Where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

I read two things today that made my heart sad.

The first was a heart-wrenching story from Dr. Christiana Russ. Christiana is a pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who is on loan to an Anglican Mission Hospital in Maseno, Kenya through the Diocese of Massachusetts. (She's also the chair of the Standing Commission on HIV/AIDS).

I've known Christiana since she was a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis 11 years ago, and a more dedicated, optimistic, brilliant person you will never meet. But this morning she was at the end of her rope.

As you can read in her posting on the EGR blog, the Anglican hospital where Christiana is working is so short of funds that they have to charge for even basic health services. The result is that in a region with a 20% under-five mortality rate the top inpatient census during her time at this 160-bed hospital has been 25 -- because people who are sick won't get the care they need because they can't afford it.

She illustrates this with the story of one-month-old Baby Jean. Baby Jean's mother brought her to the hospital with a fever and showing signs of a bacterial infection. They recommended she be admitted, but the mother couldn't afford to, so they went home. Two days later, her mother brought her back, but by then it was too late. Despite their best efforts, Baby Jean died.

Christiana writes:

"This story makes me SO ANGRY. It is an affront to us as human beings that in this day and age it is still possible for a child to not receive appropriate medical care, especially when her mother sought it out. It is an affront to the Anglican church - the entire communion - that we have a cross hanging on the front gate of this hospital and that we don't fund it well enough to take adequate care of those who enter here, even the small children. It is even more damning for us that other organizations are able to find the funds to provide free or highly subsidized care, and we are still operating in a hopelessly un-Christian fee-for-service system. When people don't get basic health care because they can't pay for it, it's a travesty. It's disgusting. It wounds us all.

"I am sick at heart today for the children who die due to lack of care, who die within a few miles of institutions such as this hospital which have the capacity to care for them but somehow don't. I am sick at heart for the mothers and fathers, grandparents, and siblings who bury their little ones and know this is not the way it is meant to be. This is not God's plan."

I carried Christiana and Baby Jean and her mother on my heart all day ... as I know you would have to had you read that story. And so it was through their eyes that I read another email later in the day, this one from the Diocese of Virginia.

This email was a very businesslike update on the court battle between the Diocese of Virginia and CANA over church property. They're in the third day of a six-day trial arguing over who owns what.

Even a very conservative estimate of what firms bill an hour will run about $200-$300 per (and that's REALLY lowballing it). A six-day trial. All the preparation for it. The inevitable appeal(s). The price tag in this diocese alone must be astronomical.

Meanwhile, half a world away Baby Jean dies in her mother's arms not beause the medical treatment wasn't available ... but because an Anglican hospital didn't have the funding to give her life-saving treatment at a price her mother could afford.

Where is our treasure? Where is our heart?

Now I can hear the arguments from both sides already. The injustice each claims is being visited upon them by the other. The trust of past and future generations. The betrayal of the faith. Who is the REAL church?

The truth is, none of us are acting like the REAL church. The REAL church, the REAL body of Christ wouldn't be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers to protect ownership of what amounts to "treasure stored up on earth" while a one-month old baby dies under the shadow of a cross and bathed in the tears of a young doctor in Kenya.

The battles are springing up all over our church. Court cases that will bring aggregate bills in the millions.

Who's wrong? Who's right? I really don't care. We're all wrong. We're all right. It's a plague on both houses ... on our entire house divided. Because it is in the very entering of the battle that we lose it.

Children are dying in Maseno because we have a Church that believes it's more important to pay lawyers to fight over buildings than to help those children live. Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. It's really as simple as that.

And if you're going to argue that it's not ... don't tell it to me.

Tell it to Christiana.

Tell it to Baby Jean's mother.

Tell it to the man on the cross.

Christ's peace,

Mike+