Praying for Community: Service and Poverty

June 18, 2017 ~ Prev | Intro | Next

During June we are concentrating on prayers that strengthen community. This week we will focus on the virtues of service and poverty.

Service is a central value to sustain a community as members look out for one another’s needs. Christ calls us to love and serve one another, but also to go out and serve those beyond our group. Poverty as a spiritual virtue, as opposed to poverty as involuntary economic deprivation, cultivates an attitude of detachment from material things, in order to focus fully on the work of supporting God’s kingdom. Jesus links these values in today’s gospel lesson. Matthew 10:8-10 reads:

Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food.

John Wesley likewise links service and poverty. He frequently preached about money and became frustrated with people’s attachment to wealth. In his sermon On the Danger of Increasing Riches he implores:

Do not you know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud your Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?

These are hard words for us to hear in our culture, as they were in Wesley’s time, and even in the time of Christ. This week pray on the spiritual practices of service and poverty, that they might inform your understanding of how the community of God may become manifest through our church.

Lord, make us what you want us to be.