During the month of July, part of my ministry as an Associate Pastor for Families, Youth, & Children involves helping to lead two service-learning trips with our congregation's Junior High and Senior High youth groups. We will travel to Billings, Montana and to northwestern Minnesota for a week of service projects and learning opportunities. During these trips, we spend time serving, learning, worshiping, eating, and having lots of fun together.
Our conversations during service-learning trips often lead us to consider what the Christian faith has to say about caring for our neighbors. We often spend time in the gospels, learning from the life and ministry of Jesus, and with the prophets, whose witness inspires us to discern a faithful witness in our own time. And every year, we emphasize the call to serve neighbors and to seek justice. Those two calls are interrelated but not identical. On a service-learning trip, we do a lot of serving neighbors. We partner with food shelves and meal ministries, community gardens and wildlife centers, shelters and ministries with people who are in need. But we try not to forget the dual call to also pursue justice alongside those whom we seek to serve, to ask questions about the systems that keep people in situations of poverty and marginalization. When we return home, we ask ourselves, how can we keep the justice-seeking alive?
In the gospel reading assigned in the lectionary on July 6, Jesus offers instructions for his disciples as they go out into diverse communities together. To friends and strangers alike, they are to proclaim, "The kingdom of God has come near to you." The work of serving neighbors and seeking justice is work that bears witness to the reality that God's kingdom is already among us, though we see it only in part. In the face of every neighbor, the kingdom of God has come near. In every act of service and every movement for greater justice, the kingdom of God has come near.
On our July 6 program on Sing For Joy, we will hear music about the call to discipleship, paired with that gospel reading from Luke 10. We will hear John Rutter’s sung version of St. Francis’s famous prayer, which begins, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace," as well as a sung version of Desmond Tutu's words, which begin, "Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate." And we close our program that day with a hymn whose words I will carry with me into a summer of serving and justice-seeking with the brilliant young people in my congregation. Hymn writer Jeffery W. Rowthorn penned the hymn, "Lord, You Give the Great Commission," an invitation to listen to the call to faithful discipleship. The hymn ends:
"Lord, you bless with words assuring:
I am with you to the end.
Faith and hope and love restoring,
May we serve as you intend
And, amid the cares that claim us,
Hold in mind eternity:
With the Spirit’s gifts, empower us
For the work of ministry."
Peace to you all,
