Thought for the day – Friday 19th June 2020
Micah 6: 6-8
With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
As we start to think about opening our churches again, it is very easy to get obsessed with worrying about how we will be able to get back to being able to worship together, how we are going to keep our churches safe from deadly viruses, and how we are going to adhere to the various guidelines we are being given. How much hand sanitiser do we need? Do we need face coverings? How will people move around the building, once they have even managed to cross the threshold?
Let us take a moment, and ask ourselves, what does the Lord require?
To act justly – to act fairly to all people irrespective of age, gender, colour or faith.
To love mercy – to forgive those who irritate us, or who have hurt us. The image of the Patrick Hutchinson, a protestor in the Black Lives Matter movement carrying a man from the far right wing protestors who had been injured to safety, comes to mind.
To walk humbly with our God.
It is not about our church buildings and what we do inside them. Yes, of course we want to be able to sing hymns and join in praise to God. However it is also about looking forward to how we can walk, in new and different ways, with God amongst the people we meet, in humility, fairness and forgiveness.
Prayer:
Almighty and Sovereign Lord, may our worship be a time of seeking You in all that we do. Help us to fight the injustice in the world, help us to be forgiving and live out our lives in all humility, to act in service of You.
AMEN