They Are Our Children - Rev. Carlos L. Malavé in Bread For The World

We are called to be Christ to all, but in a very intentional and biased way, we must be Christ to destitute, hungry, and oppressed people. Our actions, care, and concern for poor people reveal the presence or absence of the living Christ in us.

The most important responsibility of the Church is to promote, nurture, and protect human life and dignity. When the Church relinquishes this duty because of political expediency, or even in defense of its theological and ideological convictions, it loses its moral grounding and credibility.

The Church is called to be the most unequivocal expression of the heart and conscience of Christ. The way we respond to the cries of the children of God either affirms our legitimacy or exposes our failure.

Our allegiance is not to the political winds of the time. Our allegiance is to the one who will call us into account when the last act of the human drama wraps up.

Every follower of Christ, every minister, and every local congregation must offer refuge to those seeking freedom, healing, and salvation. 

Our ears cannot become deaf to the words of Jesus: “Because you did it unto one of these little ones, you have done it unto me.”

We must guard our souls from apathy and the callousness that pervade our political and economic systems.

There are children dying in the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia, and there are also children dying in the Sonoran Desert and the Rio Grande. They are our children. They are our children because we are one human family.

The children of Salvadorian, Honduran, and Guatemalan families are as human and as important as my own three children. How can anyone think that their own children have the right to live in peace and security while denying this same right to others?

The full article is available here

A Way of Blessing - Kayla McClurg at Inward/Outward

There is no “maybe” in any of his statements, and there is no future tense. He says, “Blessed are you—right now—when…,” not “Blessed are you—maybe in the future—if….”

When Jesus says blessed are the poor in spirit and those who mourn and are meek and merciful, he is not giving preemptive encouragement for the challenging times that surely will come in our lives. He is not saying, if you someday have sadness and grief, you will be blessed, or if you are wronged or persecuted, you can count on God using it in some way.

What he describes are not possibilities, nor probabilities, but the actual current realities.

There is no “maybe” in any of his statements, and there is no future tense. He says, “Blessed are you—right now—when…,” not “Blessed are you—maybe in the future—if….”

The magnet of God’s blessing tugs strongest at those who already know poverty of spirit and grief, who know humility and loss and what it means to hunger for the food of God. They lean toward mercy, probably because they have suffered the withholding of mercy in their own lives. They see life simply, with pure hearts, because events have stripped away the clouds of ego and pretense. They tend to be peacemakers because they already have experienced persecution and blame.

When Jesus says, “Blessed are you when…,” he is talking to folks who already have known the heavy boot of oppression and are uniquely prepared to rise up and follow. People who are low in spirit, hungering for justice and hoping for some hope, right now.

The full article is available here