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Morning Reflection
June 4, 2025
Reading: Hebrews 10:32-39
But recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence; it brings a great reward. For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. For yet
‘in a very little while,
the one who is coming will come and will not delay;
but my righteous one will live by faith.
My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.’
But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
When I read the New Testament epistles I try to put myself in the place of the letter’s recipients. In today’s passage from Hebrews, I imagine receiving the author’s calls to compassion, confidence, and endurance.
Hebrews provides the observation that the third century Jewish community had been compassionate toward prisoners and had developed confidence from this experience that their reward, presumably salvation, is yet to come but will indeed come. And then the author of Hebrews recommends that the community persevere in its compassion and confidence as it awaits the Messiah’s arrival.
In reflecting on this proposition, I am concerned that our compassion, confidence and perseverance has been woefully attenuated by the panoply & rapidity of communication methods. This breadth and speed in turn has eroded our trust in our correspondents.
I enrolled at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1990, and the university was very proud of its new ubiquitous communication tool -- yes, email. I became a research assistant at what is now the National Poverty Center under the direction of Dr. Sheldon Danziger. Sheldon remains a preeminent anti-poverty scholar and welfare policy analyst. Thirty-five years ago Sheldon became addicted to email, which in those days meant he had read my daily work and quite literally chopped it up for the next draft.
Among my tasks were to write Congressional testimony and reports for the Michigan House of Representatives bipartisan committee on welfare reform. Sheldon was generous with red ink and he would literally use a scissors to cut, rearrange and paste paragraphs and sentences together in a form more to his liking. Today with google.docs and iclouds “speeding” our work products, Sheldon’s mentoring seems closer to the third century Hebrews than the third millennium tik-tokers, but I’ve come to appreciate his method more and more.
Sheldon was critical but also very generous. If there was a gap in my logic or an unsubstantiated claim, Sheldon would pull over a two-foot high stack of studies and give me three or eight of them to read that night. I never considered “winging it,” for a claim about policy with Sheldon. Truth be told, Sheldon was a liberal, but he knew that good policy changes required conservative support. The Michigan legislature was divided exactly evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and Governor Engler was a Republican. Sheldon would remind me, when asking others to have confidence in you, it’s best to be your own vigilant skeptic.
Sheldon’s clunky method required me to develop and submit credible work. Claims about welfare work requirements and taxpayers’ dollars had to be documented with evidence measured in the real world against standards for their reliability. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the non-partisan Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation had conducted a six-state experimental-design study of welfare-to-work models that estimated potential government savings and participants income that work requirements could effectuate. President Clinton, Democratic and Republic Congresses used the evidence from the MDRC studies to create the 1996 welfare reform law – the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which had the tortured anacronym PROWRA (per-ow-wruh). Albeit lacking in reliable empirical evidence, Big Beautiful Bill does roll off the tongue a bit easier.
The clunky method of writing and reporting has been replaced and I think it’s now to our community’s detriment, not in a liberal or conservative way, but in the sense that we communicate so quickly and with such abandon that we are less likely to have compassion for others in our communities as the Hebrews had for the prisoners in their communities. We are far more likely to dismiss correspondents to our communities than to have faith in them. And those correspondents are more likely to just make stuff up than undertake a careful, expensive three-year study of policy change. And without compassion and confidence, what is left to be faithful for?
One of my goals with the church school kids this past year has been to provide them with 45 minutes that are not on-line save for brief videos. Like our children, we as a faith community, we need to commit to slowing down the information we learn from, the collective deliberations we engage, and return to learning from slowly, in clunky ways, that ironically engender genuine confidence, sustain our compassion, which then strengthen our faith.
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