Doing Justice and Loving Mercy: Compassion Ministries, Mentor's Guide, MG16

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D O I N G J U S T I C E A N D L O V I N G M E R C Y : C O M P A S S I O N M I N I S T R I E S

Cheerful giving of oneself is the heart of the Gospel, and the key to urban ministry and missions.

What is significant in covering the broad scope of the concepts covered in the first video segment is that you scan all the pertinent issues associated with them. The questions below are meant to help you give a kind of “at-a-glance” approach to this material. It is unrealistic and undesirable to think that you can cover the specific details of all the things associated with poverty and oppression and the environment in your review time. Rather, focus on the general notions of what it means to be a world Christian, and help them understand how such a person might then interpret the pressing issues of poverty and the environment thinking and acting in the most Christian way possible, in other words, to behave Christianly . The issues covered in this segment all have to do with the question of difference, conflict, and peace. How do we resolve our Lord’s insight of Matthew 5.9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” and ”Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (cf. Matt. 10.34)? To understand the role of peace as a fundamental and underlying predisposition of the Church and the Christian is to resolve these apparently different statements. The authors of Hard Sayings of the Bible provide us with a concise and compelling interpretation of the relationship between the two. In speaking of the Matthew 10.34, the authors suggest: This is a hard saying for all who recall the message of the angels on the night of Jesus’ birth: “Glory to God in high heaven, and peace on earth among human beings, the objects of God’s favor” (as the message seems to mean). True, the angels’ message appears only in Luke (Luke 2.14) and the hard saying comes fromMatthew. But Luke records the same hard saying, except that he replaces the metaphorical “sword” by the nonmetaphorical “division” (Luke 12.51). Both Evangelists then go on to report Jesus as saying, “For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her

3 Page 165 Student Questions and Response

4 Page 167 Summary of Segment 2