Church

Being a part of a community seeking God is important to Mike and I, and we have both realized this increasingly more since not being a part of one. We have not found a church, though some of the names of churches on the map are interesting: Infant Jesus, Jesus, Christ, and All Saints. We hopefully will be checking some of these out in the next week or so. It’s difficult to find out the time, location, and such, but we’re hopeful.
Our “church” has consisted of Mike and I waking up on Sundays and listening to a sermon (we just finished going through a series by Rob Bell called “Leaving Behind” that I strongly recommend), chatting about it and praying together. Anyway it has been really encouraging. The last message really spoke to us and I’m going to attempt to relate it to the masses (it is way better just listening to it yourself: Rob Bell: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst” look it up).
The series is on the Sermon on the Mount and breaking it down verse by verse. This week it was “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” He first introduced righteousness as all relationships, between others, God, the Earth, ourselves to be proper and full of peace. Bell went on to explain a couple of takes on it and ultimately what he thinks it means. One view could be that it is a verse calling us to be righteous and to achieve a certain level of goodness, of righteousness and then we are blessed. We must reach this pinnacle of success on our own to be blessed. This view does not resemble the core of the gospel or the core of grace. Another view would be that those struggling to wade through the guck of the world, the injustices, the sorrows, the conflicts…those who hunger for a shalom, or peace in the world: those are blessed. Those who are stuck in hard decisions of how to enjoy life and how to sacrifice for others to enjoy life, those are blessed. Those who want to throw up their hands in despair at the injustices around us, those who yearn for God’s truth and goodness to reign throughout the world…Those are blessed.
It was really encouraging to Mike and I to realize all the perspectives and insights into humanity we deal with day in and day out don’t have to reach a pinnacle of success. We probably will never figure out why poverty lives on, why my students probably won’t get an education past 10th grade, why we get to live in an apartment while people right next to us live in shacks, why we eat to our content while others beg, why we have money for a plane ticket while others never leave the city…it is not all right or fair and makes us cry out, “What is going on here?!” We want the world to be at peace, with all the relationships to be right: the relationship between people, the relationship with the earth, the relationship with God, the relationship within ourselves to be full of joy and goodness. We are not called to fix it all, we are called to follow Jesus and figure out what that means. We are blessed not because of who we are, or what decisions we make, or what sacrifices we make, but for the sheer struggle of hungering for righteousness to cover the world.