Sometimes I really wish I could stop living in history. Watching as the world seems to constantly quake around us, I find myself worrying about the future. About my daughter, about the life of the church in a world that seems to need conflict so badly. I wonder if the day will come when preaching the message of Jesus of Christ will become illegal, when reminding people that what the LORD really requires of us… to seek Justice, love Kindness, and walk Humbly with our God… will be the thing that marks us as a group who need to be silenced.
It’s happened before. If you look in our book of Confessions, you can read the Theological Declaration of Barmen (it’s also freely available online.) Written by members of the German Church, it was a rejection of what Nazism had transformed the German Church into… a weak, sycophantic movement that served the hatred of the Government, rather than the love of Christ.
The authors of Barmen rejected that church, and gave a call so powerful we as a church encoded it into our very constitution: the reminder that the call of Christ is NEVER to serve any institution of humanity, not the government, not a political party, or any particular ideology save that of Christ himself. And a few of them paid for that rejection with their lives.
I hold onto the hope of the future. The hope that God will walk with us as we walk in these times, and that someday soon the bitter division we see in the world all around us will quiet, and the Church as a whole will once again follow the path the Prophet Micah told us of… Justice, Kindness, and Humility. I pray for it every day. I hope you’ll pray for it, too. Hold to the love of God. Love for your neighbor, love for the stranger, love for the foreigner, love for the outcast.
While also remembering that sometimes, while following Christ, love also means flipping some tables.
Pastor Dan
