Category Archives: Childrens’ rights

Massacres in Our Midst, Matthew 2:13-23

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We pay little attention to the Massacre of the Innocents in modern Christianity.

The Revised Common Lectionary lists the verses only once in the three-year cycle— in Year A on the first Sunday after Christmas. That makes it easy to miss unless you’re one of the few attending church that day and it is read and/or preached on.

Of course, pastors like me often avoid preaching on it. After all, today’s world already has enough misery for everyone to get their fair share. And many of us are reluctant to emphasize the evil, pain and suffering in these verses during the Christmas season.

However, I am not preaching much anymore and found that these verses would not leave me alone this year. They have followed me around since Christmas Day.

After all, the massacre of innocents conjures up all too many memories from recent years—Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde, to name a few. At the same time, I wonder how many more might happen and then pray that they don’t.

Also, for some reason, perhaps God sent, I’ve imagined several times Roman troops tramping up to huts, their armor clanging as they walked, and the people inside growing ever more afraid as the threatening sound neared them.

The troops would kick the door open, enter, look for a child of the “right” age and summarily kill him as parents and family looked upon it and shrieked in horror. The troops would then leave the stricken family with the lifeless, bloodied child.

It all makes me want to wince and look away.

But I shouldn’t. Probably, nobody should.

Instead, perhaps we can learn something from the early church, which specified a feast day to remember these unnamed children, the first martyrs for Jesus Christ. The day still appears on many liturgical calendars, although relatively few Christians are aware of such things.

If we do take time to honor their deaths, we might also remember the truth that they had to die for Jesus both to live and to enter the fulness of his ministry. We might also add a prayer of thanks for their lives.

In saying this, I want to be mindful of most Herodian scholars who agree it is likely that this event never took place.

The thing is, it has taken place, time and again, and it still takes place whenever anyone threatens the power of a tyrant or whenever the power of Jesus Christ threatens worldly power.

Finally, at least for us in the United States, we might also supplement our commemoration of the innocents by joining in the fight to save our country from the grip of the gun culture.

We should not continue our complicity in massacres of innocents.

Burning Christians Illuminate Administration’s Immorality

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Donald Trump can end his “Rip Families Apart” policy by calling his Attorney General and ordering him to stop.

There are at least two reasons he will not do this.

First, he likes the results. Dislike, if not hatred, of “other” people, especially those of a different skin color, seem to be embedded deep within his bones.

Second, he finds the children and their parents useful to him in a devilish sort of way. They are living and breathing human bargaining chips he can use both in his ongoing War Against Immigration and his drive to fund the border wall.

Jesus, while taking a child into his arms, once said, “Whoever receives one child like this in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who sent Me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

Unfortunately, instead of receiving children in any way remotely resembling Jesus’ desire, or in any other humane and moral manner, our nation’s leadership has embarked on another course.

They receive children in the name of a man who would do them harm and leave them at his mercy.

The result is that Trump has chosen to show “zero tolerance” to immigrant families appearing at the border even to present legitimate claims of asylum.

This means that our country rejects valid asylum claims that it has heretofore accepted. It also means that families are separated, with parents being jailed for subsequent prosecution and children being imprisoned for indefinite periods of time.

The latter results in our government taking children into custody and stashing them in an abandoned and now overcrowded Walmart facility located deep in South Texas.

While this facility is now licensed by the state of Texas, it is only approved to hold about 1100 people. Unfortunately, it now houses almost 1500 children ranging in age from 10-17. In addition, at least thirteen citations have been presented against the facility for inadequate conditions or services.

Meanwhile, as they move into federal jails and detention centers, these children and their parents join DACA recipients in an obscenely unjust pocket of Trump-imposed hell– pawns in his unholy, immoral fight against immigration.

Stunningly, Trump repeatedly brays out the lie that his “Rip Families Apart” policy actually is caused by a pre-existing law passed by Democrats, and that he can do nothing about it until the law is changed.

Rubbish. It is Trump’s policy designed to hurt people.

As such, these families not only are they bargaining chips but are also people the Orange One hurts in the hope that their misery will deter others from seeking asylum.

