These past few months I have been involved in the current Occupy protests in San Francisco and in Oakland. What started out as a small protest at Wall Street has turned into a global phenomenon with tens of thousands of people protesting in Canada, Chile, England, Indonesia, and countless of other solidarity protests from people in China, Spain, Greece, Taiwan, Korea, etc. What's been happening in the Bay Area, and in New York, is that people have begun to look at the situation around them and they have come to realized that they no longer live in a country that is putting value into cultivating healthy and happy human beings. The society around them is no longer seeing Christ within the other.
One of the main reasons for my participating in Occupy San Francisco is because I fully believe that when Christ told us to love our neighbor as ourselves that he truly meant it. He meant for us to put personal welfare and justice above all else. Above profit, greed, and malice. When Christ spoke of the Kingdom of God, and that the Kingdom of God has come near, he was speaking of a world where we no longer allowed injustice to permeate our lives. Christ spoke of a world in which God demanded justice for the oppressed, the poor, and the marginalized. Christ gave us the example to live by: that God demanded that we seek out justice, but that we need to make God's command for a just world and turn that commandment and transfix it into the flesh by actively participating in our society and try to make it better through our actions.
The Occupy protests in San Francisco and Oakland are a reminder that we need to be vested in our communities and that we need to work together as a community of people in order to make God's Kingdom of justice and mercy a reality. A reality that is greater than corporate greed and a profit driven economy.
by Jack Stephens
jack.m.stephens@gmail.com
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