• We very much need your prayers for the officers’ retreat which begins tomorrow evening with dinner and runs throughSaturday lunch. We’ll be taking our key from the first chapter of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, which distinguishes between fellowship founded upon human vision and desires, and fellowship founded upon Christ and what he has done, and is doing, in and through us. Please pray.
• Matt 9:10-13 — “And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. 11And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ 12But when he heard it, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
• There’s no way to actually love the lost without also being subject to criticism for enabling or endorsing sin. By the time you are close enough to someone that they know you love them, and will listen to whatever you have to say (such is the power of love), you are also close enough to be painted with the same brush. Love is messy because it ignores the barriers that allow us to keep tidy our piety.
• Much of what passes for evangelism is something like short-term missions: you’re in someone’s life only deep enough to feel that you’ve discharged your duty. Now you can get out and get on with your own affairs. That friend who is the addict, or the investment banker, or an angry-but-lonely-lesbian, is a kind of trophy relationship you can speak of at church so people know you’re “real” and that you “care deeply” about others. But in fact you never got deep enough that the addict, or banker, or lonely person is calling you, and you alone, at 2:00 am in their dark night of the soul.
• Love extends so far past words and gestures that you will find, with your non-believing friends, that the real question is “who am I?” By knowing our love, our friends — Christian and non-Christian alike — will naturally discover Christ in us, and his mercy. More superficial relationships are the quick and easy sacrifice. But he doesn’t desire that. He desires that our lives reveal his mercy, that sinners would find Him.