This month at MCC Tampa we are celebrating and exploring social justice works and visions as a central part of our worship journey. And each week we are inviting one of our partnering organizations who is doing egalitarian, distributive or soulful justice work to introduce themselves to us again so that we might remember the breadth of our calling to be One Body in this city of ours.
The Way of Christ is many things to many people, and for me, one of the aspects that continues to make it such a beautiful way of living is its teaching that together we can this a better and more just world for one another. Jesus taught us practices that could ground us time and again in what is most important in life. He encouraged us to keep it simple no matter how complex and stressful things become in richer or poorer times: feed, house, clothe, visit, heal, educate, quench, free, respect and love one another. He taught us things like how to settle our anger with one another rather than letting it fester into an all-or-nothing matter where surely we risk losing much. And he seemed to have faith in us through the Spirit to learn to be compassionately just and secure in believing that we have enough to allow generosity to be our core value.
The stories we tell ourselves become the worlds we create. I believe this is what Dorothy Day was so passionately expressing. Maybe we did not have enough in our earlier lives - enough provision, enough love, enough opportunity – and we have fought hard to make a good life for ourselves. But there comes a time when this story of not having enough needs to change if we are to free ourselves to become part of a just world. As long as we live out of a place of deprivation – a deprivation mindset – we will convince ourselves that we still do not have enough long after we do. And our capacity to live a life of peaceful enough-ness and compassionate sharing to bring about true egalitarian, soulful and distributional justice will be dangerously lacking. In the end, there is ‘just us’ and Christ’s encouragement to us is that we are more than enough to embody the transformational practice of justice together.
This past Sunday, the Tampa Hillsborough Homeless Initiative was our featured partnering organization with Lesa Weikel introducing their work. I want to encourage you to familiarize yourself with THHI and consider volunteering for the important homeless count coming up soon.