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Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
-Psalm 36:5-6
This passage, taken from the lectionary reading for this week, is fitting as we approach Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he references a passage from the book of Amos:
But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream. (Amos 5:24)
How wonderful it is to know that we are surrounded by God’s love! But we are called to not only accept God’s love but to also outwardly show love to others as we act as “reflections” of God’s all-encompassing love. That means showing love even to those people who make our blood boil and to those who we don’t want to have anything to do with.
God is also faithful and we are surrounded by God’s faithfulness from birth. How has God been faithful to you? How has God seen you through hard times? We must always be aware that people of different races are likely going through struggles that we cannot see and have never experienced. As Christians, we need to be “reflections” of God’s faithfulness by helping others in their struggles, even if we do not understand or have not experienced this struggle ourselves.
God’s righteousness is the standard for our morality. In Romans 8:31, Paul explains that, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”. And we know that Christ came not to condemn the world, but to save the world (John 3:17). So if God is “for” the whole world, how can we be “against” anyone? As Christians, we are called to “reflect” this righteousness back on earth, working to heal racial divisions and create new pathways for reconciliation. There is still work to be done and we as Christians should be leading the charge for unity.
And finally justice. God is just and fair, but the society we live in is fundamentally neither just nor fair, though we strive for that. How can you “reflect” God’s deep justice in your life? Our world has treated minorities with injustice for far too long. How can you stand up for God’s justice today in your life?
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