Amy and the Most Important Word

The Most Important Word

I'll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age. (Mt 28:20 MSG)

The most important word in the Bible, suggests priest and Christian ethicist Sam Wells, is "with." God with us is the Good News - you and I and all people are never alone, no matter what is going on in our lives or in the world around us.

Wells suggests that we as humans would like the most important word in the Bible to be "for." We'd like God to do things "for" us, and we like to do things "for" other people, because in many ways, doing "for" can be a lot easier than being "with."

It's easier to give a hungry person a meal than it is to sit alongside that person and listen to their story.

It's easier to give a sick person medicine than to sit with them in their pain and worry and listen to their experience.

God could have done all manner of things "for" us, but instead God chose to be "with" us, to be born, live, and die, experiencing the full range of human life, in order that we might know God intimately and know ourselves intimately. 

Our doing "for" - our charitable endeavors - must be grounded in a being "with," Wells suggests. 

As we at St. Francis Episcopal Parish discern and live into the mission that God has called us to as a congregation and community center, how do you hear this today?

Samuel Wells' article Rethinking Service can be found here: http://thecresset.org/2013/Easter/Wells_E2013.htm