Tag Compassion

Religion That Applies to Every Society, in Every Time and Place

Todd R Leave a comment
Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Unsplash

I am on vacation this week, so I’ve collected some old posts about James 1:27 for the week.  I’m reposting them as is, but they definitely need some editing!

If Christianity is a message of salvation to all people, in all times and places, then the religious practices it recommends must be broad enough, and also flexible enough, to apply in every situation.  The political and cultural societies we each live in today have only existed for a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of history, and people reading this post may be living in societies entirely different from the one I’m writing this in.

What are these religious practices?  When the apostle James wrote in James 1:27 – “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” he didn’t just mean “pure and undefiled” right here and right now, but that to an eternal God whose character doesn’t change, there is a religion that remains pure and undefiled in all circumstances.  There is no expiration date or limited jurisdiction on James 1:27.

To apply James’ words that way doesn’t mean he was using “orphans and widows” only as a metaphor for something other than actual orphans.  He does mean to take care of them.  But he was also using them as the best example of people unloved in his society and by the world – the ones who fell through the cracks of society, and that “to keep oneself unstained from the world” means that pure religion leaves nobody behind the way the world does.

The world has many people who believe perfect society is only a matter of time, effort, and ingenuity, and it also has many people whose very existence shows the folly of that belief.  This tension reflects human history all the way back to Adam and Eve, who had to decide whether the kingdom of God they already lived in was what they wanted, or whether they wanted to build a kingdom based on their own ideas.  This tension existed when Jesus ministered on earth in the Pax Romana, or “Roman Peace” of the society He lived in.  The Caesars declared in what they called “gospel,” or “good news,” messages that they should be revered as gods for producing the most peaceful and prosperous society the world had ever known.  But when Jesus came, all He had to do was walk down the street – any street – and find problems not being solved in Caesar’s great empire. [1]  Jesus didn’t shake his fist at the utopians in protest, He just loved those in need of love, exposing the immensity of the flaws that exist in any human system, and proving by example that His kingdom is better.

WWJD

So, when James says “visit orphans and widows in their affliction” he means to do as Jesus did – to seek out and care for those left behind by the utopian imaginings of the world, and its related denials that these abandoned people matter.  This does include literal windows and orphans, but it’s also whoever is left behind in your area of the world.  The people in your neighborhood, country, organization, or even your church that the system doesn’t notice because there is nothing worldly to be gained by noticing them.  In Jesus’ eyes, even Zacchaeus, a wealthy Jew in a Jewish society that valued wealth, was one of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” because nobody saw him as a person with a personal and spiritual need.[2]  These “lost sheep” Jesus referred to in Matthew 10:6 and 15:24 need to know “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”[3] because this world’s kingdoms have failed them.

Each and every world system leaves some behind, proof that Adam and Eve made the wrong decision to go their own way.  There are always those who it is unpopular or uncool to pay attention to, even in churches.  Therefore, James calls us to love the unloved and the genuinely oppressed, whoever they are, wherever you are.  By definition, there’s no program to reach these people, because they are the ones who were missed.  It takes the actions of individual, loving people to reach them and that’s kind of the point.  Christianity is about the restoring of people and relationships, not the building of theoretical systems.

But does this really apply in every time?  How is the ethic of James 1:27 eternal, while other ethics are not?

At the risk of oversimplifying (inevitable in a blog!), the difference is that worldly ethics depend entirely on “progress” toward a solution that is theoretical and in the future.  Those pursuing worldly utopia hope they will progress to a solution for the orphans and widows’ problem, but what about the widows and orphans of the past?   Or right now?  In a framework of Darwinian evolution, death is just part of the process and an inevitable circumstance we must accept until we find a solution.  Death itself is Darwin’s philosophical orphan and widow they don’t want us to notice.  A solution in the future has no real hope for people in the past or present.

