Audit the activities of your church. How many offer some kind of reciprocal payback? Is your youth program designed to reach lost young people in your neighborhood or to provide a safe haven for church kids? Are your home groups doing adventurous mission together or offering a cozy support group?
Luke repeats the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame in verses 13 and 21. These four examples represent the marginalized, powerless, and vulnerable as a whole. They’re the “orphans and widows” of James 1:27 and the “tax collectors and sinners” of Luke 15:1. Our attitude to the marginalized is to be shaped by our expe- rience of God’s grace to us. God welcomes us to his party, and so we’re to welcome the poor. The kind of fasting that God desires is “to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isa. 58:7).
We’re called to follow Christ into a broken world. Simply writing a check keeps the poor at a distance. But Jesus was the friend of sinners. As we learned in chapter 2, to invite someone for a meal in Jesus’s time was an expression of identification. That’s why Jesus’s habit of eating with tax collectors and sinners was so scandalous.- Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus, p. 82
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