Last night we invited a couple from church over to our house for dinner. We had a great time getting to know them. It was a perfect, warm night so we decided to eat outside on the back patio. We shared our life stories together, and it was fun getting to know them better. Part way through the meal our doorbell rang as it often does, and we invited five teenagers into the house to eat and hang out. I hadn't really warned our guests that this type of thing happens all the time. We had some good conversations about the calling that God has given us in Pittsburgh, and we got to talk about the kids who were hanging out in our house on a Friday night. I didn't really go into too many details, though, of the kids in our living room who have become a part of our family. Three of the five kids are brothers who happen to each have different fathers. Their mother, a woman who we had developed a friendship with through outreach in the community, died last year, and the boys are social orphans who are in and out of the foster care system. They often come to our house for refuge and peace from the streets. One is already a convicted felon and a gang member. All of the kids that visited us last night are loosely affiliated with the local gangs since they need protection from the violence that hapens right on their street.
Our biggest goal in living incarnationally in Pittsburgh is to be able to show the love of Christ conistently and relationally to people. God has called us strategically to a neighborhood with high crime and poverty, and we love living there because we feel close to Jesus when we get to share the love of Christ with people that mainstream society ignores. We experience God's grace in low places with the powerless. When we share our house with hungry people that God brings across our path, we experience God's love in greater proportions than when we used to live as though we were separating ourselves from people in need.
Loving our neighbors and serving the poor are basical foundational aspects of following Jesus. Our faith will not make sense if we fail to do these things. James 1:27 says, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." For us, this means finding the orphans and widows in our own city where God has placed us and intentionally giving our lives away to them through service in order to show the profound love of Jesus Christ. It also means that we "keep ourselves from being polluted by the world" by walking away from the American Dream. The American Dream is essentially based on idolatry... bigger houses, bigger jobs, more power, worshipping our bodies and celebrities, and upward mobility. The way of the cross of Jesus Christ is downward mobility and rejection of the comforts of this world, and all of that so that we can experience the life-changing love of God by giving ourselves away to others. In Matthew 16:24-26, Jesus says, "If anyone would come after me, he must take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"
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