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MEDITATION:

Written by Timothy Keller, a contemporary pastor and author. This is an excerpt from his book “Generous Justice.”

When I was a professor at a theological seminary in the mid-eighties, one of my students was a young man named Mark Gornik. One day we were standing at the copier, and he told me that he was about to move into Sandtown, one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore. I remember being quite surprised. When I asked him why, he said simply, “to do justice.” It had been decades since any white people had moved into Sandtown. For the first couple of years there, it was touch and go. Mark told a reporter, “The police thought I was a drug dealer, and the drug dealers thought I was a police officer. So, for a while there, I didn’t know who was going to shoot me first.” Yet over the years Mark, along with leaders in the community, established a church and a comprehensive set of ministries that have slowly transformed the neighborhood…The problems of the poor are so much more complex than any one theory can accommodate. What it takes to rebuild a poor neighborhood goes well beyond public policy or social programs. It takes the rebuilding of families and communities and individual lives. This is why Gornik not only established programs of social service but also began a church that called people to spiritual conversion…the weak educational system that society provides for inner-city youth sets them up for failure. But when we add personal wrongdoing and crime to the larger forces of exclusion and oppression, we have a potent mixture that locks people into poverty. Taken in isolation no one factor – government programs, public policy, calls to personal responsibility, or private charity—is sufficient to address the problem.

PRAYER:

This prayer is from the Byzantine rite for the evening vespers service.

While fasting with the body, brothers and sisters, let us also fast in spirit. Let us lose every bond of iniquity; let us undo the knots of every contact made by violence; let us tear up all unjust agreements; let us give bread to the hungry and welcome to our house the poor who have no roof to cover them, that we may receive mercy from Christ our God.

MUSIC MEDITATION:

Beauty for Brokenness Performed by Graham Kendrick. This song was written by contemporary British singer-songwriter Graham Kendrick and was originally recorded in 1993.