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It’s an injustice when where you live determines whether you live.
Right here in America there are zip codes in the same city where there can be a difference of as much as 20 years in the average life span of a person.
It’s an injustice when where you live determines whether you live.
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There can be no debate about this: God is on the side of the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised and the powerless. God is in the business of setting things right. That is what justice is. It’s putting everyone on equal footing. It’s raising up the powerless and bringing down the proud.
I repeated the illustration from yesterday in today’s Catch, in case you didn’t take the time to notice it. Three little guys are standing on crates in order to watch a ball game over a fence. The taller one and the middle guy are doing fine, but the littler one is too short to see over, even with the crate, so the taller one, realizing this, stacks his crate on top of the little boy’s, so that they can all see together. It’s such a simple illustration but it says a lot. It says the taller one had to have noticed the little guy couldn’t see, and that he could do something about that. Justice is first noticing the inequity, and then doing something about it. We may not always be able to do something about injustice, but we need to be looking for where we can.
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What word appears 130 times in the Old Testament and15 times in the New (used mostly by Jesus) but hardly ever shows up in the language of evangelical Christians? What word has such political overtones that it galvanizes the polarization of believers when it should be a simple quality of the heart for all believers that flows from the heart of God? What word was high on the list of the secular culture of the ‘60s but hardly ever mentioned among most of the Jesus Freaks? What word shows up consistently in black inner-city churches but not proportionately in white suburban ones? Give up?
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Now that baseball is back, it’s time to make something of the nature of the sport that has given it longevity as “America’s pastime.” First let’s just think about that — passing time. Doesn’t that sound great right now? Doesn’t that sound like something you’d like to have the luxury to do?
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There’s a pagan whore in the genealogy of Jesus and a very smart one at that. This was no accident. She was purposely worked into the stories of the lineage of Christ. Actually, Christ’s ancestors are all sinners, the whole lot of them, no one worse or better than the rest, but we needed at least one who was outwardly sinful lest we miss the point that grace was mercifully extended to them all. We always put on our best face but we’re scoundrels nonetheless. I think God loves to work in a little color into our stories.
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“Do not fear threats; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. 1 Peter 3:14-15
Whatever you do, don’t let fear rule your heart. To be sure, there’s much to choose from these days when it comes to fear. COVID, Ukraine, global warming, inflation, soaring gas prices, another possible war with Roman numerals, Putin’s itchy finger on the nuclear button — there are plenty of things to fear right now. So what do you do?
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In June of 2020, in the midst of our first serious pandemic scare and resulting lockdown, Jocelyn, my then 4-year-old granddaughter, came up with a statement that prompted someone in the Catch to coin the phrase, Jocelyn for President. The magical statement was: “When the world gets better, we’ll have a pool party, and everyone’s invited.”
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According to James, your faith in Christ has to be evidenced in your attitudes, your treatment of others, and your overall actions or else you are fooling yourself with your faith. No wonder some of the early fathers of the church didn’t want the Book of James to be in the Bible. Read one way, it can read as a book of works. What it is, in fact, is a book that insists that your faith has to reflect itself in your life in some way. You can’t say you have faith in Christ without your faith showing up in your life in some form.
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“So whatever you say and whatever you do, remember that you will be judged by the law that sets you free” (James 2:12).
The law that sets you free? That’s a strange law. Laws don’t normally set us free. They do the opposite. They enslave us. They find us guilty because we are all guilty. The law condemns. But this law James is talking about sets us free? How is that?
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In his book Screwtape Letters where an underling demon learns how to trip up Christians so as to render them useless for the kingdom of God, Lewis introduces the sinister idea of “Christianity and” where one’s faith is bound up in something in addition to their faith, so that one’s faith can be made to support just about anything, even that which would be in conflict to the true nature of following Christ and His teachings.
Examples of this would be:
John Fischer The Catch 