In Christianity the solution already exists – it was available even to our first ancestors – and death is only the result of refusing to accept it. And in all times places and situations “love God and love neighbor” is the right ethic, epitomized by James 1:27 and to be consummated in Heaven.  All those who have ever turned to God and accepted His solution, in the past, present, and future, will see His salvation.  We don’t have to hope that someday our children, or their children, and so on, will be loved, and know love, perfectly.

Until mankind actually produces a utopia, it is unscientific to believe utopia is possible, but because Jesus exists and walked among us, it is scientific to say perfect love is possible, even in this world.  From this perspective, Christianity is only horrendous if false; other systems are horrendous if true.

Today you may live in the greatest empire the world has ever known, or the worst tyrannical state, or you may live in a country most people on the world couldn’t find on a map.  In every case, and all cases in between, there are orphans and widows among you because only the kingdom of God is a perfect solution, and it will only be fully realized in Heaven.  Find them in their affliction and visit them, “And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” – Matthew 10:7

[1] For more on this, see an earlier post, More Than Truth
[2] See an earlier post, A Man in Need of an Ally, for more on Jesus and Zacchaeus
[3] Matthew 10:7

Religion That Epitomizes Love for God and Neighbor

Todd R Leave a comment

I am on vacation this week, so I’ve collected some old posts about James 1:27 for the week.  I’m reposting them as is, but they definitely need some editing!

What is religion?  In the Bible we get one definition from James 1:27, which says: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”  This may sound like a nice sentiment for a Hallmark card instead of a religion, but James was not resorting to hyperbole for mere effect.  He meant what he said, but what does he mean?

Photo by Robert Guss on Unsplash

Jesus Himself said that to love God and to love your neighbor were the greatest commandments, in a way the highest form of religion, so James is probably using “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction” as the purest, most undefiled form of love.  In James’ time, orphans and widows were the people genuinely unloved by the world – the ones who fell through the cracks of society.  Not only were they without a husband or parents, but society was not providing for them either and they were truly abandoned “in their affliction.”  Anyone caring for them would get no credit or recognition for it.  Therefore, the only motive for visiting them is love for them.  Pure love, with no impurity or stain from a desire to get something in return.

James specifically refers to “God the Father,” who has always taken His own, and His people’s, responsibility to widows and orphans seriously.  He wants to take care of them, but Psalm 94:6-7 says about the rulers of the nations, including Israel: “They kill the widow and the sojourner, and murder the fatherless; and they say, ‘The LORD does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive.’”  They preyed on those nobody cared about, and also boasted that not even God cared.

When any group of people – even one with God’s institutions of His law, temple, priests, prophets, and kings ruling the literal promised land – neglects the oppressed, their religion is impure and defiled.  All institutions – including ones provided by God – are useless outside of God’s purpose for them.  The temple was a way to approach God by sacrifice, foreshadowing Jesus’ death on the cross, but Judah used it as a way to appease Him so they could do their own thing.  Jeremiah criticized the religious leaders of his day, who thought they were free from judgement, repeating “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD,”[1] treating the temple as more important than God Himself and a reason God would always bless them.  However, God doesn’t want us to follow a checklist of religious observance – He wants us to be His loving family.

Because they replaced love with empty religion, Israel was cast into exile under the Babylonians, and Jeremiah cries in Lamentations 5:3 that “We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows.”  Perhaps God would teach compassion to His people through painful discipline and experience, having to live like those they ignored.

Unstained
Visiting widows and orphans keeps one unstained from the world when society thinks it’s ok to leave some behind.  That it’s ok to think we can’t do any better and that God doesn’t see, and that He doesn’t have an answer for it.  That if we follow the letter of the law, or rely on institutions, but not on the spirit of love, God will just look the other way because we tried our best.

Therefore, don’t visit widows and orphans because its popular, because a law tells you to, or for any reason besides Godly love, because when we mix in worldly motives, we risk loving only those who are popular to love or who our government and culture have put in favored positions.  Maybe we even reduce love to a comment about distant people trending on social media at the time, and not those individuals who are actually suffering the most.  These people are often right in front of us.

