I want to share with you several ideas that are extremely difficult to grasp and indescribably difficult to embody. If we are willing to grapple with several basic realities integrally related to radical obedience to Jesus Christ, then we have a chance of being the instruments of Christ in changing history. And surely that is the reason that we are here: to discover what it means to belong to Jesus Christ, to celebrate our belonging to him, to give ourselves totally and unreservedly to him, and to find out what he is calling us to in this crucial hour of human history.
I believe that radical obedience to Jesus Christ means to be identified with the poor. The gospel claims that God himself in his Son got into human life at the point of the weak, the despised, the rejected, the sick, the imprisoned, the least of the race -- the last, not the first. He entered into human life with the powerless and the vulnerable who were buffeted to and fro by all the cruelties of physical and human nature, Jesus Christ gave himself to the weak, to the despised, to the forsaken; and because of this identification, Christ was himself despised and rejected. Our savior was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The forsaken were his people. He didn’t simply dip into their life and problems momentarily and then slip out again. His father had sent him, and it was very clear that it was to the forsaken that he was sent.
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