Today’s Reflection
Note: This week’s New Every Morning follows the format of our featured title, Rally: Communal Prayers for Lovers of Jesus and Justice, which addresses issues of social justice through a compilation of reflections and call-and-response prayers known as litanies.
I am a person of strong conviction and intense moral righteousness. I have a lot of ideas about how I think a “true Christian” should live in this world, and none of them is fainthearted. I don’t think Christians should make much money, so they can ally with the marginalized. I believe we must live very simply to care for the earth — leave fossil fuels behind, grow our food, try not to produce trash. I don’t think we should perpetuate war, and I feel racism and the love of money are major demons in this world. By now you get what I mean. Maybe you don’t want to meet me at a party.
God’s little joke is that many of the beautiful Christians I love deeply don’t share any of these convictions.
—Dee Dee Risher, “Ears to Hear: A Litany for Listening One to the Other,” in Rally: Communal Prayers for Lovers of Jesus and Justice, edited and compiled by Britney Winn Lee (Fresh Air Books, 2020)
Today’s Question
How do you manage your relationships with other Christians who don’t share your convictions?
Join the conversation.
Today’s Scripture
For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with excellence, and excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
—2 Peter 1:5-7 (NRSVUE)
Today’s Litany
ONE: O moving Spirit, displace us from our convictions
ALL: Into prayer.
ONE: Move us from our certainty
ALL: Into all we do not know.
ONE: Change us from warriors of righteousness
ALL: To people who know brokenness in ourselves and others.
ONE: Crack open our certain hearts,
ALL: Until we can whisper in the hollow spaces, “We may not be right.”
—Dee Dee Risher, “Ears to Hear: A Litany for Listening One to the Other”
Submit your prayer to The Upper Room.
Something More
Meet Jesus at the intersection of faith and justice with our new Lenten resource. In Where We Meet, a collective of writers and activists invite you to immerse yourself in the stories of Jesus and the early church throughout the Lenten season. Learn more and download a free sample here.
Lectionary Readings
(Courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library)
Looking for lectionary-based resources? Learn more about The Upper Room Disciplines.
3 Comments
While I am not perfect in doing this, I think 2Peter 1:5-7 clearly tells me what I should do concerning Christians who do not share my convictions. A Roman Catholic internet friend has begun sending me sermons. Yes, there is a core of Christian belief we all share. That’s a blessing in the spirit of ecumenism.
It should be a great day on the slopes with the wonderful snow that came. Will be off to find out in a little while.
Have to take advantage as rain is in the forecast for Wednesday.. It’s a roller coaster season of great and not so great skiing. Thankful for the opportunities that present themselves. Thank You, Lord.
Today’s question goes hand in hand with the one I asked the NEM family several weeks ago about how to respond to people asking how I can admit to being a Christian in light of what Christians on the national stage do. I am so grateful for the members of our family here who helped me with that.
I have many Christian friends who don’t share my convictions. The following is going to be fairly stream of consciousness, so here goes:
1. the Second Peter passage provided above and which Robert commented on is absolutely fundamental. So is 1 Peter 2:17 about loving the brotherhood and sisterhood of believers. I endeavor (with God’s help) to love all Christian believers with an agape love.
2. I believe those who I think are so far off from Jesus’s teachings are genuinely misled. I pray hard and frequently that their hearts would change on those issues about which they have been misled. I also couple those prayers with the prayer that I not be misled, either, asking God to help me see where my convictions are wrong.
3. I admit that this is hard and it breaks my heart. Lord help me, but I can almost see the Enemy grinning and rubbing his hands together over how Christians are being misled by certain leaders in this country.
4. It has also broken my heart that a number of my close Christian friends have taken on personas that deem it okay to say prejudiced things and make political statements based on false science. Also statements about the origins of the United States which are not true historically.
5. It truly breaks my heart, and I do stand up to such statements. I do this by first gently remaining silent when someone makes an offensive or false statement. Simply not responding or going along with them (which they sometimes expect me to do because they consider their views to be something all Christians today would believe.) If they pursue it, I state my disagreement or offense taken at the statement and request that they not continue down the path they have started in the conversation. Then I seek to move the conversation in another directions if they persist, sometimes citing scripture if I know of any that is helpful.
6. I can’t say that any of this is really changing minds, but I try hard to listen for what God may be saying to me either in my heart or through what the other person is saying.
I would love to hear others’ thoughts on this topic. Blessing to all!
I, like Rusty, stare at the person wordlessly and then change the discussion to an inane subject such as the weather. This conveys without confrontation, my annoyance and disagreement. I do this because engaging in a “discussion,” in the true meaning of the phrase, is impossible in today’s fraught climate.
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