An event that promotes health ends with an explosion, death and chaos. A fire at a warehouse ends in the destruction of a city. Water is good, but too much produces flooding. Think about it, this week's dance has been one of explosions, cities locked down, towns flooded, airports shutdown, lives lost, confusion, questions, chaos...
What does it all mean? How are we to respond? To the Boston Bombing, to the Texas explosion, to the Watertown turmoil, to life? In all that is happening, I have to admit that my first reaction is not one of mercy.
I find it hard to show mercy when I feel as though I have been wronged, don't you? What does it mean to be merciful, to enact justice?
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it like this:
You remember one day a man came to Jesus and he raised some significant questions. Finally he got around to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" This could easily have been a very abstract question left in midair. But Jesus immediately pulled that question out of midair and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. He talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. Three men passed; two of them on the other side. And finally another man came and helped the injured man on the ground. He is known as the Good Samaritan. Jesus says in substance that this is a great man. He was great because he could project the "I" into the "thou." He was great because he could surround the length of life with the breadth of life . . . . May it not be that the problem in the world today is that individuals as well as nations have been overly concerned with the length of their individual lives and concerns, devoid of the breadth? But there is still something to remind us that we are interdependent, that we are all somehow caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Therefore whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a million dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at May clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.Mercy, justice, and hope are brought about by and through our faith-filled actions. See for Dr. King, peace, hope, and justice on earth are in themselves evidence of the eternal peace which Christ on the cross establishes between God and man. For the Christian, therefore, a plea for justice and peace is a plea to God himself. Only when the church becomes a witness to God’s performance, in Christ through the Spirit, does it point beyond itself and into the communion of love, thereby becoming active participants in the building of the Kingdom of God. Christian love is rooted in the overflowing love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, who have poured out their divine love into the hearts of the body of Christ. It is only in this love that the church finds the ability to pour itself out into the lives of the ‘other,’ bearing witness to Christ so to bear witness to life, thereby letting justice "roll down like a river, and righteousness, like a never-ending stream." The pouring out of love and self for the sake of the other is the dance of Jesus' disco. No better time to step into Jesus' dance of insane love! Let's dance! Amen Jesus!
