Breaking News; my comments appear after the story:
Orofino Health and Welfare Office Targeted For Closure
Associated Press, April 6, 2010
BOISE — About a third of the state’s field offices for the Department of
Health and Welfare, including one in Orofino, are being closed and 126
workers laid off within the next two months as the department struggles to
cope with a shrinking budget.
Department officials announced Tuesday that offices in American Falls,
Bellevue, Bonners Ferry, Emmett, Jerome, McCall, Orofino, Rupert and Soda
Springs would close within the next two months, and some services in the St.
Maries office would be shifted to Coeur d’Alene.
“The closures will cause hardship and inconvenience for many people, but
resources are not available to continue the current level of office
support,” the department wrote in a press release . . . “
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Jesus said, “The poor you shall always have with you.”
There’s nothing whatsoever in his words and public ministry, however, that suggests it was no big deal — something his disciples could toss aside, like the promise some day of a count of the hairs on one’s head, or sentimentally file away with falling sparrows, crumb-scrounging dogs, and lilies of the field. And nowhere does Jesus or the Bible that is his Word offer consolation to those Christ-followers who find themselves annoyed with the poor for being so damned . . . publicly poor. Poor, and needing the help of his people, and often receiving it through the public treasury modeled by Joseph in the Old Testament and rendered unto Caeser in the New.
And so let’s acknowledge, then, that the poor today are, in fact, actually among us, and in Idaho, they’ve just had more doors — doors that lead to medical care and education — creak slowly yet stubbornly closed in their faces. What a sad, disturbing culture we have if we treat news like this with nonchalance or, worse, rationalization of the type that’s often woodenly carved out of Jesus’ observation that poor people were going to be around for a good long while.
That those who benefit from these Department of Health and Welfare offices are low-income families, usually with children and virtually all with hard-working parents, is a given, and their lack of access to services, predictable. The poor don’t have lobbyists, PACs, or the attention of those in power. We shouldn’t be too surprised, though, when Caeser ignores “the least of these” who belong to, and represent, Christ Jesus. Governance in a fallen world pretty much guarantees it.
But the outcast and the needy don’t often have the advocacy of the Church, either. Those in society whose religious faith charges them to care for these people too often explain aware both the need and their obligation to remedy it. When Christians forget the poor, it’s a sin and a tragedy. Worse, though, is canonizing the active neglect of poor women, children, and men via appeals to the wonders and virtue of free-market faux-Libertarianism, an exegetical dance that requires quick-stepping around Biblical imperatives and spinning the needy through an exhausting polka of self-serving, dishonest employing of the Word in service of disobeying the Logos.
Too many Christians today, and certainly in those pastoral blogs originating from Moscow, are enamored of calling government programs for the poor “charity at gunpoint,” as if the obscenity of poverty is that taxpayers are called to chip in to provide a societal safety net to try to mitigate it and not the ugliness of poverty itself, a grinding lack of food, shelter, healthcare, comfort, and security these self-identified Christians would certainly offer Jesus if he appeared to them in person.
Sadly for them and tragically for the suffering and oppressed, Jesus himself DOES appear to them in person. He just sometimes shows up as a single mom in Orofino with sick kids, and our attempts to impress him with political, economic, and Scriptural justification of our contempt for those kids will be and has been laid bare. We can’t expect to dazzle him with our insouciance toward poor people without a promise of devastation when he demonstrates his insouciance toward us. “The poor you will always have with you,” and, just as certainly, so will we have those who wonder what possible concern that is of theirs.