The headlines and news reports during the past year have been dominated by stories about the state of the economy. Much of the news has been "bad", and even as reports circulate about the "recovery", the subjects of jobs, incomes, and taxes are still very much on many people's minds. Even in Ottawa, insulated as we have been from some of the worst of the recession, there are still many who are painfully aware of hardships and cutbacks which have followed a downturn in business. Those who have lost savings through investments gone bad and who rely on fixed pensions for income are understandably wary about the future. Those who have lost the pensions they thought they had earned are even more understandably bewildered if not justifiably angry.

It is good for those who are called to lay up treasure not on earth but in heaven to consider what we value. Not only does such a valuation help us to keep a healthy perspective on material goods, but it also allows us to make a much-needed contribution to public debate on what things we should count as priorities. Where should we as a society be spending our collective resources?

My reflections today in part stem from two conversations. One involved a young woman caring for a family member. She is seeking to earn an honest, living income by working as a personal caregiver for others, and finds at the end of the month that too few hours at a minimal wage does not translate into enough to pay for the rent, let alone any food. The other conversation was a discussion at city hall about the perceived need to hire three more full-time garbage inspectors, at a total cost of a quarter of a million dollars per year.

A wage for someone to work as a caregiver -- providing personal help to someone who is unable to do basic tasks of washing, dressing and eating, starts at ten dollars an hour ($10./hr). If one were to work forty hours a week for fifty weeks a year at such an honourable occupation, one would have a gross income of twenty thousand dollars a year ($20,000./yr). Surely helping another living human being to attend to the daily necessities of life is something upon which we would put a high value. Yet if one were to be hired as a garbage inspector -- in part to ensure that what can be recycled is sorted and separated properly from what cannot be recycled -- one would make, with salary and benefits, something of the order of eighty thousand dollars in a year ($80,000./yr). Which or whom do we value more: the individual who needs to be supported and assisted with the essentials of life, and the one who is willing to live and work to offer others such support, or the purity of our garbage, and the one who is content to tell the rest of us how to sort it?

I don't need to extrapolate the scale and point out that by paying our average professional hockey players a "wage" of two million dollars a year ($2,000,000./yr), we are placing on their "work" to "entertain" us a value of forty thousand dollars a week ($40,000./wk), or twice what we pay a caregiver in a year. Yet I will do so, to make the point that we are living in a society in North America which has completely inverted the value chart. The two million dollars paid to the average hockey player is more than ten times what the average family doctor earns.

The tax collector whom Jesus called to leave his tax collecting booth and to become a disciple seeking to draw others to follow in the way of Jesus ... the way God designed life to be lived ... the way of life in a loving, supportive community ... took down words Jesus spoke about God's value on "things" and "people":

Matthew 6:26 - "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" (NIV)

We are to remember first and foremost that our value is assigned by God, and He puts a premium on each man and woman who is made in God's own image. Furthermore, the comparison of our value is made in the context in which God reminds us that He supplies even the lowliest creatures with the necessities of life. Will He not much more clothe us of little faith? We are to be comforted by the fact that God cares and will provide for us.

We are also to remember -- and to help others to grasp -- that the values of God's kingdom are not the values of a fallen, selfish, pleasure-seeking leisure society.

Jesus demonstrated God's correct and correcting perspective in a human society that valued power and wealth and leisure much as we do. Amid the mighty modern Roman Empire, the Hebrew believers were marginalised and "tolerated". Yet in such straightened circumstances, the Saviour appeared. Jesus was born in a cold cattle-shed in a small village in the dark of winter. His Father owned the cattle on a thousand hills, but our Saviour would borrow a boat for a bed, a donkey for a ride, and a cross and a tomb to live and die for us sinful sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. His apprenticeship as a carpenter prepared him to walk among the common fisher folk, and to lead them to live to build a new kingdom -- one that would address the human needs of the present but which would finally be established in heaven for all eternity. The riches of his glory were laid aside for a short sojourn here on earth, to be restored upon his return to the throne of heaven.

How then shall we live for the few short years we have here? Let us, both in our approach to the celebration of Christmas and in our attitude towards resolutions for the New Year, seek to affirm the value of each person in God's sight, and strive to point the way to a biblical and God-honouring scale for priorities within the society among which we are called to be light and salt.

Valued by Jesus, and seeking to sort value from trash, while preparing faithfully to use my new green box,

Your pastor,
James T. Hurd