Yesterday, the kids in our Presbyterian (PCUSA) church took center stage for our annual observance of the Children’s Defense Fund’s “Children’s Sabbath,” singing for us, reading the liturgy, helping collect our tithes, and participating in our kickoff of this year’s Trick-Or-Treat For UNICEF.
Rev. Wendy used each facet of the service to politely but directly hammer away at people -- including a chunk of our parishioners -- who claim to care about the poor, especially poor children, but cannot or will not see that the politicians, tax policies, and legislation they support are greedy and indifferent, inflicting injury and death on the least fortunate in our country and around the world -- and especially children. I wanted to jump up and cheer, but... we’re Presbyterians... we do (and sing) more than we talk, no noisy demonstration, no testifying, no proselytizing.
Instead, we mob her at the sanctuary door. Yeah! What she said! :D
Our young, red-headed warrior-mother continues our Southern small-town church’s 50-year tradition of leftist, activist ministers; and to a child, woman, and man, we love her madly, even those who disagree (‘tho they can’t cogently argue why) with her bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, dirt-worshipping, let-us-break-bread-and-SING ministry. She is a wellspring of creativity when it comes to illustrating for our young ones what it means to do the real work of loving your neighbor, and how people little and big can do that work, so the “Children’s Sabbath” was right up her alley.
When she gave a shout out to Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund, it struck me -- in answer to people who ask why progressive Christianity does not put itself forward to combat today’s savage, selfish, plundering, ruinous soicopolitics -- CDF is prime example of faith in action, a very visible, potent, and sustained force for good, brought into being by a woman motivated through her concern for children and her faith in God.
Edelman -- the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar -- founded the CDF in 1973 as an offshoot of Dr. King’s and the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign, and it’s still going strong (as is she, doing the camel/needle-eye thing via Robin Hood).
Following is an excerpt from MWE's statement in this year’s Children’s Sabbath Manual.
There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage. A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future. Like Thomas Jefferson, I tremble for my country when I think that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Yet the extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest American, especially on top of the cuts approved in the Ryan budget, passed by the full House defies the prophets, apostles and tenets of all great faiths as well as common decency and economic common sense .... These cuts would push 900,000 children into poverty and at least 6.4 million children into deeper poverty an unconscionable act when 16.4 million children are living in poverty 7.5 million in extreme poverty.
.... Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development. If you believe as I do that we have more just and sensible choices like helping babies during their early childhood development years rather than helping billionaires who need not one additional material thing, then speak up and fight back.
Yeah! What she said!
Peace and all good things.