Matthew 6:31-34 (NIV):
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Lao Tzu:
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
I became a Christian because I believe what he teaches about our interconnected intimacy through God to each other is a powerful revelation that changes the world. I became a disciple—a student of Jesus—because, in his life and faith, I see a better, more complete version of humanity.
Jesus lived (and died) for the common good. His ministry is about uniting people of diverse backgrounds through God’s love. And because God’s love is distributed equitably, Jesus insists it is the responsibility of all people to contribute whatever they can to the task at hand. Jesus urges us to use our innate relationship with God to create a society that gives every human a chance to unlock their God-given, Christlike, true self.
When we adopt Jesus’ more compassionate, people-centric attitude towards others we naturally live his humble life of service. Ultimately, serving each other makes the world more livable for us all. Jesus describes an Earth that reflects his kin-dom reality, where everyone on the planet understands the magnificent, progressive, abundant world we can create if we just act a little less selfishly.
People call this vision utopian and naïve, which is disappointing. Why is it so difficult for people to rally around taking care of each other, but so easy to devolve into tribal nationalism against a brother or sister? Jesus understands this problem well. After all, he was an itinerant Rabbi with a loyal following who disrupted every system they touched—the religious systems because of their financial bedfellows; politicians for their abuse of the people and dismissal of the power of God; the Roman Empire for creating an economy built on inequality, oppression, and slavery.
Sound familiar?
Jesus teaches us that loving God means living as lovingly disruptive.
The Jesus people lived communally outside the commerce of the Roman Empire, creating an alternative economy based on Jesus’ teachings about God’s abundance and our responsibility to distribute God’s abundance equally.
In a world that says, “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine,” Jesus says, “No. Nothing is yours. Everything is God’s and God’s alone. Give what you have away, and you’ll have even more. There is more than enough for everyone to be wildly happy and healthy. Trust me.” Trusting Jesus requires courage because he asks his followers to live an alternative lifestyle where giving is more important than getting. Like Jesus, his students are to be the lovingly disruptive presence of God in the world.
What does lovingly disruptive presence mean? It means we show God’s love to everyone, without exception or qualification. You exist? Then I love you. And because I love you, I want to make sure you have what you need to be the best you. Because, God. And if you’re not into God, then because it’s good for civilization.
Throughout his life, Jesus teaches and shows by example, how to create a more just and equitable world by simply loving and respecting one another without prejudice. When Jesus talks about the “Kingdom of Heaven,” he is describing a vision of this planet, here and now.
Jesus envisions a world we create by following his foundational instruction to love each other. In Jesus’ world, God’s abundance is universally shared. Jesus may have said we’ll always have the poor with us, but he never said that means we should discard them and leave them to rot. Instead, Jesus demands we feed anyone and everyone in need, and that we do it by redistributing what each of us already has.
If you pay attention, Jesus most often feeds people with leftovers, as in the case of the loaves and the fishes. That story is not about the miraculous appearance of food from thin air. Jesus doesn’t materialize magic food. What he does is what he always does—he convinces people to provide for themselves by loving each other, which reveals the abundance already in their midst and gives them the will to share unconditionally.
We have all we need already. We must learn to share our wealth.
For thousands of years, followers of Jesus have worked for the common good through assemblies of people called churches. Like a synagogue, mosque, or any spiritual community, a church is where we gather to learn from Jesus (or Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Krishna, etc.) and intentionally experience the presence of God.
Through that experience, we hopefully gain some understanding of ourselves as part of the larger, more significant, living, conscious being of God, in which every human life is equally important. Once we realize we’re all a part of the same thing, the church, this incredible body of people motivated by love for each other through God’s love for us, begins doing the hard work of changing the world. We do this by serving in our local, national, and international communities. Churches all over the world run food pantries, soup kitchens, temporary and permanent housing facilities, schools, healthcare centers, hospitals, elder-living facilities, and more.
One of the main reasons I decided to become an ordained pastor in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is because our denomination focuses on serving the common good. We are a theologically and ethnically diverse group of churches. We worship God in very different ways, and we have different opinions about how exactly God accomplished God’s work in Jesus.
However, we are like-minded in our understanding that Jesus demands we fearlessly love and support oppressed people everywhere. We believe in unity—not just Christian unity, but the unity of all people as beloved God-beings, no matter our ethnicity, creed, gender identity or sexual preference.
Our denomination often partners with other religions and secular services to more effectively serve people in need around the world. We have no intention of converting people to our religion. We serve because that’s what Jesus teaches: Serve one another. Without question.
One of the ways our denomination does this is through the efforts of Week of Compassion, the relief, refugee, and development mission fund of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). There’s a great interactive map on their website (weekofcompassion.org) that lets you look at all the places around the world WOC serves, from Texas to Mongolia.
Here’s a video showing some of the places and people we’re helping:
With all the bad news around the world, let’s remember that we’re not in this alone.
God works for the underprivileged and the oppressed through every one of us.
As we strive to ensure all people get the respect and quality of life we all deserve, I pray we will work beyond our own religious understandings of the universe and cooperate with people who believe in God differently, or don’t believe in God at all. Because only with universal support from all sorts of sacred and secular organizations can we possibly begin to fulfill Jesus’ vision of a peaceful, cooperative kin-dom.
The world does its best to convince us that everything is hopeless, and to be afraid of everything and everyone, because they want to take our land, our “way of life,” our stuff. But the world lies to us. The path to self-annihilation is paved with fear and loathing. The road to salvation, on the other hand, is awash in self-sacrificing love.
Amen.
