These past few weeks have been heavy for many of us. I personally have been involved with refugee resettlement since 2007 because of the Bible’s command to help the foreigner, oppressed, and poor, and have many friends who are refugees, including friends in our Mosaic family! While prayer and advocacy are important, God has led me to make sure that I, and we as a church, are also hands-on in helping real people living in our communities during this crisis. I need this in order to get my heart and mind above the noise and make sure I’m being a real part of the solution, not just talking about it.
A Biblical Understanding of Romans 13, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities…”
I’ve been seeing Romans 13 used a lot on social media these past few weeks. I’d like to pause and look at a biblical understanding of the passage, and how to apply it during our current cultural moment, using responsible hermeneutics.
When “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” falls short
If “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” means I follow the Kingdom of Jesus and will live, advocate, and vote according to those values, and I will stand up to the Donkey and the Elephant when they aren’t, then I’m all for it.
But where I’ve most often heard “I follow the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant” used is by Christians who also say things like “Just preach Jesus (and don’t talk about issues of oppression and injustice, despite what the Bible clearly commands).”
Psalm 35 Devotional – Continued Praise Under Continued Pain
We love these pretty red bows in our contemporary sermons and ideas of prayer. But the psalm does not stop here. The transition from verse 10 to 11 feels like taking a stick shift automobile from 5th gear to 2nd. One minute the psalmist is extolling God for rescuing the poor from their oppressor, the next he is writing about his ongoing, brutal oppression. Verses 1-10 paint the picture that God has throttled the oppressors and the poor (and the psalmist, written as one of the poor) are free. Verses 11 and following take us down the dark road of the real, daily, in-your-face oppression that the psalmist is still currently under.
Psalm 13 Devotional – How Long Oh Lord, How Long?
I have heard lament described as a language of prayer. Have you ever been in a foreign country and you didn’t speak the language? If you tried venturing away from your interpreter, guide, or the comfortable confines of your English-speaking resort, you quickly find yourself baffled and bewildered. You need a common language to connect and communicate. God gave us the language of lament when we are suffering and everything is falling apart around us. A language that acknowledges the state of the world we live in. If we don’t know this language, mostly because our church tradition has neglected it in favor of products that sell better, we will be baffled and bewildered when suffering hits us.
Psalm 9 Devotional – The God of the Oppressed
Oppression and injustice happen when a person or a group of people is deprived, usually by law or by force, of basic and equal rights that are allotted to others. Often oppression and injustice use categories of people to afflict their damages. For example, our country was founded and built on laws that allowed for the brutal killing and enslavement of blacks and Native Americans, with many laws explicitly benefiting white people by name. This is oppression and injustice. Refugees are oppressed by something going on in their home country that they are fleeing from in order to save their lives. This is often religious or ethnic persecution and is often related to wars or guerrilla warfare dangers. The oppressed are the ones under the boot of those with power. We get less comfortable talking about oppression and injustice when we start looking at the vast inequities in the United States between whites and people of color. It’s a lot easier to talk about oppression of biblical times and the distant past, but much more uneasy when it’s right under our nose and we may or may not even be aware of it or acknowledge it.