Daily Lesson for June 17, 2020

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verses 11 through 12:

11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. 12 For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

I drove down the street the other day and saw a For Rent sign in the window of a building that had just been renovated and a restaurant just opened inside of back in January. The business had just opened and basically their timing could not have been worse.

Yet we moralize.  We wag fingers.  "They should have been better prepared." "They should have had more cash."

The owners will probably make it.  But their workers have moved back in with mom and dad; and they are the ones who've taken to the streets in the protest -- which is not only about police abuse but a whole society of injustice where most folks just can't get a foothold.

And then a pandemic strikes or a housing bubble bursts and the folks with less than a month's worth of savings are left holding the bag.

And people with real promise and work ethic are left further behind.

It's a bit of a downer, I know.  So too is the book of Ecclesiastes. Reality often is.

And we wonder what the answer could be?  A start would be genuine universal health care for all.  Beyond that, in the aftermath of the riots in his own time, Dr. King argued for universal basic income to protect the poor, young, and otherwise vulnerable in the hard times -- which is all the time for some.

Calamity could befall us all.  The poor are the most vulnerable.  But as we've seen the swift and strong aren't immune either.  So we say, "We're all in this together." But in order for that to be really true we also have to be altogether in this.       

And by "this" I mean the lifeboat we call community.

NOTE: We are reading the whole Bible through this year.  Tomorrow's Lesson comes from 1 Kings 10-11 and 2 Chronicles 9.