Daily Lesson for June 13, 2018

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verses 13 through 15:

13 I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed important to me. 14There was a little city with few people in it. A great king came against it and besieged it, building great siege-works against it. 15Now there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man.

I have a friend who retired from the ministry last year after decades of service. He was one of those pastors very involved in the city over his many years. In the eighties he helped organize the city’s first AIDS resource center. In the nineties his church became a refuge for families of gay persons. Also in the nineties, he and a few other clergy persons and religious leaders created an interfaith network in the community. After 9-11 the network organized to bear witness against Islamophobia. In later years, right up to and through retirement, he worked on a new scourge facing the city’s most vulnerable: payday lending. Through it all he gave counsel to mayors and city counsel persons, some of whom were his parishioners but many of whom just knew him to be a man of wisdom and justice.  

My friend’s church was never very big in number.  It was definitely small by the standards of Texas, where everything is big and church is even bigger. But that little church has had an outsized influence on the whole community and will continue to do so for years. 

At his retirement I sent him today’s Lesson, about a man who saved the city but later on no one remembered it. When people look back on the time in the city, they’ll see portraits of mayors sitting on well-upholstered furniture. What it won’t see is my friend holding hands with a man dying of AIDS, or praying with an Imam outside a vandalized mosque, or strategizing with a small group of friends how to convince a councilman that good governance ought to protect the people against usury.

My friend saved the city. Maybe many times over — all in very small ways. Nobody will remember it a generation from now.

But for the time being he fought the good fight and kept the faith. 

That’s enough. That’s everything.