Joyce Shutt
Fairfield Mennonite Church
(11/1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, wrote from his prison cell in Nazi Germany, "The person who falls in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community wherever they go."
Political and religious ideologies easily become demonic. Our visions of party loyalty, the 2nd amendment, climate change, health care, religious liberty, immigration…. often come back to bite us. Witness the Great Recession from which we are just recovering because we eliminated regulations designed to protect us. Witness the Inquisition. Witness
Syria. Witness the horrendous storms and weather patterns resulting from denying climate change. When we fall in love with our visions of something as an absolute, we destroy the very thing we want to protect. But, when we love the people around us, when we care about what happens to them as well as to us, we create healthy, safe, and functioning communities wherever we go.
The Kavanaugh Hearings and mid-term elections are over. Thank goodness! Now it is time for all of us to make the healing begin, to let go of our anger and resentments. Not just surface healing, but real healing. A healing wherein we relinquish our need for revenge. A healing which actually listens to, values, and affirms the rights and hopes of those
with whom we differ. A healing that recognizes light or dark skinned, Christian or Muslim, male or female, straight or gay, legal or illegal, we all have the same basic longings and needs: to love and be loved, valued, treated with dignity and justly, able to provide for our children.… Our very existence as a nation, a people, our planet depends on our learning to live and
work together. Isn’t that what God wants from us? To love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind? To love our neighbors as ourselves?
Hurricanes Florence and Michael sent me to my Bible and the story of Noah. In Genesis I read: "when the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time, he was sorry he ever made them and put them on the earth... I will wipe out these people I have created….I am going to send a great flood that will destroy every
living thing." Who really knows what tipped the balance back then causing the great flood that seems embedded in all cultural mythologies around the world? Yet, we do know what is causing the radical climate changes that threatens our very existence today. Human activity. War. Cutting down our trees. Excessive pollution. Greed. Placing short term profits over long term
benefits.
Thanksgiving is not just a time for overeating and watching football, it is a time for being grateful, grateful we live in a nation shaped on basic rights designed to better the lives of all its people, not just the wealthy and powerful. Rights such as equality, dignity, fair play, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and want… But, we humans have
this way of taking things to extremes which inevitably leads to great abuses and painful corrections.
Thanksgiving. A time for taking pause. A time for giving thanks. A time for being grateful. A time for discerning what is truly important. When I get discouraged over our partisan politics and the way we are abusing our beautiful planet, I practice gratitude. When I am grateful I use less, need less, am more willing to accept what I have as enough.
When I am grateful it’s easier to be accepting, generous, less critical. When I am grateful I realize I can only do what I can do. In fact, my contentment and happiness flow directly flow from gratitude. When I am grateful I can let go and let God, recognizing that if we humans choose to destroy the world as we know it, the earth will remain, some form of life will remain,
and most importantly, God will still be God.
I am old enough to remember WWII. I remember the draft, getting news from flickering news reels and crackling radios. I remember ration books, margarine in plastic bags, saving aluminum foil and metal for the war effort, planting victory gardens. Small as I was, I still caught that sense of shared purpose. In spite of rationing and hardships, we
flourished emotionally and spiritually because we recognized our need to work for a shared goal. I remember a president who brought us together, elected officials who set aside ideological differences to find real solutions to real problems.
I grieve today’s "them against us" mindset where winning is all important. I grieve there is no longer a sense of "we, the people," of a common good, a common purpose. I grieve a president who encourages political tribalism, politicians who refuse to take responsibility, whose desire to get re-elected prohibits them from making wise decisions. I grieve
a culture that values stuff over people, profits over fair living wages, health care for profit, polluting the water, air, land we need to exist. For what? Temporary gains.
Thanksgiving and Christmas loom large upon the horizon. Dare we take these two amazing holidays rooted in gratitude, love, sharing and caring and allow them to help us become better citizens, better neighbors? Dare we turn away from our political polarization, our crass commercialism and become courageously grateful for our many blessings? Dare we be
grateful for the difficult challenges that allow us to flourish and grow? Like diversity? Like caring for those who are different?
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Instead of shop till we drop, dare we claim this season as a reason to start over? As a tribute to The One who called us to love one another, to feed the hungry, free the slaves, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, becomes advocates for civility and peace? Peace as in working together? Peace as in caring about those who
are different? Dare we risk blessing not cursing our so called opponents as He did? Dare we set aside our private agendas to come together to actually solve the life threatening problems facing our families, congregations, towns, communities, states, nation, the world?
When we love our vision of community, our vision of freedom, democracy, capitalism, power, politics, we destroy the very thing we love. But, when we love the people around us, we create community wherever we go."
Read past sermons by Pastor Joyce Shutt
