This week the mayor of Elizabeth and the deputy secretary of HUD toured the apartment homes destroyed by flooding early last month. Although some units can be repaired and families can move back in, a large number of residents will not be able to return to their homes. Section 8 housing vouchers were offered to residents, which can really help a family stabilize if they can find a qualifying apartment. Finding the apartment - that’s the rub.
Even before the flood there was an affordable housing crisis in Union County. There just aren’t enough homes for the people that live here, and there are not enough affordable homes for families. The Section 8 vouchers solve an immediate problem, but they do not address the root of the issue: we lack safe, affordable housing for families in our community and place the burden for this shortfall on the poorest people in our community, making any economic mobility more difficult.
This poor mother in Nain was obviously grief stricken at the loss of her only son. What mother would not feel the loss of her son in the deepest parts of her soul? But this was not all. The loss of her only son, and her husband who preceded him in death, meant that she would have no one to care for her economically in the patriarchal society of the ancient world. Surely it wasn’t just the loss of her son that she grieved, but the loss of any economic or social stability.
Jesus’s compassion and the miracle of her son’s resuscitation from the dead is cause for great celebration, but it only solves the immediate problem. It does not address the deeper problem that the social culture of the day prevented women from leading full, free lives apart from men.
We don’t find out what happened after the young man was resuscitated, but it would seem to me that it was a second chance. A second chance for the young man, certainly, but also a second chance for a community to find ways to care for each other so that none are destitute. Did they decide women could hold property? Did they develop a way for women to have lives apart from men? I don’t know, but there is an opening to try.
God is a God of second chances. The way things are is not the way things have to be. Jesus proved this to us when he was resurrected from the dead. Not even death is what it appears to be. We have immense imaginations, gifts from God to vision what we cannot see.
Desmond Tutu once said, “We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.” We won’t get things right the first time we try. The problems we solve today may have deep roots, but with grit and imagination we can take a second chance to get things right.
