Tonight as I pulled up into the check-out at my local Kroger, cart full to the brim with a week's worth of groceries, there was a mid-20-year old African-American woman with her four-ish year old boy talking with the African-American mid-twenties cashier.
They apparently knew one another, or at least knew the same pool of people. Their conversation about the boy's father turned to the men that they knew in common who were in jail. Or rather, who were not in jail. They could count them: two. They could list two men that they knew from this pool of people who were not locked up.
I don't really know anyone who's locked up. It's sort of tempting to make that into some sort of joke. But tonight I felt how different my experience of the world is from many people's--the raw-ness of it.
That little boy was about Davis' age. What are the chances that he'll also end up in jail? All kinds of odds are stacked against him that are not stacked against my little guy.
It made me think about the Scripture we're studying in our church small group: James 2, the admonition to care for widows and orphans...the people who were powerless and marginalized in that society.
Do I have any idea how to help my church community live out the gospel in such a way that it makes contact with that little boy and his mother? Does our resource-rich little church plant have any way of making our way to the widows and orphans, the poor that James tells us God has chosen to give the kingdom to?
Would these folks be welcomed in our Sunday morning worship service? Would they "get" what was happening with all the readings and responses and the formality of robes and processions and the like?
All questions that the book of James forces me to ask. Not sure that I like the answers very much...
2 comments:
out of all your recent posts, i like this one the best. and i love that you are trying to connect your church community to these experiences! happy sabbatical! :)
thanks for checking in, Liz!
yeah, if you take James too seriously, it'll really put a hurt on you. figuring out how that connects with church life is hard...i've just got my little corner of it with my small group. i know that these issues are ones that my church values, and we do some really cool things to serve the poor, especially the poorer kids who attend the school where we meet.
but none of those kids or their families are coming to our church, so far as i know. maybe that's fine, we're not serving as a way to get them into "our" church. If they're going somewhere else, great!
But what i don't want is for our service to those kids to "check off the box" of caring for the poor while keeping them safely at arms distance.
happy spring of your senior year! i look forward to connecting when i get back post-spring break to hear all about
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