Crossroads
Pentecost 22 (Narrative Lectionary 1)
November 9, 2014
Grace, Mankato, MN
Micah 5.2-4; 6.6-8
I want to thank Katie and Aaron for representing Crossroads Lutheran Campus Ministry on Campus Ministry Sunday. It’s a day to celebrate our relationship not only with Crossroads Campus Ministry, but also campus ministry throughout our church. You should know that I stand before you today not as your pastor but as a board member of Crossroads. Part of that responsibility is not only to proclaim the good news of God’s love through Jesus, but to thank you, Grace Lutheran Church, for the partnership in that good news, a partnership going back many years.
Several years ago, you provided substantial resources for the building of the Crossroads Center on the MSU-Mankato campus. You have provided leadership for the board, most recently through Arv Zenk and Kris Bauer. Several of your women’s groups take turns serving “Lunch 4 a $1” to hungry students once a month; that’s 25% of the time! Your Gifts and Memorials fund sent $3,500 to Crossroads last year and is on track with a similar amount this year. That doesn’t include the ministry support we send through the Southeastern Minnesota synod nor the gifts of individual donors. Your gifts make up a substantial part of the Crossroads ministry spending plan.
Katie and Aaron will say more in the Adult Forum, but your support provides opportunities for a full-time campus pastor, weekly worship, campus food shelf, and housing for Campus Kitchen, a food rescue organization. These ministries are all outgrowths of the Crossroads mission statement: to provide opportunities to experience the love of Jesus. Crossroads seeks to live out this mission through these guiding principles: welcoming and honoring all; discovering and responding to God’s call; transforming lives through relationships centered in Jesus; and serving through the example of Jesus. We can’t say it enough: thank you for walking with us at Crossroads as we respond to the love of God in Jesus.
That’s one of the issues the prophet Micah is addressing in our focus scripture today, our response to what God is doing. Bringing a word from God to God’s people as a prophet does, he did so in the southern kingdom of Judah in the latter part of the 8th c. BCE. It was around the same time that the Assyrians defeated the northern kingdom of Israel. Being divided into two kingdoms make the Israelites more vulnerable to attack. Feeling the Assyrian pressure, there was much political and religious corruption in the Southern Kingdom. Political leaders were mostly undependable and the religious community was not much better, thinking they could buy off God with empty religious motions. Micah is not Dale Carnegie, who seeks to win friends and influence people. But in the midst of his message of judgment he does bring a message of hope.
Micah does this by telling Judah that, all evidence to the contrary, God will not give up on them. Furthermore, they can expect that God can and will do great things, but do them unexpectedly. Using Bethlehem, the least of the least of the cities, as an example Micah says that help through a new ruler will come from a different place, in a different person, and in a different way than anyone could imagine. Of course, we who follow that itinerant rabbi who was born in that same Bethlehem and who was killed in the most God-awful and cruel way, see in Jesus how God rules differently.
Because of what God has done through Jesus, we respond with lives of justice, mercy and humility. As many have noted, justice is grace in action, and we who claim to be Grace Lutheran Church know this: that grace must have legs. In a world similar to Micah’s, Crossroads is an outpost of hope, helping students who are burdened with debt by the unjust inequities of the system to experience the love of Jesus. And because of your support, Crossroads helps students respond to God’s love in just and humble ways. Thank you again for walking with Crossroads and with these students on their journeys of faith. May you also experience that gracious and unexpected love so that your lives make a difference, too. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment