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Morning Meditation
October 3, 2025
Scripture:
Galatians 4:7-12
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us.
Mathew 25:34-36
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
Paul’s letter to the Galatians commends us to love one another. Mathew 25 is frequently invoked as a call to compassion, to serve our neighbor’s and to be present to those who are unfortunate, those who struggle, and those who are.
August 2025 marked the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – a cataclysmic event in which the world witnessed a natural disaster transform into a massive human tragedy leaving tens of thousands of individuals and families stranded with little food, water, health care or sanitation. For five days, tv and internet news showed disturbing images of New Orleanians desperately waving from rooftops or wading through polluted oily water in search of refuge only to discover that the Superdome and convention center offered no food, water or even basic sanitation facilities. Hundreds of people baked for days on the Route 10 overpass only to have the bridge across the Mississippi River blocked. As hours turned into days and then weeks, recovery workers observed that the most prevalent factor in survival was whether an individual endured the hurricane alone or with at least one other person.
Less remembered than Katrina, in 1995 a prolonged heat wave settled upon Chicago. For five days, temperatures in Chicago remained above 100 degrees with heat indexes topping 124 degrees. The heat wave claimed 790 lives. The victims were overwhelmingly poor and elderly. In a retrospective study one unexpected finding was the Latino communities had much lower mortality compared to white and African American communities. This difference persisted after factoring poverty’s influence.
The principle reason Latinos, even very poor, elderly Latinos had better survival rates was “Presence.” Comparing two very poor adjacent neighborhoods, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that the Latino community, known as Little Village, had substantially more social interaction, better neighborhood institutions such as churches and social clubs, more “street” commerce such as bodegas and barber shops, and that family and neighborhood networks were strong. In comparison, the adjacent, predominantly African American community, North Lawndale, had large stretches of vacant land in which crimes, were prevalent. Many elderly women lived alone in un-air-conditioned apartments in buildings that were more vacant than occupied. In North Lawndale, small businesses and commerce were almost non-existent. There were few open churches and no social institutions remaining. North Lawndale experienced a mortality rate ten times higher than Little Village.
So what connection is there among Chicago and New Orleans, Paul’s letters to the Galatians, and Jesus’ commendation to us in Mathew? These scriptures call us to be present to one another. New Orleans and Chicago reveal the latent costs, which can become catastrophic, when we ignore people in our midst. Our presence needs to be on-going and genuine, not episodic. Little Village’s experience suggests that more than material wealth, we need to support communities by first and foremost recognizing their inhabitants as our brothers and sisters in Christ, and then by acting with a guided compassion to invest in and socially and spiritually fortify any environment or struggling neighborhood.
Offering food to the hungry, clothing to the naked, & presence to the prisoner must not be one-off exceptional events or even annual Christmas events. At the Church of the Redeemer we are fortunate to have parishioners who regularly volunteer at St. Gabe’s Mission and our RYG youth who regularly serve at St Francis in Kensington. Our witness of Jesus compassion must be a sustained effort lest we leave too many of our brothers and sisters vulnerable.
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