels are not burdened with responsibility for giving way, these powerless vessels may not make safe harbor. Imagine that: the powerful boats are burdened, and the powerless are privileged. And when these two kinds of craft meet each other on the open sea, the privileged and the burdened, the powerful are burdened and must give way if the powerless, the privileged, are ever to make safe harbor.

The powerful must give way if the powerless are ever to make safe harbor.

I thought to myself, who wrote this thing, Billy Graham? Cornel West? Mother Theresa? I turned to the front and it said “New Jersey Department of Transportation.” Now, you know what a notable theological institution that is!

Friends, what’s going on? What’s going on in our land when the Department of Transportation knows that the powerful must give way if the powerless are to make safe harbor — that the powerful are considered burdened and the powerless are privileged — yet the government of the United States and the Church of Jesus Christ are having trouble with the concept.

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