One of my professors pointed this verse out to me a couple years ago: "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor or the needy" - Ezekiel 16:49. Talk about a rebuttal to the popular belief that promiscuity and homosexuality were the primary reasons for God's wrath on Sodom.
And it's not like we need to take tweezers to the Bible and pluck out one verse to back our claim that Christians should be concerned about the least of these. As Jim Wallis points out, a Bible that does not care for the needy is a Bible with lots of holes.
But it sure is nice to be reminded of the facts that 1. followers of Christ should lead the charge to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and care for the widow, and 2. that more and more of them are.
The New York Times just ran this piece the other day showing that "a growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion". The fact that Evangelicals generally have become more socially conscious in the last decade is something Wallis called for and predicted in God's Politics.
While the change should be celebrated, it's no time to stop, lest we be tempted to look back.
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