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A family I know was waiting to adopt when the baby was born – very, very early. Baby Lucy is unbelievably tiny, but she’s one tough little cookie. Relatives, friends, neighbors, parishioners: Everyone’s helping take good care of the family in this new stage of their life together. They say it takes a village – but it also takes a church. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.
In about the year 197, the North African scholar Tertullian wrote that his pagan neighbors were astonished: See how these Christians love one another! And not only one another, wrote other early Christians: They take good care of anyone who needs it. One modern scholar of the early Christian era reports that towns with a solid Christian presence had a much better survival rate during the plagues that regularly broke out.
This is how we act on what Jesus taught us. The way we take good care of people when they need it – whether it’s organizing a casserole and carpool brigade for a family with a new baby or raising money for solar power for hospitals in Liberia – that’s the church at its best.
This message is excerpted from “It’s what we do” by Audrey Novak Riley from the August 29, 2019, blog of the Women of the ELCA. Today we commemorate Lawrence, deacon, martyr, 258.