Shockingly, Attorney General Sessions looks on all of this and claims that it is part of God’s plan designed to bring law and order to the United States.

He even cites verses from Romans 13 to support his contention. In those verses, the Apostle Paul exhorts early Christians to submit peacefully to taxes imposed by the Roman Emperor Nero.

It is odd that Sessions uses this verses. However, he is likely unaware that some of the same Christians whom Paul counseled to honor the Roman government were destined to later become human torches illuminating the Roman night. They had been publicly dipped into tar and set ablaze pursuant to governmental policies set by Nero to discourage the practice of Christianity.

So much for that government’s “law and order” and lack of morality.

We are left to fight against those of our own.

Children’s Health Plan and the Axe that Looms

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The White House/Administration/Trump continue to be careen on their helter-skelter, immoral course.

Their latest outrage is an attempt to cut the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was renewed for a six-year period earlier this year.

Known more widely as CHIP, this program provides health coverage to nearly 9 million children in low-income families in all 50 states.

It is widely-recognized as successful. It turns out that, just as predicted, children’s health improves with access to medical care.

In addition to its medical and policy successes, CHIP also saves the country money by reducing expenditures on other health care programs, particularly Medicaid. CHIP does this because of the better medical outcomes that result from treating children earlier and in a doctor’s office as opposed to later and in an emergency room.

Nonetheless, it is under threat of the knife.

Indeed, it is on the chopping block to the tune of a $7 billion reduction because of the ballooning budget deficit that the administration is salivating to reduce.

It matters not to the White House that the deficit results primarily from its ill-advised 2017 corporate tax cuts. Those will remain as is, although there are rumors of some wanting additional reductions.

One might wonder why children should go without medical care while the country injects more cash into already-profitable companies, but that is just the way the United States rolls– or, careens– today.

One does hope that our white evangelical brothers and sisters (Where are you Franklin? Jerry, Jr? Rev. Jeffrees? Mr. Perkins?) will use their new-found political muscle to prevent this reduction.

Unfortunately, their political agenda may be too crowded with issues other than the just treatment of children.

 

Texas Foster Care System Held Unconstitutional

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A Texas federal court judge ruled that the state has violated the constitutional rights of foster children by exposing them to a flawed system where children “often age out of care more damaged than when they entered.” Like many other states, Texas phased out the old orphanage system around World War II, opting instead to follow the widely-held opinion that placement of children in group or foster care homes would improve their treatment and living conditions. Perhaps the present system is an improvement, but the Texas court judge wrote that, “Years of abuse, neglect and shuttling between inappropriate placements across the state has created a population that cannot contribute to society, and proves a continued strain on the government through welfare, incarceration or otherwise.” That is a fairly damning accusation.

Judging from some of the testimony, some children were treated horribly. For example, one 16-year-old girl entered foster care at age 6 and changed placements 28 times within four years. Similarly, a 14-year-old girl entered foster care at age 5 and has had 12 different caseworkers and 24 different placements in her 9 years in the system. For now, the court has appointed a court master to study the system and report back in 6 months with recommendations consistent with the court order.

What I have not read in the news accounts are the bitter comments I’ve heard over the years from people concerned with the system. Among them are that there is inadequate screening of foster parents and, as a consequence, a number of kids have been placed with neglectful or abusive foster parents and some have even been placed with sexual predators. In addition, many foster children are moved out of their home county—and away from any friends or support system—to homes hundreds of miles away. There also are continuing complaints about homes that are dirty or ill-kept.

The Bible, of course, is filled with verses concerning compassionate and caring treatment of orphans and children. For example, James 1:27 says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” More ominously, Exodus 22:21-24 says, “You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” Yikes! And then there is the Jesus “millstone” verse in Matthew 18:6, “If anyone causes one of these little ones . . . it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

It is easy to blame this on the Texas legislature as they certainly are  certainly are a motley and hard-hearted crew more concerned with taxes than with helping the poor or marginalized. But, just as God put all of Israel under judgment in their lack of concern for the widow and orphan, so we are under that same demand and judgement. After all, the legislators are elected by “we the people,” so any shortcoming lies in all of our hard hearts.