As many of you know, Carol McGittigan, our parish secretary, has been out all week taking care of her sick mother in Louisiana. I want to thank Debbie Reeves and Mark Robertson and Marion Tillman for helping out in the office. They are the reason you have bulletins this morning. But even with their help, for most of the week, either I was in the office alone or no one was in the office, and a few things slipped through the cracks.

One of them was this letter. I wasn’t going through the mail everyday (I figured it could wait until Carol gets back), but toward the end of the week I decided to flip through it to see if there was something that was obviously urgent, when I saw an envelope addressed to me with the notation, “Cancel my pledge,” on the back of the envelope. There is nothing that will get a priest’s attention like, “Cancel my pledge.”

So, with a sense of dread, I opened it. Here’s what it said:

Dear Father Pritchett, (right away I knew that this was not someone who knew me well. Most people call me, “Jim.” A few call me “Father Jim,” but nobody calls me, “Father Pritchett.”) Anyway. . .

Dear Father Pritchett,

We have not actually had an opportunity to have a conversation, but I moved to this area some time ago, and since then, I have been coming to your church fairly often. I was raised in a family that never went to church or talked about religion (except in unflattering terms), and when I moved to this area, I thought I owed it to myself to explore Christianity and make up my own mind, even though I already knew a great deal about it from television and movies.

I was intrigued by what I found at your church. It seemed like just what I needed. Christianity seemed comforting, and spiritual, and, above all, focused on my needs. That was exactly what I was looking for. After some time, I decided that I would make an appointment with you to discuss getting baptized. I also filled out a pledge card for 2006, and I recently started giving money. I hope you can understand that thinking about baptism and giving money were both significant steps for someone like me who was raised in a non-religious home. I have found, however, that I need a religion that will help me escape from the stressful and unpleasant aspects of life, and I was very excited at the thought of joining your organization.

Much of that excitement came from words I have heard come out of your very mouth to the effect that this religion can bring you peace and love if you follow Christ. (I hope you will not deny this, as there were witnesses.) I spent a good deal of time thinking about who Christ is and how I could follow him. I came to the conclusion that he is a spiritual leader who calls us to a higher spiritual plane in which our spiritual needs will be met. This spiritual plane will be a “safe harbor” from the storms of life. And I have heard you say, out of your own mouth, that Christ can meet our spiritual needs and that Christ will help us deal with the storms of life. (I hope you will not deny this either, as you said these things in public as well.)

So I became clear that this faith is about Jesus loving me and me loving Jesus back, and that through that process, I will get into heaven and won’t have to deal with the unpleasant, ungodly, parts of this life.

In light of what I have just said, I hope you can understand my extreme disappointment and sense of betrayal when I learned that you had not portrayed Christ correctly at all. Imagine my sense of disillusionment when I learned that Christians are called to see Christ himself in people who are hungry, or thirsty, or people who are strangers, or who don’t have adequate clothing, or sick people, or even prisoners. This has been extremely disturbing to me. These are the very people who represent the unpleasant parts of life that I want to escape from and that I thought Christianity offered me a spiritual safe haven from.

Furthermore, I have recently learned that some Christians use this understanding of who Christ is to meddle in political matters, where religion has no place. They apparently feel that if Jesus is to be found in the poor and the weak, and even in prisoners, their religious concern extends to how we as a society treat people who are hungry and sick and such, and some have even chimed in on whether it is moral to torture prisoners. Such meddling is, of course, clearly wrong. The purpose of religion is to meet my spiritual needs, and it should stay out of politics.

Please do not misunderstand me or think that I am unfeeling or insensitive to the plight of the poor. I do not mind giving to charities and even occasionally working for one. But I certainly do not care to affiliate with riff-raff and criminals, and I cannot in good conscience follow a religion in which the leader says that he is to be found in these dregs of society. I mean, it is one thing to feel a sense of obligation to try to help these people occasionally, but to say that Christ is to be found in these people is simply too much. With all due respect to you and your position, it is absurd.

Father Pritchett, you have misrepresented this faith to me, and I am disappointed not only in that I find that I cannot become a Christian in light of what I have learned, but also that you did not tell the truth. You told me (and others) that this was a religion that could bring me peace and comfort and could meet my needs. If your Christ is to be found in the scum described above, this is manifestly untrue, and you should be ashamed.

Therefore, please cancel my 2006 pledge and refund to me the moneys I have given in 2005.

Sincerely,

I’m not going to give you the name; you don’t need to know that. I’m reading you this letter to ask for your help. I’ve got to write this person back. That’s not going to be easy. Here’s where I need your help: please think of what you think I should say.

Ok — I made this letter up. Still, you know that there are a lot of people who could have written a letter similar to this, so I think it’s a good exercise for us to think about how we would respond.

So, please, think about it all week. Think about how Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” And think about the letter-writer’s objections.

If you have any ideas, jot them down and send them to me. That might be a good exercise for all of us, and I could use some friendly mail.

But more importantly, we all need to be prepared to respond to this letter-writer when we meet him or her — and we will. And more important still, we need to be ready to respond to this letter-writer when we meet them in ourselves — and we will.