“Our Work”
June 28, 2026
Rev. Rebecca Migliore
Last week we talked about how “house churches” or Communidades Eglesias de Base were part of the “reformation” of Latin and South America, giving spark to what is now termed Liberation Theology. You got a little taste of what it is like to read the Bible together, to think about what God might be saying to us today. This week, I want us to delve a little deeper into this way of listening and hearing Scripture.
This Latin/South American God talk was novel and ancient. It was first written about by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez. In 1971 he published “A Theology of Liberation” with its emphasis on God’s preference for the poor. And these CEBs (as they were called) spread like wildfire, others began to try to codify what they were doing—which eventually led to the maxim “Look (or see)—Judge—Act.”
Look—be cognizant of the world around you and what is happening there. (The theologian Karl Barth once said that “we should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”) In other words, what God is doing isn’t just in the Bible, God is acting in our world as well. We have to have eyes to see—what is happening, and where we might be needed.
Judge—this is the section where we look at what we see in our world through the lens of the Scripture. How does what we hear in Scripture “dance with” or “inform” or challenge what we think we know about our world.
Act—this is where the true power of this way of reading Scripture lies. This isn’t a cerebral exercise of memorizing a text, or even of setting it in context and then trying to tease out what it means for us, personally.
No, this asks us to take what we have seen, take what we have heard from Scripture, and start to make an action plan (not about what we can do internally), but how it is that we can make the Kingdom of God come a little nearer.
We shouldn’t think this is a magic trick—that you talk about this one week and—viola, a new ministry appears. It is a discipline, a way of trying to have a relationship with the text, the God behind the text, and the world we live in.
This week the text of Matthew is filled with the word welcome. Let’s spend a little time thinking about:
--what does the word welcome mean to you?
--are there people in this community that we need to try harder to welcome?
--what is the writer of the gospel of Matthew saying to you in these two verses?
--(if you remember last week’s reading: does our value have anything to do with this text? Does picking up our cross and carrying it say anything to us here?)
--If you had to dream of an action we could take—what would it be?
Gracious God,
Thank you for inviting us to be partners in the work of illuminating the kin-dom of God right here and now. Give us eyes to see what you see. Give us insight into what we hear in Scripture. Give us courage and wisdom to dream, to begin to put flesh onto our dreams (to work them into a plan, and break them into steps and move us forward), to help us place some building blocks, some foundational stones, even as we try to live into being your own “living stones.” And always, be the whisper in our ear, the flash of insight in our mind, the tie that binds us to one another. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.