Scripture: 1 John 3:17-18
If any one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, sickness how can the love of God be in you? Dear children, order let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

Thought for the Day: The original Jesus movement was a call to action. While people gathered to hear Jesus teach, prescription he also exhorted them to resist Empire in all its forms and to give away everything they possessed, both materially and spiritually. Jesus echoed the call of the 8^th Century BCE Prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, who rallied against the development of an early Feudal system in which people no longer worked the land for God and each other, but instead worked for a landlord, indebted to that Human Lord for life.

Things are not that different today. For the most part, humans have little sense of obligation to each other. We’ve developed a system in which we are forever indebted to a bank or lienholder of some sort—the Feudal Lords of the 21^st Century. While many of us give until it hurts, and while millions of us volunteer in both faith-based and secular service organizations, the global economic system of debt has turned entire nations, like the USA, into modern feudal serfs.

Jesus demanded that we remember there is only one Lord—God, and that serving God means forgetting about profit and loss statements, and instead providing for each other ceaselessly. I believe the world is trapped in an unhealthy cycle of selfish debt, and the only way out is a complete rethinking of our global economic and social system. It’s a tall order, I know, but we have to start somewhere, and as people of faith, we know that with God, all things are possible. So why not try to change the world? It is what Jesus asks of us, after all.

Prayer: Help me, Lord, as I try to resist the siren song of Empire, which distracts my focus from You, and ultimately smashes my spirit—Your Spirit—against the rocky shore of selfishness and greed. Amen.