Faith and Fair Taxation

On behalf of our Peace and Social Justice Network I want to invite you to our Sunday worship which will be a little special this time. We hope to include more fully all generations into our worship and at the same time to integrate our worship with the social justice activism (letter writing). We want to connect more fully our worship, the core of our faith as community, and with our lives in society.
  It is my conviction that faith and spirituality cannot be separated from our daily social and political lives. Children in our Sunday school understand it very well. I found out when I worshiped with them several Sundays ago. The lesson that Sunday was about the Widow’s gift (Mark 12:41-44) and we were counting buttons in place of coins, yet all kids instantly recognized the injustice inherent in the system where the rich and the poor are asked to contribute the same percentage of their income.
  Kids in Sunday school instantly understand it. Adult Christians tend to have greater problems. The traditional Church overwhelmingly divorced faith from social justice. For centuries, the church over-spiritualized Jesus.
  We need to reconnect Jesus with social and political issues which were dear to him. What were they? Just read the Gospels without a religious/spiritual prism!

• Jesus healed people, especially those who did not receive proper care and attention because of the religious, national and social scruples and prejudices of those around them. And isn’t it a burning issue even in our, especially American, society, where so many loudly call for egocentric healthcare and scream against socially responsible care?
• Jesus also fed people because there were so many among them who could not have a basic sustenance even for a one day trip and were so seriously undernourished that they could hardly skip a day without a meal and without getting into serious problems. And aren’t we aware of similar situations around the world and even on our own American doorsteps?
• Jesus often taught in parables which open to us new insights if we are prepared to hear them anew. Take for instance the one about a hidden treasure in the field. Clearly something like that happened at that time, as it occasionally happens even today. But what does it tell us about the society, where the only or predominant hope in life for many is associated with an event as rare as that? Don’t we know it in our own society with lotteries, casinos and slot-machines, where especially the poor people lose their hard-earned money for a false promise of hope? 

Social justice is indeed permeating the Gospels; we only need to open our minds to these new possibilities. Almost every gospel passage contains in some way Jesus’ concern for the poor, exploited, marginalized and his personal invitation to all of us to join him in changing our world as God would like to have it. Let us come together and worship in the spirit of Jesus.

You can learn more about #FlatZach project by visiting our website or dedicated facebookpage.