What are you doing for others?

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is,
 'What are you doing for others?” –M.L. King, Jr.

I was well into my thirty’s when I came to a better understanding of King’s famous quote. Most people I knew growing up—some of my family, friends, and acquaintances—had a misconception of what King was urging people to do. In my community there wasn’t a lot of support for King’s admonition to help others in making the world a better place. No one wanted to be a nurse aboard the Mercy Ship, to teach an illiterate person to read, or mow the lawn of the woman who lived down the street whose husband died last summer. After all, I had an Aunt and Uncle that lived on an eighty-acre farm who barely survived the Farm Bureau policies on land-use and crop rotation.  My Uncle was forced to take a second job at the 3M factory in order to make it from one growing season to the next. I knew people who needed the assistance of others and they were not getting anything—from government or otherwise. It was people like these who needed help.

King’s message wasn’t about handouts, charity, or income re-distribution. King the theologian properly read the gospel as a message for service. We are made to be in relationship and we discover our wholeness only as we join ourselves to the fortunes of those around us—preparing a meal for a family who has lost a loved you, providing a ride to church to someone who can no longer drive themselves, growing vegetables for the community food bank.

We don’t have to go to Africa to find an opportunity to serve others, but we could.  We cannot turn our backs on those less fortunate that us, in effect saying to them, “Why don’t you get a job and feed yourself.” And we shouldn’t default to government policies and agencies to provide subsidized housing, food stamps, or low-cost child care.

I know that lots of people spend their lives scamming the system, but that doesn’t mean we can turn our backs on everyone because some are cheating. In doing so we are cheating ourselves out of the blessings of service.  The greediness of society, evidenced in the widening gap between rich and poor, is evidence of whom we really serve. This gospel lesson is another call to mature faith, to grow up into the fullness of Christ.

Like Bob Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody.”

Peace,
Father Mark+