Go to or be? What is the balance?

The man, a carpenter or stone mason's son, walked to the scroll and began to read.

He had spent some time in Capernaum doing miracles and such, but he was back to the hometown. On the Sabbath, he went as he always did to the synagogue. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

What Jesus had just done was give a mission statement. Surely it seems we should pay particular attention to it.

Recently I took a call in the office. The caller on the recording had a voice much like concrete mixing in a dump truck. Maybe too many unfiltered cigs over a long period of time, I don’t know. She gave her number, and little info. I knew from experience that she wanted, heck needed, something.

I called back and she answered on the third ring (do we still have phones that ring?). Her daughter and her grandson had no place to go, she said. She wanted to know if I could do anything. The answer, unfortunately, most of the time is no. My churches, for better or worse, have such problems paying for anything that ... wait, wait, wait right there.

It's time we get rid of that kind of thinking, I figure. Way too often my first thought is we have no "extra" money hanging around because we're too busy fixing this, that and the other. I question though whether that is what we're called to be, what we're called to do. That’s what the wonderful work of the Welcome House is about. I pointed her that direction. I pray they found a place of rest.

But the thought continued to press: what is the balancing point? Bills to be paid. Billys to be paid. I wonder where the right measure is? Should we be meeting in homes and putting all our income in one pot, like the first church, or is there a way to do both things?

Perhaps there is someone we can all follow on this. Has anyone but me been watching the new pope? St. Francis is blazing new patterns of helping, of loving like a man whose soul is the fire not a flame.

He washed the feet of a Muslim woman, breaking taboos and tradition like wine goblets. On Easter, as the parade around the "Pope-mobile" grew like weeds on the side of the road, Francis reached out for a disabled child and kissed him.

Francis said this of how he sees this world: "Today, amid so much darkness we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others," he said. "To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope. It is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds."

I’m not a Catholic. But I am a follower of the one who said we were to give good news to the poor. I wonder when was the last time we did that outside the buildings we have constructed. Each of us. All of us.

United Methodists a while back decided we would re-think church, that it was okay for church to be a verb and not a noun. We were supposed to be the church, not go to it.

We’re still working through that, some doing better than others, but the poor around the world continue to grow. Today in Africa, a child will die because he or she couldn’t find something to eat. A tear runs down the face of the Christ, I believe.

Again, it has always been a balancing act for Christianity to deal with, the building and repair of massive and beautiful and reverent buildings versus (sometimes) the building and repair of the persons outside the buildings.

There will come a time when we are judged on how well we did that, I believe.