Solidarity Bible Quotes

One more, final question came from the audience on my last night in Newtown, and it was the one I most did not want to hear: “Will God protect my child?” I stayed silent for what seemed like minutes. More than anything I wanted to answer with authority, “Yes! Of course God will protect you. Let me read you some promises from the Bible.” I knew, though, that behind me on the same platform twenty-six candles were flickering in memory of victims, proof that we have no immunity from the effects of a broken planet. My mind raced back to Japan, where I heard from parents who had lost their children to a tsunami in a middle school, and forward to that very morning when I heard from parents who had lost theirs to a shooter in an elementary school. At last I said, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t promise that.” None of us is exempt. We all die, some old, some tragically young. God provides support and solidarity, yes, but not protection—at least not the kind of protection we desperately long for. On this cursed planet, even God suffered the loss of a Son.

If all this is correct, baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. To put it another way, you don’t go down into the waters of the Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!

The fact of the Fall and the accomplished redemptive work of Christ serve as the true foundation for the liberation of black people. The fruits of Christ’s sacrifice are not restricted to any one group of people because of our common human solidarity as sinners.

Jesus made it clear that he did not come to abolish the laws of the Torah, “but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). The life and teachings of Jesus, then, embody all that these laws were intended to be. Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like. This includes compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering. It means breaking bread with outcasts and embracing little children. It means choosing forgiveness over retribution, the cross over revenge, and cooking breakfast for the friend who betrayed you. As Elton Trueblood put it, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.

Are you angry today? Let us not be too quick to assume our anger is sinful. After all, the Bible positively orders us to be angry when occasion calls for it (Ps. 4:4; Eph. 4:26). Perhaps you have reason to be angry. Perhaps you have been sinned against, and the only appropriate response is anger. Be comforted by this: Jesus is angry alongside you. He joins you in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you. Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it. As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you. In that knowledge, release your debtor and breathe again. Let Christ’s heart for you not only wash you in his compassion but also assure you of his solidarity in rage against all that distresses you, most centrally death and hell.

The balance of truth regarding solidarity and corporate prayer in the Bible seems to be that no-one can engage in public prayer who does not know what it is to engage with God in private. But the man or woman who has begun to pray in private will gravitate to the fellowship of praying people in the church.

Most slaves achieved status within the black community by winning the respect of their fellow slaves, not their owners. Indeed, slave leaders generally secured their high standing by virtue of opposing their owners, not collaborating with them. Many were connected with the new religiosity in the quarter, as preachers, shamen, and conjurers - men and women who could join the natural and unnatural worlds together, whether through African folk rituals or biblical injunctions. Others were healers and midwives, and still others earned the respect of their peers in the field or workshop. A few secured a bit of book learning and were able to read the Bible. All were enmeshed in the expanding web of kinship and spirituality - connections of blood, marriage, and belief - that bound slaves together. While they may have exhibited some personal quality, such as courage, intelligence, honesty, or piety, that their compatriots found attractive, it was kinship - a sense of belonging to a common family, on this earth or in heaven hereafter - that carried them to the top of black society and provided the basis for solidarity. Whether their social position rested on knowledge of the cosmos or the key to the corn crib, whether their authority derived from the Big House or the quarter, it was to these men and women - not their owners - that slaves turned first in moments of distress. And few crises shook slave society as deeply as the transfer from the seaboard to the interior. Annealed in the furnace of the Second Middle Passage and the cotton and sugar revolutions, a new generation of leaders struggled to express the collective aspirations of a people who were often divided by their multiple origins, diverse expectations, and increasingly differential wealth.

Theories like this try to show that Jesus’ attitude to sinners was nothing other than a demonstration of the reconciled attitude God had already shown towards the world’s guilt. But what sense would this make of the many stern words of judgment in the mouth of Jesus? And what of the whole terrible drama, the tragedy of the Old Covenant between Yahweh and Israel? What of the departure of God’s glory from the Temple, and the angel, with fire from God’s throne, setting it in flames? Was all this a pure misunderstanding, corrected by Christ’s Father-God? Would not this bring us back to Marcion’s anti-Semitic gnosticism, in which the God of the Old Testament was an inferior demon? Surely the Bible is a unity?—especially in view of the continuity from the great prophets, Job and the “Servant” to the Cross of Christ. Certainly the Cross is concerned with Jesus’ “solidarity” with sinners. But this word, so much in vogue today, is much too weak to express the whole depth of the identification taken on by Jesus. The truth of sin (particularly when it is seen as the lie) must be realized somewhere in the iron ruthlessness implied by the sinner’s “No” to God and God’s “No” to this refusal. And this could only be realized by someone who is so truthful in himself that he is able to acknowledge the full negativity of this “No”: someone who is able to experience it, to bear it, to suffer its deadly opposition and melt its rigidity through pain. We

While Christ is a lion to the impenitent, he is a lamb to the penitent - the reduced, the open, the hungry, the desiring, the confessing, the self-effacing. He hates with righteous hatred all that plagues you. Remember that Isaiah 53 speaks of Christ bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows (v. 4). He wasn't only punished in our place, experiencing something we never will (condemnation); he also suffered with us, experiencing what we ourselves do (mistreatment). In your grief, he is grieved. In your distress, he is distressed. Are you angry today? Let us not be too quick to assume our anger is sinful. After all, the Bible positively orders us to be angry when occasion calls for it (Ps. 4:4; Eph. 4:26). Perhaps you have reason to be angry. Perhaps you have been sinned against, and the only appropriate response is anger. Be comforted by this: Jesus is angry alongside you. He joins in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you. Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it. As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon the mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you. In that knowledge, release your debtor and breathe again. Let Christ's heart for you not only wash you in his compassion but also assure you of his solidarity in rage against all that distresses you, most centrally death and hell.

A state may be defined as a polity with institutions of government and a territory that can be conquered and destroyed. Nation, by contrast, is a political community held together by shared memories and a will to act in solidarity. It is fundamentally a work of the collective imagination – a state of mind.

What is required for the salvation of the center and for the creation of a just society is the radical commitment to be in solidarity with those who exist on the margins of society and to accompany them in their daily struggle.

He called for all Americans to celebrate their differences but to never forget we are one people under God. At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us, ‘How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.’ We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity. When America is united, America is totally unstoppable. This passage is important, because it expresses an aspect of President Trump’s personality that is completely overlooked by the media. To Trump, bigotry cannot exist within a patriotic heart. To be racist—to hold any other American in low regard based on their gender, religion, race or heritage—is to be completely unpatriotic.

Many mystics and liberation theologians have further recognized that inviting us to drink wine as his blood is an invitation to live in bodily solidarity “with the blood of every person whose blood has been unjustly shed on this earth, from the blood of Abel the Holy to the blood of Zechariah” (Matthew 23:35). These are the first and last murders noted in the Hebrew Bible. In the act of drinking the blood of Christ at this Holy Meal, you are consciously uniting yourself with all unjust suffering in the world, from the beginning of time till its end.

How was it possible, wondered the abolitionist, to have, men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution.