"No Hands But Ours..."

Blogfriends Annie and *Christopher have been thinking and praying about our grace-ful response, as people of God, to the disasters that have been buffeting the planet. They have challenged their readers, in the Anglican Communion and beyond, to pray and to work on behalf of all who are suffering. Here is their letter:

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer have a long foundation in the Christian tradition stemming from our Jewish matrix. This triple counsel calls us to share signs of tangible grace with one another, reminding each of us to live in such a way that our very lives declare “God is gracious and bountiful, generous and merciful.”

Our holiness is found in loving our neighbor as ourselves. Many saints past knew this. Fasting was not simply a matter of individual piety, but a matter of personal responsibility to sisters and brothers with whom we are intertwined. And so we find St. Catherine of Sienna fasting and giving her meals away to the hungry. We find Desert Elders selling their woven wares to purchase food not for themselves, but for those without sustenance.

In the last few weeks, a series of natural disasters have ravaged the earth, striking brothers and sisters far and near. Some leaders within the Christian community have taken this as a sign of God’s wrath, singling out one or another sort and condition of human being for blame. Others are speaking up about taking care of our own first.

Rather than seeking to lay blame, to raise dividing walls for deciding who is our neighbor, or to get caught up in speculation about the end of days, we choose to discern in the signs of the times, that now is always the time for solidarity with those who are suffering. The signs of the times call us to live graciously as our Heavenly Father is gracious toward us.

To this end, we pledge to be signs of God’s generosity through fasting, prayer, and almsgiving in solidarity in a particular way with our brothers and sisters: To begin each day with the Lord’s Prayer, remembering that the Bread of Heaven at Holy Eucharist is intricately tied to striving so that all shall have daily bread; to abstain from a meal or simplify our eating habits each day; and to give the cost of this meal or savings from simplified eating to Episcopal Relief and Development or equivalent relief organizations for the work of disaster relief amongst our sisters and brothers both far and near.

At a time when our Communion is impaired by conflict and many search far and wide for signs of God’s tangible grace, we invite you to join us in the work of Christ, living into our Baptismal Covenant as we seek to serve Christ in all peoples, loving our neighbor as ourselves.


lux Christi vobis,
*Christopher and Annie

To all my fellow Lutherans, and to others of good will, reading this blog: I challenge you, as I have challenged myself, to join in this effort. I know that many of us are laboring under tight budgets, anxiety about our jobs and life commitments, and other stressors that often make us feel disempowered and overwhelmed; that tend to turn us inward. Yet Christ's "Follow me" is a call to follow him into the heart of the world's suffering and want. But he also promises to stand by us, to walk with us, and to give us his peace -- a peace that helps us "give until it hurts" with joy and gratitude and compassion.

So please feel free to copy this letter and issue your own challenge on your weblog, and/or link to this post, and/or copy the artwork. Please share this message with other online friends and favorite websites; pass it along to your faith community. Please share information about how to contribute to your church's relief agency, and other agencies helping disaster survivors. And please share your experiences as you undertake the suggested disciplines, as an encouragement to others.

Not only do I thank you for taking this letter, and my own postscript, to heart, but I thank God for you; because I know that, through this amazing online community, through your hands becoming Christ's hands in the world, God's love and mercy will be made real for many. Soli Deo gloria!