SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2008

THE SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

________________________________________________

Dear Friends in Our Lord Jesus:

About 15 years ago, a reporter for the Associated Press became intimately involved in the ongoing Civil War in the Balkans. It happened on the streets of Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavian Republic.

One evening, as the reporter was walking to his car, a little girl in front of him was shot and severely wounded by a sniper. Suddenly, a man ran from the doorsteps nearby, picked up the child, and ran toward the journalist. "You have a car," the man begged. "Please won't you take us to the hospital?"

Without hesitating, the reporter loaded them into the backseat of his car and began to drive. A few minutes later, the man in the backseat said, "Hurry! Please! My little girl is still breathing!" Yet a few minutes later, he repeated the urgent request: "Hurry! Please! She is still warm!"

Several minutes later, they pulled into the emergency entrance at the hospital. But it was too late. The little girl had died. After receiving the devastating news, the man and the reporter walked into the restroom together to wash the child's blood from their hands. "Now comes the hard part," the man told the reporter. "Now I have to go and find that little girl's father and tell him she has gone."

The reporter was shocked. "But I thought YOU were the father! I thought she was YOUR child!" he said incredulously. With a nod of his head, the man replied: "Aren't they ALL our children?"

The New Testament tells us that if one member of Christ's body suffers, "then all suffer together. And if one member is honored, all rejoice together" (I Corinthians 12:27).

-- The Very Rev. Dr. Steve Sellers +