Real Care
Do you know that saying about walking the walk and not just talking the talk? It comes from many traditions including the biblical one. We all absorb the seriousness of this wisdom because sentiments don’t feel authentic unless there is a follow-through. Since you care about loved ones, you show them. When you want the best for someone, you follow through with help.
The code of hospitality among Semitic peoples is deep in sacred literature. The Epistle of James from the New Testament is strong on this point. Check out the second chapter sometime. He asserts for people to say they are people of faith their actions have to correspond with it. He says, “If a fellow man or woman has no clothes to wear and nothing to eat, and one of you say, ‘Good luck to you, I hope you will keep warm and find enough to eat,’ and yet give them nothing to meet their physical needs, what on earth is the good of that” He goes on to say that a bare faith without a corresponding life is useless and dead.
The First Epistle of John has the same strong medicine, as we will hear this Sunday. Just read through this; it is a real challenge:
We know love by this, that he [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. —1 John 3:16-18
The early theologians and bishops of the church were adamant about this principle. Look at this from a sermon by Basil the Great of Caesarea:
“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”
Yikes! This truly gets my attention. It even makes me want to select some action for follow-through, which is the point in the first place. The various means of outreach at St. Francis Church are for cultivating disciplines of care and action. It is for our good and the good of others. Our lives are rooted in God who is generous, and that fosters generosity within us: the feeling and the action, the talk and the walk. Going back to the passage from the epistle, 1 John, because Jesus laid down his life for us, we are willing to show our love in real terms and actions to others.
Indeed, we cannot do it all. We can select the things we can truly do. Our involvement will foster caring hearts that find meaningful ways sacrificially to lay down our lives for one another.