Love Thy Neighbor, Conservatively

From a sermon by Myron S. Augsburger, “Love Thy Neighbor.”

“In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth” (Isaiah 42:3-4).

As Jesus’ disciples, his ministers of reconciliation, we are involved in a mission of justice to provide equal opportunity to all, opportunity to come into God’s family. We should love our local and global neighborhood enough to promote the kingdom of God and its values worldwide! We do this through the many Christian disciples who carry this expression of love and justice outside the four walls of our churches, into the orders of the common life. George MacLeod expresses this most effectively:

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his name in Hebrew, and in Latin, and in Greek, at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about. And this is where [the church] should be and what [the church] should be about.”

Many evangelical Christians are very reluctant to accept the fact that poverty for the millions is directly linked to injustice, to power struggles that increase the gap between the haves and the nave-nots.

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Too, it seems clear enough that increasingly one facet of the distance between the haves and have-nots of the world is “environmental,” related to the use and stewardship of natural resources which must be managed wisely.

I wonder: What would it look like if, more and more, Christians, as an act of faith, were conservationists? What would we say to our children? What would we hear in church?