Isaiah 9:2-7
Here’s my hand. Take
it or chop it off.
I’ll get back to that.
Salvation – that’s our business
here in this place, isn’t it? How do we do
it? We tell stories. No, really, Sunday after Sunday, and tonight
especially, that’s what we do. We become
the stories we hear. We become the
stories we tell. So let’s start with a
story about salvation.
It was the mid 1960s, south side of Chicago. There’s this neighborhood called Pilsen, south
of the viaduct. It had been a port of
entry for Polish and Bohemian immigrants at the turn of the century. Now it was a port of entry for Puerto Ricans
and Mexicans. That’s when the real
estate people figured out the power of fear. They figured out how to cash in on fear of immigrants.
So the real estate people told the Polish people, children
of immigrants themselves, that with this change of ethnicity in the neighborhood,
their property values would go down. What
they had to do was sell out of Pilsen, where Mexicans were moving in, and buy
new houses in a new suburb called Cicero. And gosh, the real estate people made a
killing on urban flight. For each
frightened Polish family, the realtors earned, not one but two commissions, one
on the sale in Pilsen and another on the purchase in Cicero.
