If one body part suffers, all the others suffer. If one part of the body is honored, all the others rejoice. (1 Corinthians 12:26)
At the daily morning service in the church where I am pastor, we usually sing one of David's psalms as an alternate hymn. Several of the psalms are lament psalms, where the psalmist complains to God that he is sick or on the run or otherwise miserable. The other day, a participant in the morning devotional remarked that he thought it felt wrong to sing that kind of thing when you're doing as well as we are in Danmark, because what do we have to complain about?
That question gave me pause for thought. While we Christians in Danmark rarely, if ever, experience persecution comparable to what David describes in Lamentations, other Christians do, and we are all part of the same body whether we live in Danmark or in Pakistan, Iran and Libya.
And when one body part suffers, so do all the others, as Paul writes. Therefore, we can rightly sing along with David's psalms of lament even if we are not personally persecuted, because when our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world are persecuted, we are part of the body that is being persecuted. If my arm hurts, it's hard for my foot not to care. It should be just as hard for a Christian anywhere in the world not to care that Christians elsewhere are being persecuted, because when one Christian is persecuted, we are all persecuted.
