This Sunday is World Communion Sunday and as I was thinking about what I might reflect on in the sermon on Sunday morning if (God forbid) our Sr. Pastor doesn’t make it back from California. I haven’t been blogging enough for you to know this, but I’m really troubled and the divisions in our country and in our world.
And those divisions are not only political; they are socioeconomic, they are racial, they are ideological. In the US we act as if we deserve to consume the disproportionate amount of resources that we consume. We act as if those who are struggling to get by are just lazy or dumb or unmotivated. We act as if children that are born into our poorest communities — throughout our country and our word — deserve to be there.
They don’t. I just watched the first part of a new documentary online called, “The Line” — it was produced by my friends at Sojourners, World Vision and Bread for the World. Watch it. Today.
We really want to believe that people are in the situation that they are in because they deserve to be there. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one deserves to be hungry and homeless and without healthcare. No one deserves to have to choose between paying the light bill and buying groceries, paying the rent or paying for books. No one.
So this weekend when Christians come together around Christ’s table to celebrate God’s grace that extends to all of us, let us also remind ourselves to extend that same grace to one another — particularly the other that we don’t like and the other that we don’t understand.
Let us come together around the table and come home to a God who loves us all the same and who wants us all to flourish. Jesus didn’t spend time with the elites, he spent time with the outcasts — the poor, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the “sinners”.
Jesus chose to love the very same people we often choose not to see.
