The RMS Office of the Bishop in partnership with leaders across the synod has created a community discussion guide to engage challenging topics as people of faith. Each week we will share a personal reflection on that week's featured social statement.
Matthew 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Addressing Social Issues as People of Faith
Peter Severson, Director, Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-Colorado
When I think of what it means to live out my Christian faith on a daily basis, I often remember the words of the poet, Christian Wiman:
“Silence is the language of faith. Action – be it church or charity, politics or poetry, is the translation… Without these constant translations into action, that original, sustaining silence begins to be less powerful, and then less accessible, and then finally impossible.”
We decided to call this curriculum series Living Faith because “living” isn’t just an adjective describing our faith. Rather, it’s an active verb which describes what we do every day to translate our faith in Jesus Christ into the world.
In the course of that translation, we encounter the vicissitudes of the world: the concerns, joys, uncertainties and problems that shape our lives as individuals, members of households and families, and members of wider communities. As Christians and Lutherans, our understanding of how to address all of those issues faithfully is rooted in a process of shared moral deliberation about our commitments to love and serve our neighbor.
We are gifted with both a rich legacy and an active, engaged tradition of this deliberation in the ELCA. We have a body of social teaching, rooted in Social Statements and other resources, that helps guide our understanding of a wide range of major social issues. It is therefore incumbent on all of us to become equipped for our calling in the world, and to nurture others in the same. Faith formation is therefore a foundational and lifelong endeavor when it comes to being prepared to engage in moral deliberation together.
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