First, like so many people since Tuesday, the church constantly needs to be asking, “Is this the best we can do?” Then, we need to advocate for a just economic system that protects the vulnerable and refuses to devour widows’ houses. We need to demand a system that refuses to make the poor feel like they’re not full participants until they cough up their last five bucks until payday.

Second, in the meantime, we followers of Jesus need to work like crazy to be worthy of the hope people place in us.

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Love, you see, requires activity. Love isn’t an abstraction; it’s a way of living with other people that takes their needs as seriously as we take our own.

The way we treat those who are hungry, the way we treat the laborer, the way we treat the disabled, the way we pursue justice—these all have to do with love.

What we care about and what we refuse to remain silent about, who we see and whose voice we hear, how we offer compassion and how we stand up for those who’ve been knocked down—those are all about love. Back bent, hands dirty, feet sore…love.

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Popular Christianity promises a Jesus who only wants to be your pal, a Jesus who doesn’t want you to be inconvenienced, a Jesus whose real concern is that all your biases are continually reconfirmed for you. A Jesus who knows what true glory looks like. And, let me tell you, that would be a whole lot easier on me.

But unfortunately, I’m not good enough figure out how to give you that Jesus.

Instead, I’m so incompetent at my job that all I can manage to figure out how to give you is a Jesus who seeks out the small, the irrelevant, and the marginal. I’m only skilled enough to show up on Sunday mornings with a Jesus who thinks glory looks like losing, sacrificing, and dying. I hope you’ll forgive me my vocational inadequacies.

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How do we stand with Jesus against a world that too often tramples the best interests of women and the needs of children, that regularly ignores the plight of the hungry, the houseless, the addicted, the stranger, and the outcast?”

After all, the world we inhabit wasn’t created just to bless people like us; it was created to carve out space so that all whom God loves can live and flourish with dignity.

And if we want to be like God, our vocation is to learn to participate in such a world—not to try to remake it in our own image.

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Therefore, as Jesus embraced the child as a symbol of powerlessness and death, we’re called to embrace our own lack of power, relying on the love and grace of the most merciful parent of all.

Moreover, embracing powerlessness in ourselves opens us up to the welcome we must now extend to the little ones, those who’ve been left behind by the rest of the world.

Only in that realization can we become great. Because, after we realize that—sterling stock portfolios and winning personalities aside—any greatness that emerges isn’t something we ginned up on our own; it's God's.

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We no longer have to wonder whether we have any responsibility for our brothers and sisters, those who can’t stand up any longer by themselves.

We no longer need to ask whether those who’ve been forgotten, abused, or kicked to the curb are our people.

Through the grace of the cross, we’re able to see not competitors in the food chain, not threats to our individual projects, not nuisances for which we have neither the time nor the energy, but family ... family everywhere we look.

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So, requiring us to live lives that look like Jesus is a pretty tough thing to ask of us. But if I, who claim to follow Jesus, won’t live a life struggling to be faithful, how can I continue to call myself a follower of Jesus?

If I, who claim to live a life shaped by the cross, don’t speak up for the weak, the poor, the forgotten, the bankrupt, those to whom medical services have been denied, to whom injustice is woven into the fibers of existence—if I don’t lift my voice—even knowing that I don’t have all the answers—then how can I ask anyone else to follow Jesus?

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And even after all this time, the church is often just as quick to erect barriers to keep people out, turning customs into dogma, human precepts into doctrine.

Unfortunately, many people’s experience of the church is having the ladder pulled up just as they reach for it.

“Thanks for inquiring. But we’re just fine. We’ve already got things pretty much the way we want them … I mean, the way God wants them.”

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In a world in which every detail has to be nailed down before we move forward, where every nickel has to be accounted for before we strike out, where every eventuality has to be covered, the notion that God is in charge, that God will provide is seen as naïve—if not ultimately unwise.

But maybe there’s a wisdom that Christians are called to practice that trusts God’s love enough to give thanks—even when giving thanks looks like the last thing any wise person ought to do.

Maybe living as wise in the unfolding reign of God involves a set of practices the rest of the world deems gullible and unrealistic but which signal our hope.

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And as painful as it is, Jesus says that for the fire of transformation to be kindled—the fire of God’s change in the world—we have to speak the truth about our current mess and the new world God desires.

We live in a world where division feels inevitable, but Jesus announces a world where divisions are healed—not by passively ignoring injustice but by shining a light on them.

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