Thank God it Still Happens, by Pastor Ed Evans

In another online venue (www.LinkedIn.com) I'm involved with, there is a great conversation underway about Christian faith, works, and America as empire.

   

I suppose you could put alternative motives to nearly everything anyone does, as a farmer, a plumber, businessman or politician.  But our Jesus pointed out that it's by their works that we should know them, not by looking over their shoulder every minute to demand justification for each moment of work.

One of the posters in that venue, ended a very thoughtful post with this sentence:  "We witness in large and small ways and in the end the world will be transformed."

My own response immediately was "Amen, amen and amen. And to the end that belief and faith, like politics, is local, often the only way it will happen."  Then I began to think, if asked, what had I seen and heard that would speak to that opinion?
   
That thought put me in mind of some people I want to bear witness to in this arena. James has pointed out that if you "love" the naked and hungry and say nice things to them without feeding or clothing them, that isn't Christ's kind of love. For 17 years I worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, so that I was often in the midst of disasters, the results of flooding, tornadoes, all sorts. Other than the presence of Red Cross and FEMA, sometimes helpful sometimes not, the one presence we could count on were the trucks and buses of the Southern Baptist and the Church of Christ. While the Red Cross and FEMA were holding press conferences promising help that sometimes never quite measured up, these other good people rolled in unbound by regulations insofar as they were allowed access, distributing hot meals, water, blankets and shoulders to cry on. There was no proselytizing just human hands to help however they could. It took money and chunks of time out of volunteers' lives to do that, but thank God it still goes on.

Now, the Corps of Engineer people with whom I worked are "just folks", but because of their vocation, they are nearly all people of educational degrees, intelligent, creative, compassionate. But we were hidebound by regulations and FEMA interference. So we were always pleased in the days after, when the cameras and press conference leaders had all gone home, to see individual churches from across the nation arriving with work crews, the elderly, teenagers, middle aged, with hammers and nails and lumber. While the victims made do and waited on promises, the followers of Jesus Christ cleaned up unbelievable messes, in homes and in lives, and just helped wherever they could. Thank God it still happens. Nobody said are you a fundamentalist, a millennialist, old school, new school. They just worked together and prayed together.

During my life of growing up through the Free Methodist Church, the Baptist -- Southern and otherwise -- the United Methodists and the Disciples of Christ, those are the Christian works, in faith, that I know. That is what led Christians through our short history as a nation to build hospitals and schools and colleges, and just take care of people, whatever tag they're wearing. Thank God it still happens.