Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 23, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Bias from the bottom
The Lord hears the cry of the poor.
In 1981, a couple of years into our marriage, we lived in an unfortunate farmhouse on a lonely hill, on dad’s farm just outside Lincoln, Illinois.  We had a couple of cars, a land yacht given to us by my Aunt Lena, and a broken down yellow Toyota that I bought for $100 from a friend at Jacques Seed Company, where I worked for several years.
Chris, our oldest, was just a year old, and on Christmas Eve we headed from Lincoln to Springfield, about 30 miles south. On the way home a blizzard quickly filled the sky with snow and the roads with drifts.
We drove our hundred dollar yellow dog because it was got better gas mileage. But the front passenger side floor had a big hole in it, so the wind blew snow and ice cold air up into Margaret’s lap, where Chris sat wrapped in a blanket. We had a car seat but didn’t use it much, since we really didn’t know how it worked. Earlier in the fall, as Margaret turned out of our long country drive onto the county road, Chris tumbled out of the seat. He didn’t make a sound, and he was fine, and gradually we learned how to use those pesky newfangled seats for babies.
Our driveway hadn’t been plowed when we got home. Halfway up the drive we bundled Chris up and walked the rest of the way. The snow had stopped but the wind had not. Our house wasn’t well insulated. At Thanksgiving we spent a very cold and windy weekend in Evansville with Margaret’s family had to refill our propane tank when we got home. The bill was something like $400, mostly for just that weekend when we weren’t even home.
So our furnace was rarely on. We replaced it with four kerosene heaters, and we turned those on right away, as our breath fogged up in the living room. We jumped into our kingsize waterbed. It was warm. We breathed on each other. We laughed and warmed up. Eventually we tumbled back out of the bed and spent Christmas Eve eating treats we found under the tree, gifts from our family.
In the morning the sun burst out of the sky, our lane eventually got plowed, and we went to Mom and Dad’s house for the Christmas Eve dinner postponed from the night before. And in this time of very little money, we never really felt poor.
The Lord is close to the broken-hearted, and those who are crushed in spirit. He redeems the lives of his servants.
Margaret and I both have stories of times when we barely scraped by. We had to be very careful with our meager incomes. But I think that’s a lot different from being “broken-hearted and crushed in spirit.”
The tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven. He beat his breast and prayed, “Oh God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
Richard Rohr talks about the need for us to find a “bias from the bottom,” choosing to turn away from wealth, power and prestige, as Jesus did. That choice has been unavailable to the vast majority of people throughout history. But history doesn’t say much about that.
The vast majority of people throughout history have been poor, disabled, or oppressed in some way (i.e., “on the bottom”). But the people who wrote the books and controlled the social institutions  have almost always been the comfortable people on the top. Much of history has been recorded from the side of the winners, except for the unique revelation of the Bible, which is an alternative history from the bottom: from the side of the enslaved, the dominated, the oppressed, and the poor, culminating in the scapegoat figure of Jesus himself.
Since I am given the opportunity to make that choice, I do well to accept it, even if it goes against everything my culture tells me about comfort and class.
When Scripture is read through the eyes of vulnerability—what we call the “preferential option for the poor” or the bias from the bottom—it will always be liberating and transformative. Scripture will not be used to oppress or impress. The question is no longer “How can I maintain the status quo?” (which just happens to benefit me), but “How can we all grow and change together?” Now we have no top to protect, and the so-called “bottom” becomes the place of education, real change, and transformation.
(Sirach 35, Psalm 34, 2 Timothy 4, 2 Corinthians 5, Luke 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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