The first and the last

Jesus said, on more than one occasion, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. I first saw that painted on the back of my church youth group's sputtering blue school bus (emphasis on "the last shall be first" -- the bus topped out at 50 mph, when it worked at all).

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first" is an eye-opener in today's economy. As someone wrote recently, if that means CEOs are a 10 and the poorest of the poor are a 1, we should pray to be a 5. Then when the first become last and vice versa, we'll stay right where we are.

There's some truth in that, I suppose. God never intended for anyone to be poor. (You can look it up.) God also never intended anyone to be rich at the expense of the poor.

As a colleague said yesterday, maybe things are shaking out the way they have to in order for us to remember what prosperity really means, to rediscover the difference between our rights and our privileges, and to revive our understanding of what it means to live in the kingdom of God (not just the kingdom of captitalism and consumption).

That said, a lot of people are getting smacked by the short end of an economic stick and are suffering the sting. Like the man who told me over the weekend his savings had lost eight months' worth of nursing home care for his wife in the span of five days.

What do we do about that?