It is by ministering to specific widows and orphans in their need that the Christian retains the preservative power of salt and the illuminating power of light to the world.[2]  It’s not the idea, but the actual visiting that is pure and undefiled.  Me writing this and you reading this is only an idea.  But it is a beginning.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Heaven is for people who love when there’s nothing more at stake than the person being loved.  Only Jesus has met the standard of this love, but He has made a Way to Life for those willing to accept His Truth.  Jesus willingly takes our stain on the cross, and gives us His righteousness as a free gift, but only if we actually want His righteousness more than we want our stained world.  In Christ, the Father will change His people into people who care for widows and orphans.  People like that don’t need anything else to make a perfect society.  It’s loving people that make a perfect society, not rules and institutions, and certainly not good intentions that leave people behind.  Paradise will be a society that is pure, undefiled, and unstained, and where the only Institution needed is Jesus, our Prophet, Priest, and King.

No better solution exists than God the Father’s plan to build a family where everyone loves Him and loves their neighbor as themselves, and when we visit widows and orphans, we illustrate the truth that God sees them and cares for them, even when nobody else does.

Visiting widows and orphans is Religion that epitomizes love for God and neighbor.

[1] Jeremiah 7:4
[2] Matthew 5:13-16

The God Who Puts Food on the Table

Todd R Leave a comment

There are many reasons to praise God, many ways that He blesses us.  One of these is given in Psalm 111:5, and it’s something we shouldn’t take for granted:

“He provides food for those who fear him;
            he remembers his covenant forever.”

While this may be a reference specifically to God providing manna and quail to the Israelites when they wandered in the wilderness, it applies more broadly to any food provided to anyone at any time.  Therefore, we should praise Him whenever we have something to eat.

But He doesn’t just deliver food from the grocery store to us.  He provides everything required for food to exist in the first place.  He designed everything involved in the growth of what we eat.  Sunlight, rain, soil conditions and nutrients, all have a role in the growth of fruits and vegetables.  All of these roles act the way they need to be by design.  Food doesn’t exist by chance and is not an accident of a blind nature.

Then add what’s needed to produce the meat we may eat.  First, those plants need to contain what animals need to eat and grow.  The animals need to be able to not only digest those things, but then to turn them into something edible for us.  Again, all ordained by God, the intelligent creator of our universe, who “provides food for those who fear him.”

Also, He is not only a God who designs and provides, but a God of mercy, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”[1]  He provides food even for those who do not praise Him and give thanks to Him, so they might come to know Him by His mercy towards them.

Those who fear God, praise and thank Him for the food He provides, the complexity of the world He designed, and His mercy toward all His people.  But also, to reflect His character, provide food for those in need, showing them the mercy and love of the God who puts food on our tables.

“He provides food for those who fear him;
            he remembers his covenant forever“

[1] Matthew 5:45b

The Priorities of the Good Samaritan

Todd R 1 Comment

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well-known, even by those who aren’t Christian.  Briefly, it goes like this: a man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the side of a road.  First a priest, and then a Levite, passed him by, offering no help at all.  But a Samaritan, a member of a group despised by many Jews, stopped and helped the man, even bringing him to further help and paying the necessary expenses.

There is a lesson in the story about priorities – what this Good Samaritan put first, and what he didn’t.  But before covering his #1 priority, here are some things he did not prioritize, even though these aren’t necessarily bad things:

His first priority was not to fight for stricter laws against robbers.  What the robbers did was probably already illegal, and definitely not morally right.  We don’t know the fate of the robbers in the story, but they might have gotten away with this near murder.  In modern times, if criminals are getting away with bad behavior, a movement sometimes grows to make something that is already illegal “more illegal.”  If robbing is against the law, some might lobby to make the punishment harsher, or to focus laws on particular victims or perpetrators, but if they’re getting away with it now, how will these changes help?  The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority.

