Army of Priests

People are dying. Thousands of people – everyday – the forgotten machinery in our 21st century economy. We all have blood on our hands. We have participated in a system that values people solely by their purchasing power and bought goods based on their price or quality regardless of their morality. We have elected governments that “protect” our economy through tariffs and trade barriers whilst demanding the removal of the exact same protections from poor countries. We have enforced structural adjustment programs on our neighbours and imported goods created in working conditions that would be illegal in our own country.

And what have we gotten out of it? No man is an island. We are so consumed by our thirst for material goods that we have devoted our lives to it. We don’t care who we hurt whether its a peasant in a 3rd world country or our own family and friends who just want to spend more time with us. We’re certainly no happier for it. We have less leisure time than anyone since the Feudal Ages and the suicide rate continues to rise.

Watching the world is like watching a train rushing at high speed toward a precipice.

Two thousand years ago Jesus saw the danger of the train. He did a lot to warn us about where it was going, and even set up an alternate method of transport. He had a lot of people listen to him for a while. But then his followers got bored of walking and saw the train going at such high speed so they decided to get on at the next station.

Christians are suppose to be stopping the train, but instead we’ve decked out our own carriage on it.

Then we go out and try to move people into our carriage.

But it doesn’t matter what carriage you’re in – the train is still going over the cliff. We’re still obsessed with material goods. We’re so concerned with the audio quality of our worship services. We think we’re spiritual because of our quiet time.

People are dying.

Don’t we care? We are so smug in our “salvation” that we are just willing to ignore the starving children in our world. We’re so wrapped up in programs that we forget how our lives affect people.

It’s time to get real. God’s forgiven us already, which is amazing considering the gravity and scale of our debauchery, but now we must repent. We’ve got to get of the train. We have to say a loud “NO” to profiting at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. There are a lot of methods available to do this. But first we have to see what we’ve done. We have to break down.  We need to repent.