Pastors' Blog

Poor Flint, Michigan. But then, maybe that’s their problem. They are poor. An African American majority. No money. No lobbyists. No political power. So nobody pays attention—until recently, that is.

Since April, 2014, when their city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River (to save money), residents of this city of  100,000 “began complaining of burning skin, hand tremors, hair loss, even seizures. Children were being diagnosed with anemia. Parents were finding strange red splotches on their hands and faces” (TIME 2-1-16 p 34). Their drinking water was changing colors—from blue to green to beige, brown and yellow. And it smelled like gasoline, some said. Others described it as the inside of a fish market. “Melissa Mays, a 37-year-old mother of four, says her hair started to fall out in clumps, clogging the shower drain. She broke out in rashes and developed a respiratory infection, coughing up phlegm that tasted like cleaning products” (ibid.).

All the while city officials declared the water safe to drink. The mayor even gulped down a drink of it in front of TV cameras. Why worry? But the continuing pleas of Flint’s residents eventually found political traction in the presidential race. Candidates challenged—would officials have ignored eighteen months of cries for help, if the pleas had come from the affluent suburbs of Detroit or Ann Arbor? You don’t need a degree in political science to know the answer.

Now the decrepit lead pipes of old Flint are injecting lead poison into the water supply—and children of the inner city face sobering developmental risks. Even though the city switched back to Lake Huron water last October, the lead pipes are so corroded the water is unfit for drink.

Enter now a band of Andrews University students—from the seminary, from the Physical Therapy department—who have launched a major relief effort underway on campus to collect donations of bottled water to deliver to Flint’s imperiled citizens. Tina Carriger, a seminary student with her husband, wrote me: “On Friday, January 22nd my husband and I made a trip to Flint in our SUV, completely loaded with water donated by Andrews University students and members of the Niles Philadelphia SDA Church in Niles, Michigan. We traveled to Flint with 40 cases of water and within a matter of 20 minutes that water was gone!”

They plan to go back to Flint this Friday (January 29) and are appealing for people at Pioneer, Andrews and around this community to assist them in their humanitarian effort. The city is limiting residents to one case of water per person per day. They need more water! So I’m inviting you to join us in this emergency water donation. Drop off your case(s) of water inside the entrance of the seminary building (parking lot side). The Carrigers and their team will deliver the water on Friday.

Lest we minimize the gift of a cup of water to a thirsty soul, Jesus declares the endtime judgment will hinge on what we do or do not do for the forgotten, the marginalized, the poor: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did it to Me”—“for I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink” (Matthew 25:40, 35).

But lest we conclude His mission includes only tap water, Jesus also declares: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).

Flint is dying for water, and so is the world. There is no more compelling reason for you and me to take the Water of Life to the thirsty all around us. Our surplus must be shared.

Nothing like a Powerball jackpot frenzy to warm a frigid winter’s night! Americans (and Canadians) are still queuing up by the tens of  thousands for a chance to win a record $1.5 billion-plus at tonight’s 10:59 Powerball drawing. Chances of winning the grand prize? One in 229,000,000. And yet by Monday this week Michiganders were spending $156,000 per hour on lottery tickets!

In case you were wondering how to spend $1.5 billion, USA TODAY offers five suggestions. (1) Buy a fleet of Gulfstream G650 private jets (@ $65 million apiece you can take home 23 of them). (2) Match the gross domestic product of the island nations of St. Vincent and Grenadines combined (spend the remaining $200 million on that large stone mansion for sale in the Windy City). (3) Buy the new Tesla Model S ecofriendly electric car for $71,100 (then do the same for 21,096 of your closest friends). (4) Rent the royal two-bedroom suite at the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai for $34,555 a night (with $1.5 billion you’ll be able to stay for 42,320 nights or 116 years—if you have the time!). (5) Purchase a flotilla of five “super yachts” (100-meter-long cabin cruisers with an onboard staff of 50 for roughly $275 million apiece). (usat.ly/1Pr96MF)

But let’s get serious. Uncle Sam will take 25% (30% if you’re Canadian) off the top, with Michigan state receiving an additional 4.25%. Then consider this laundry list of warnings from financial investors and previous lottery winners: (1) your friends will take advantage—“Once word gets out that you have the winning ticket, you can expect everyone to try to cozy up to you, from the college roommate you haven't heard from in 20 years and the kid who tortured you on the kindergarten playground, to fellow carpool parents and ‘friends’ you barely recognize”; (2) your relationship could fail—the unimagined stresses of managing windfall money, as records show, place immense pressures on heretofore happily married couples; (3) you’ll have an increased risk of bankruptcy—"Winners are much more likely to make significant impulse purchases far beyond their previous means. So the purchase amounts will be much higher, making the interest accrued on those credit cards much higher. And because they don't stop to think the money could run out, winners don't generally think they need to create or live by a monthly budget,” says Scott Dillon, a senior bankruptcy attorney at Tully Rinckey in Albany, New York; (4) you’ll have to fight off a host of long-lost family members—even distant family members with credit card, medical or foreclosure bills will learn of your largesse; and (5) you’ll be a target for a litany of lawsuits and scams—“Hoping to carve out a chunk of your fortune, financial advisor Jeff Motske says lottery winners are often targets for bogus lawsuits because everyone starts to come after them” (for more details see bit.ly/1mVGlRo).

Still want that easy money? Consider some sage counsel embedded in this personal testimony: “For I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want” (Philippians 4:11-12).  Paul was onto something, wasn’t he? Or rather he was onto Someone. “For I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (v 13). When my life focus shifts from gaining to giving, from easy money to hard work, there is an inner quiet that all the money in the world can’t buy. “Contentment” is what Paul called it. “Peace” is what Christ calls it: “My peace I give to you—not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27).

