Faith Venture

I don’t ignore the news. That is hard to accomplish and probably not wise. However, I don’t immerse myself in it. That, also, would not be wise.

The easy thing for a Christian is to pretend to be an ancient Hebrew prophet and expound on hypocrisy and godlessness and the evil of people who disagree with me.

But that is merely ego-centric.

The news and pictures I’ve seen coming from India regarding the impact of the failure of the government to tackle the Covid crisis with the resulting deaths have moved me to deep sadness. And that is repeated with perhaps less drama in some other populous countries.

As an adolescent student and young man, I harbored a great dislike for the writings of the Apostle Paul. Later, I discovered that it wasn’t Paul himself, but the way people went through his writing and picked out parts they liked and build legal frameworks around them.

So, as a civil rights and anti-war person, I totally misunderstood what Paul wrote in the 13th chapter of Romans. Here, he expounds a view, not that the government is always right (and I wondered what he’d have written had he been living under Nero at the time), but that government is placed here by God to bring order and justice and the like to society.

We can see throughout this pandemic the differences in political leadership and the various impacts upon the societies. Leadership in the government is important. All the leaders made mistakes–just some learned and adjusted and some, well, failed.

But I’m not here to be an ancient Hebrew prophet predicting God’s judgement upon them all.

Instead, what is the response I can make when I learn about all this immense suffering. I cannot write a check with enough zeros to provide vaccines and healthcare for the world. But I can write a check. And I can encourage those I meet. And I can support good leaders.

Living in the dominion of the heavens that Jesus had announced doesn’t mean that I change the whole world. I can change me and influence those around me. And so can you.

It’s kind of like Arlo Guthrie singing at the end of Alice’s Restaurant—and it’s a movement, yes the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre movement. We can participate in the share the kingdom of heaven movement and learn from Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan. Help where we can.

This entry was posted on April 26, 2021 at 7:10 am and is filed under Compassion, Disciplines, Leadership, responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.