Gracious Savior, Jesus Christ, you showed us that true leadership proceeds from the heart of a servant. Teach us to humbly submit to your example living our lives as acts of grace towards our neighbors. In your holy name. Amen.
As we enter the month with the Valentine’s Day and President’s Day holidays we can reflect on the connection between love and leadership. Pope Francis has been consistently taking public stances and making statements encouraging the Roman Catholic Church and I believe the world to grow and embrace the importance and the power of Christlike love to transform our world in powerful and positive ways. He is using his mantle of leadership to call the church to faithfulness in its walk with Christ.
Valentine’s Day has become about romantic love, roses and chocolates, and has forgotten that the love exemplified by the saints of the church is less about romance and more about how Christ modeled for us the love of sacrifice and pouring out our lives for God’s call and our neighbor. Real Christ like love understands that to love another means that we are willing to accept real personal cost for the benefit of others. Christ went to the cross and died for us and our brokenness in sin not for his benefit but that instead that we may be saved.
Understanding this gift of salvation and its accompanying deliverance from the power of death we are freed to risk living in love for our neighbor like Jesus. Understanding this real power of love thus leads us into true leadership like Jesus’, like Francis’. The power of this belief and faith is what has led Francis to challenge corruption within the church and the world. This leadership understands that sometimes the most faithful act is to challenge the powers of this world, inside and outside the church, and their visions of wealth and glory in service of self.
Pope Francis has challenged us to see the various ways we cause destruction and harm to neighbor and creation. He has done that repeatedly and is steadily calling us forward on a new path, one that clings conservatively to the calling we all received in the waters of baptism. We are called to rise from the waters and our dead, sinful, self-centered lives to be a saint, a saint who is set aside for the work of God.
In this new life we are to consider the impact our lives can have on each other helping and healing those in need, respecting and loving neighbor and creation. Francis has spoken about the dangers of economic systems that exploit rather support the poor. He has spoken about the damage we inflict upon creation with conspicuous consumption. He speaks of our responsibility to work for the healing the least of these and so reflect Matthew 25 in our daily living. And he has now challenged us to reflect on the responsible size of our families and how we out strip both personal resources and global resources with indiscriminate population growth.
Christ’s love and leadership are a responsibility we all share as people called by God. How can you allow your life to be transformed by God’s love for you in Christ? How can you can grow every day in every way to reflect that love into the lives and the world around you? And how can you embrace the mantle of leadership and help show the glory of the one we call, “the way, the truth, and the life,” our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? We do these things not out of concerns for political power; we do them for Christ and to be like Christ and we accept the cost even unto death.
As we enter the month with the Valentine’s Day and President’s Day holidays we can reflect on the connection between love and leadership. Pope Francis has been consistently taking public stances and making statements encouraging the Roman Catholic Church and I believe the world to grow and embrace the importance and the power of Christlike love to transform our world in powerful and positive ways. He is using his mantle of leadership to call the church to faithfulness in its walk with Christ.
Valentine’s Day has become about romantic love, roses and chocolates, and has forgotten that the love exemplified by the saints of the church is less about romance and more about how Christ modeled for us the love of sacrifice and pouring out our lives for God’s call and our neighbor. Real Christ like love understands that to love another means that we are willing to accept real personal cost for the benefit of others. Christ went to the cross and died for us and our brokenness in sin not for his benefit but that instead that we may be saved.
Understanding this gift of salvation and its accompanying deliverance from the power of death we are freed to risk living in love for our neighbor like Jesus. Understanding this real power of love thus leads us into true leadership like Jesus’, like Francis’. The power of this belief and faith is what has led Francis to challenge corruption within the church and the world. This leadership understands that sometimes the most faithful act is to challenge the powers of this world, inside and outside the church, and their visions of wealth and glory in service of self.
Pope Francis has challenged us to see the various ways we cause destruction and harm to neighbor and creation. He has done that repeatedly and is steadily calling us forward on a new path, one that clings conservatively to the calling we all received in the waters of baptism. We are called to rise from the waters and our dead, sinful, self-centered lives to be a saint, a saint who is set aside for the work of God.
In this new life we are to consider the impact our lives can have on each other helping and healing those in need, respecting and loving neighbor and creation. Francis has spoken about the dangers of economic systems that exploit rather support the poor. He has spoken about the damage we inflict upon creation with conspicuous consumption. He speaks of our responsibility to work for the healing the least of these and so reflect Matthew 25 in our daily living. And he has now challenged us to reflect on the responsible size of our families and how we out strip both personal resources and global resources with indiscriminate population growth.
Christ’s love and leadership are a responsibility we all share as people called by God. How can you allow your life to be transformed by God’s love for you in Christ? How can you can grow every day in every way to reflect that love into the lives and the world around you? And how can you embrace the mantle of leadership and help show the glory of the one we call, “the way, the truth, and the life,” our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? We do these things not out of concerns for political power; we do them for Christ and to be like Christ and we accept the cost even unto death.
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