70% of lottery winners lose or spend all their winnings in five years or less. Apparently you can go broke trying to buy happiness. So here’s the winning ticket for your New Year: “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6).

“Return that gift before you get it.” Leave it to Amazon.com to “solve” our gift-receiving woes! The mega online mail-order giant reportedly has come up with a solution to those gifts from “Aunt Mildred” you’ve never known what to do with—from “The Stallion Stable Music Box” that must have been a beauty on the computer screen but turned out to be a White Elephant under the Christmas tree, to “The Thread and Bobbin Sewing Kit” that, truth be known, will never see the light of day. “These gifts sent via some warehouse many miles away are not only unwanted, but also a multimillion-dollar headache: They have to be repacked, labeled, dropped off and shipped back to Amazon’s Island of Misfit Toys.” After which a new present will have to be “packed, labeled, and shipped again. Efficient, the process is not” (South Bend Tribune 12-28-2010).

So Amazon has “quietly patented” a way whereby you can return your gifts before you even get them. This new option,  apparently planned in time for next Christmas, will allow you to designate individuals who consistently send you what you don’t want or need—so that if they order another gift for you through Amazon it will be “vetted before anything ships.” I.e., you’ll have the option to “convert” the gift to one of your liking. The patent says: “The user may specify such a rule because the user believes that this potential sender has different tastes than the user” (Ibid).

You can imagine the uproar from the etiquette crowd! Anna Post, the great-great-granddaughter of the proper-manners queen, Emily Post, warns of a major backlash, and hopes Amazon abandons the notion: “This idea totally misses the spirit of gift giving. The point of gift giving is to allow someone else to go through that action of buying something for us. Otherwise, giving a gift just becomes another one of the world’s transactions” (Ibid). Well put, Miss Post.

“Just another one of the world’s transactions.” Which, of course, can’t be said for the Gift Heaven gave Earth long, long ago, can it? That Gift first borne on a barnyard trough . . . and eventually spiked to a Roman cross. Return the Gift to the Giver? And yet the small print of this intergalactic struggle still called “the great controversy” includes an opt-out proviso— a provision acted upon, sadly enough, time and again: “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11). I.e., they turned down the Gift.

On this New Year Sabbath we gather at the foot of the cross, at the feet of the Gift. Because it surely dawns upon our collective consciousness that in the words of F. F. Bruce, “the total adequacy of Christ” is our truest vision in the year before us, and our only hope in the life that is left.“ But God forbid [this New Year] that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).  

Since mine eyes have gazed on Jesus
I’ve lost sight of all beside
So enchained my spirit’s vision
Gazing on the Crucified.
—Oswald Chambers  

The two young women, sisters, were out for a late afternoon stroll along the popular walking path in Compton, south LA. “Do you hear that cat?” one of them stopped. Both listened. Sure enough—from somewhere not so far away came a faint whimper. “Gotta be a cat.” They strained to listen. “Sounds more like a baby to me.” Impossible. Nothing there but the asphalt bike path and a chain linked fence. But they heard it again. “It’s gotta be.” They dialed 911.

Two deputies from the LA Sherrif’s Department arrive. “Can you hear it?” The deputies nod. Nothing but asphalt and a chain linked fence, until one of them notices a crack in  the paved pathway. Stooping over he pulls on the cracked asphalt—easily dislodging a piece of it, disclosing a crevice filled with debris. Scooping aside the debris, he spots the edge of a hospital blanket. And wrapped in the blanket a still breathing but cold to the touch newborn. Paramedics arrive, treat the tiny little girl at the scene, race her to the hospital—where she’s doing fine! Although truth is, covered with debris and asphalt the baby would’ve perished had someone not scooped the rubbish aside.

What a grand narrative for Christmas!

Or rather, what a provocative metaphor for this season of Christ’s birth—a season that begins with the advent of Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday, followed by Discounted Tuesday, followed by Wholesale Wednesday, followed by Slashed-prices Thursday? Et al. What is the Christmas season but twenty-four days of interminable shopping—credit-carding, lay-awaying, savings-spending, buying-buying-buying—until Christmas? But where’s the Baby?

Shoppers in this nation spent an estimated $12.1 billion on Christmas shopping this Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Add to that the more than $3 billion spent online on Cyber Monday, and Americans have already forked over $15 billion-plus shopping in this season that celebrates the birth of Jesus. But where’s the Baby?

Could it be the Baby now grown up wonders the same? Covered over with the asphalt of consumerism and the debris of materialism and got-to-have-it-ism, are we the nation that boasts “In God We Trust” on our currency?

And are we the Americans who have declared to the planet we can’t afford to allow even a 1000 Syrian refugees onto our shores or into our states for fear they might threaten our way of living and spending? Emma Lazarus’ words inscribed inside the Statue of Liberty surely don’t mean us—not this Christmas—do they?

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of
your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

What difference can you personally make this Christmas? #1—You can cast your vote against our rampant consumerism by ramping back your investments at Walmart, Target, Macy’s and their like. #2—You can choose to spend a comparable amount of money assisting a needy family in this community (mark your donation to Neighbor to Neighbor on a tithe envelope before Christmas). #3—You can decide to assist a refugee family even before they are granted asylum somewhere on earth (maybe not here) by giving a Christmas gift through ADRA.org (Adventist Development Relief Agency). #4—You can save the money you would spend on Christmas and set it aside for your “My Student Missionary Fund” so you can put legs on your compassion and go somewhere on earth to help this suffering world. You can do something!

Where’s the Baby? “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me’” (Matthew 25:40). That’s where He is.