Further Up the River
All summer long, the board outside the church office is collecting your questions — written on sticky notes, about God, faith, the Bible, doubt, or whatever else you’ve been carrying. Each issue, I take one or two and do my best to answer them.
“How is love made?”
“How can doing works of charity be good but also inadequate?”
“As we grow more fully as disciples of Jesus and a Matthew 25 congregation, how are we planning on addressing systemic and structural racism and poverty?”
“According to Walter Brueggemann, what is the primary requirement of God? What is biblical justice?”
Four questions this time, and underneath all of them is one real question: what does it look like to show up for people? Not just to feel love, but to live it. Not just to help, but to help in a way that reaches far enough.
Love, Embodied and Shared
Start with the most foundational question: how is love made?
I don’t think love is primarily a feeling. It’s something embodied — made real in presence, in action, in showing up. We believe in a God who is, at the very core, relationship: Creator, Christ, and Spirit, existing eternally in love with one another before there was anything else to love. And when that love reached toward us, it didn’t stay abstract. It became flesh. Jesus touched people. Fed people. Wept at a friend’s grave. Love, in the Christian story, has never been a concept held at arm’s length. It shows up in a body, in a place, on a particular day.
And here’s something worth naming clearly: love was never meant to stop at one-on-one. God’s love in Scripture is directed not only at individual people but at whole communities — at a people. The prophets don’t just call individuals to righteousness; they call entire nations to justice. That means our love can’t stop at private kindness either. It has to be embodied at the level of community — in how we structure our life together, not just in how we treat the person standing in front of us.
Downstream and Upstream
Which brings us to the second question: how can doing works of charity be good, but not the whole picture?
Scripture is unambiguous that we’re called to meet immediate need directly. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Welcome the stranger. This is not optional, and it’s not a lesser form of discipleship — it’s central to it. When our youth head out on mission trips, when we stock a food pantry, when we sit with someone in crisis, that is real, holy work. It matters exactly as much as it looks like it matters.
But it’s not the whole picture. Alongside that immediate work, we’re also called upstream — to the root causes that keep producing hunger, and nakedness, and strangers in the first place. Downstream work meets the person who’s already in the river. Upstream work asks why people keep ending up in the river in the first place. Both matter. Neither replaces the other. A church that only does downstream work risks endlessly treating symptoms without ever asking why the wound keeps reopening. A church that only does upstream work risks growing so focused on systems that it forgets the person standing right in front of it, hungry today. We’re called to both — together, not instead of each other.
Matthew 25: We Don’t Do This Alone
That upstream question — dismantling racism, eradicating systemic poverty — is exactly what led us to become part of the Matthew 25 movement, a PC(USA)-wide initiative Pine Ridge has proudly been part of for several years now.
Matthew 25 began as an invitation from our denomination in 2019, grew into a formal initiative, and has become a genuine movement — now embraced by the large majority of PC(USA) synods and well over a thousand congregations. It centers on three commitments: building vital, alive congregations; working to dismantle structural racism; and working to eradicate systemic poverty. Not as three separate projects, but as one vision of what it means to take Jesus’s words in Matthew 25 seriously — that how we treat the hungry, the stranger, and the imprisoned is how we treat Christ himself.
Here’s why this matters practically, not just theologically: none of us can dismantle a system alone. Systemic problems require systemic partnership. That’s part of why being a connectional church matters so much — why our relationship with the Covenant Network of Presbyterians isn’t incidental to our identity, but essential to it. We were never meant to do this work in isolation.
It’s also why we’ve begun building a relationship with Northland NetWORKS for Good, a local effort to connect churches and nonprofits across the KC Northland around exactly these systemic issues. We’re in the early stages of that partnership, but the logic behind it is the same logic behind Matthew 25 itself: alone, we can offer charity. Together, we can begin to move something upstream.
What Does Justice Actually Require?
Which brings us to the last question — biblical justice, and what Scripture actually says God requires of us.
The clearest answer in the whole Bible comes from the prophet Micah, in one of Scripture’s most quoted lines: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Three things, named with real specificity — not a vague call to good intentions.
The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has spent much of his career unpacking that one word, justice, and one of his most well-known and powerful definitions is this: justice is sorting out what belongs to whom, and returning it. Not charity given from abundance, but restoration of what was taken, withheld, or never fairly distributed in the first place. That’s a much larger claim than generosity. It’s a claim about rightful ownership, and about what’s been wrongly rearranged.
That’s biblical justice: not an abstract ideal, but the concrete work of putting things back where they belong. Micah doesn’t let us settle for kindness alone, or humility alone. All three, together, are what’s actually required.
Love made real. Charity that reaches downstream and upstream both. A justice that puts things back where they belong. None of it easy. All of it worth showing up for.
More questions are waiting on the board, and I’ll be back with another in the next issue. You can add yours on a sticky note on the board outside the main office — or send them directly to me via my contact page. Anonymous is always fine. Every question is worth asking.
