Between Sundays
“I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” — Matthew 25:36
This week I had the privilege of sitting down with five other Frederick clergy, representing the six churches leading a shared effort for our community. We come from different traditions, different corners of the city, different ways of praying and worshiping. And we gathered around one table because we share one conviction. Medical debt should not be a life sentence for the crime of getting sick. Yet thousands of our neighbors, right here in Frederick County, are carrying healthcare bills they simply cannot pay.
You may remember the announcement from last week and I have reposted it just below here. It is called Un-Burdened: Frederick County United in Relief. Together with Grace United Church of Christ, All Saints Episcopal, Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, and St. Katharine Drexel Catholic Church, and working with the national nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, we have set a goal. We are trying to raise $103,172 by October 31 to erase $15 million in medical debt, freeing more than 14,000 of our neighbors from bills that have been weighing them down. Because the debt is purchased in bulk at a steep discount, every single dollar we give relieves about $100 of debt. The people who receive that relief pay nothing, owe no taxes on it, and carry no strings. They simply open a letter the first week of December and discover their medical debt is gone. I ask you, what better Christmas gift could we give someone this year?
Sit with that math for a moment. Ten dollars becomes a thousand dollars of relief for a real family. That is not a typo. That is grace, made practical.
Wednesday we as a clergy group, sat down with the Frederick News-Post to talk about it. I am writing this on Wednesday, so I genuinely have no idea what the article will say when it runs, which is its own small act of faith. But here is what I know for certain, and what I most want to say to you, the people of Calvary. This is our chance to do something real for our neighbor.
Now, I want to name the tension in all of this for me. This effort treats a symptom, not the disease. Surprisingly and sadly, crushing medical debt has become an ordinary reality for good and hardworking people, for seniors on fixed incomes, for families who did everything right and still got buried the moment someone got sick. It is the product of a system of rising medical costs and insurance practices that too often put profit ahead of people. We can, and we will, lift $15 million of that weight this fall. But we should not pretend we have solved the deeper problem. The deeper problem will still be there in the morning, generating new debt for new neighbors, and it will take more than one campaign to change. It will take our voices, our persistence, and our refusal to accept that this is simply the way things must be. So let us do this good and holy thing now, and let us not stop asking why so many of our neighbors needed it in the first place.
Grace UCC has a sign out front right now, it reads, “The world is heavy, so lift what you can.” I want to borrow that from Rev. Chance Martinez, because it names exactly what we are called to do. Not to fix everything. Not to carry the whole weight of a hurting world on our own shoulders, which was never ours to carry alone anyway. Just to lift what we can.
And friends, that is what we have been doing all along, and will keep doing. The school supplies we gathered and the Love Offering for the Stuff the Bus, that was lifting what we can. The Food Barrow we fill week after week, and this month’s Love Offering for the Frederick Food Bank, that is lifting what we can. Now Un-Burdened invites us to lift a little more. Each of these is a hand slipped underneath a load that has grown too heavy for someone, and a whole congregation, a whole community, saying, here, let us take some of that.
This is the very heart of what Jesus described in Matthew 25. He did not talk about grand gestures or heroic rescues. He talked about the sick cared for, the hungry fed, the imprisoned visited, the naked clothed. Ordinary mercy, offered to ordinary neighbors. And he told us that when we do these things for the least of these, we do them for him.
So this fall, let’s lift what we can. Give ten dollars or twenty, give more if you are able, and know that whatever you offer joins with the gifts of six congregations into something none of us could do alone. The world is heavy. But we are not powerless, and we are not alone, and there is real relief within our reach.
If you would like to learn more, come find me. To give, use the link below. And to every one of you who keeps showing up, barrow by barrow and dollar by dollar, to lift the load for a neighbor you may never meet, thank you. That is the Gospel with its sleeves rolled up.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton