I saw the new movie ‘Lion’ over the weekend. It’s the story of a 5 year old Indian boy who, by mistake one night, boards the wrong train, falls asleep, and ends up 1500 km to the East of his hometown and family in the grimy metropolis of Calcutta. Unable to speak the dialect, and unnoticeable to the majority of the local population as simply another beggar on the street, he eventually ends up in an orphanage.
While the story continues from there, scenes from the boy’s time in the streets of Calcutta with other children, and scenes from his time in the orphanage stood out to me. Now, I’m certainly not oblivious to the conceptual reality of orphans in our world, but there’s no denying that my day-to-day exposure is somewhat minimal, and perhaps that’s why these scenes stand out to me so profoundly.
James 1:27 (NLT) says this:
“Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.”
As humans, we’re naturally prone to sort through information on an "applies to me" or "doesn’t apply to me" basis. When I listen to the traffic report on the radio, I tune most of it out, until I hear something pertaining to my route home. I can be engrossed in a conversation in a crowded setting, ignoring the noises around me, and yet still pick up the unmistakeable sound of my own name being used from across the room. We are necessarily selective in what we process, and this informs our thinking, our actions, our habits, and even our response to what we read in the Bible.
In all honesty, there have been times when I have read about ‘pure and genuine religion’ being ‘caring for orphans and widows’, and thought to myself, that’s an admirable exhortation. But not one which at this moment ‘applies to me’. Not because of unwillingness or intentional disobedience - but simply because of a perceived lack of opportunity.
This is why I so appreciate how Eugene Peterson translated this same passage in The Message Bible. James 1:27 (MSG) says: “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better family to be born into. My mother, father and siblings, all love Jesus. They have been loving and supportive my whole life through. I am neither a widow, nor orphan - and yet, despite this, I know there have been times in my life where if I didn’t have the family that I’ve found in church, if I hadn’t felt the love and sense of ‘home’ that I’ve found in Jesus as a child of God, I would have felt both homeless, and loveless.
My revelation is that this passage actually speaks to the heart of my saviour. It speaks to the sacrifice of the cross and pushes us to action. I may not encounter actual orphans and widows frequently in my day to day, but I certainly encounter people who don’t have a spiritual home, who feel loveless and undesirable and broken in their daily lives - and this passage tells me that the heart Jesus is this: to love the loveless and give a home to the homeless; that he desires the undesirables above all else, that he reached out and came down from perfect heaven to imperfect earth with the express purpose of cultivating relationship with me and you, and everyone around us.
Real religion is this: emulate Jesus. Be Jesus to the homeless, the loveless, the undesirables, the less thans, the would-rather-nots, the come-lates and leave-earlys; and tell them about the family that we belong to, the church that welcomes them home, and the Love that came down and made a way for us to be truly Home for eternity with Him.
Ephesians 2:19-22 (MSG)
That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.
DAN COMRIE