His first priority also was not to raise public awareness of violence along the highways.  He didn’t create posters and social media hashtags (I write as if those things existed then).  Such a campaign can have benefits.  It could help people be more careful when traveling, it might encourage the government to allocate more of its limited resources toward highway safety, but it will never completely solve the problem. The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority either.

Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash

So, what was the Good Samaritan’s priority?  He focused on what he could control, and any other concerns came later.  He focused on the problem right in front of him – a man beat up and near death on the side of the road.  Sometimes we can focus so much on advocating, that we lose sight of doing.  (I worry about that for myself as someone who spends so much time blogging.)  But the Good Samaritan “proved to be a neighbor”[1] by taking care of the neighbor right in front of him.

We can also be deluded into thinking that our government and other institutions should be able to solve all of our problems if only we fight hard enough for it.  However, they never will be enough, because any and all institutions are made up of people who too often deny their own responsibility for the problems of the world. Especially on social media, we often get the illusion that we can offload our responsibility for the world to others, and that what’s happening somewhere else is more important than what’s right in front of us.

While advocacy can be a good and necessary thing, God wants us to prioritize doing, which is what everyone in heaven will do!  In heaven, everyone will be like the Good Samaritan (and like Jesus), and therefore we won’t need better laws, awareness campaigns powered by advertising and hashtags, or stricter enforcement of laws.  The bloody victim by the roadside won’t exist.  And that is something to look forward to!

In the meantime:
“I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.” – C.S. Lewis

[1] Luke 10:36

A Mystery in the Good Samaritan Parable

Todd R 2 Comments

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well-known, even by those who aren’t Christian.  Briefly, it goes like this: a man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the side of a road.  First a priest, and then a Levite, passed him by.  But a Samaritan, a member of a group despised by many Jews, stopped and helped the man, even bringing him to help and paying the necessary expenses.

There’s a great contrast made between these people, but another interesting question is what they have in common in the story: they are all identified by their cultural “tribe.”  This brings up another interesting contrast: the man, left bloodied on the side of the road, was not identified as anything other than a “man,” or broadly, a human being.  The only thing we know about this person is that “he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.”[1]  What else was there to know?

By not defining this person, Jesus was not letting His audience limit their responsibility.  According to the Reformation Study Bible: “First-century Jews had various ideas about who was included in the category of ‘neighbor,’ whether marking its boundaries by community or clan affinities or by religious party affiliation (a Pharisee’s neighbors would be other Pharisees). Yet at its widest extent, the circle of ‘neighbors’ was confined to Israel.”  In short, the Jews were using tribalism to exclude people from the definition of neighbor, in a similar way people use concepts like intersectionality to include people over others today, but in the Good Samaritan parable, nobody is excluded.

To Jesus, the identity of the victim is not relevant – the neighborly thing to do isn’t to help because of who the person is (whether they belong to your own clan or tribe), but because they are a person – made in God’s image – who is hurt.  In other words, if there’s a bloody man on the road in front of you, don’t say God didn’t require you to deal with it because the man is not your neighbor, by some narrow definition.

Photo by Dave Lowe on Unsplash

Jesus was making the broadest interpretation possible.  When we consider the situation of each person on Earth – damaged by sin, robbed of their dignity, and left for spiritual death – isn’t everyone like this man by the side of the road?

While we can’t expect to help every hurting person we see, the message Jesus wanted us to hear by not identifying this victim is that we shouldn’t have any pre-defined rules about who is our neighbor when obeying the command: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[2]  Too often we create moral shortcuts about who to care for or not to care for, based on whatever our culture or group of friends agree on, allowing us to ignore obvious problems right in front of us.

If you find someone beat up and bloody on the side of the road, literally or metaphorically, help them if you can.  No matter who they are.  No shortcuts or pre-defined rules are allowed.

[1] Luke 10:30b
[2] From Matthew 22:39