As I write, my vacation days are coming to an end. The last two weeks have been very restful, and I have enjoyed my backyard during these warmer days. As I mentioned last week, the staff have so graciously stepped forward to help write, to encourage those who read the senior's blog.
Today we have devotional from Rob:some thoughts on neighbours…
One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?”
The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”
“Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”
I’m not sure how you’ve been processing the upheaval, pain, outrage, and protesting that has filled this past month. It has definitely brought focus on issues around police brutality, racism, privilege, power structures, human rights, advocacy, and justice.
These are important matters and we need to find ways to respond. We need to wrestle with how we represent Jesus’s vision of peace and love and justice in the context of these issues and work to find ways to affect change. I’d like to suggest that a starting point in all of this is a commitment to be people who work to dismantle the old and powerful story of US versus Them.
It strikes me that there is a tendency within all of us to build ourselves up by putting down others, as if our value is dependent on devaluing someone else. Debbie Blue made the observation that ‘it’s almost like we don’t know how to be people in this world, how to be in community, how else to be unified unless it’s over against something, someone, some group, or someone else’s way of being.’
Jesus, on the other hand, was a picture of inclusion. His way of living offers freedom from the false way in which we classify others and ourselves. As you read through the Gospels you will notice that Jesus broke every rule in the social structures of the Jewish culture. He spent time with poor people, sick people, disabled people, dead people, unclean people, children, women, Pharisees, tax collectors, sinners, Samaritans, Gentiles—and the list goes on…
When Jesus was asked about how to live in a way that honoured God he responded, ‘Love God with everything you are and then love your neighbour as yourself.’ In this statement we see that loving and caring for our neighbours is to be a natural and logical outgrowth of our love for God. For this to be possible, we need the lens of Jesus to correct our sight, to correct how we see others. Seeing like Jesus prevents us from separating or excluding people because it tunes us into something outside of ourselves. It tunes us into the deep, wide, and grace-filled love of Jesus.
Sometimes it’s easy to characterize the issues our country is struggling with, (things like racism, sexism, classism, or ableism) as being problems that are caused by a certain group or as a result of a few ‘bad apples.’ But the truth is we all carry with us bias and fear and preference. We all, in our action or lack of action, in our speaking out or in our silence, either contribute to the problem or serve as ambassadors of change
Michael Jackson’s song Man in the Mirror has been playing in my head the last several weeks. (I am including a link to the official video of the song in case you are unfamiliar with it click here.) It’s the chorus of the song that has really got me thinking:
I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
So, in the spirit of this song, here are three questions that I have been asking myself. Perhaps they are questions you can ask of yourself…
1. Who are the people I tend to avoid?
2. Are there people that I ‘put down’ so that you can feel better about
yourself?
3. How can I represent Jesus’s vision of peace, and love, and justice
in how I live?
I’ll leave you with a poem written by Ryan McCormick that you may wish to use as an entrance point for contemplating what it means to love God and love our neighbours…
We Are Trees
What if we were more like trees,
converting carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen?
We live in a bite-back, one-up world where anger,
bitterness, resentment, prejudice and violence are the soul’s carbon dioxide.
We could receive curses, then give blessings.
We could get manipulated, then speak the truth.
We could be spat upon, then respond with grace.
We could be struck, but not strike back.
The thing about trees is that they need to absorb CO2
in order to live and grow.
We could do the same.
We could absorb hate, discrimination, judgment and harm,
and use forgiveness to demonstrate healing and love.
This would free us from having to avenge our own injustices
and allow us to open our arms, welcoming
those who are often unwelcome and unwanted.
Photosynthesis and forgiveness are miracles of life.
Without them, the world is a hostile place.
Thank you, Rob for writing the blog post for this week and sharing from your corner. If you would like to drop him a note his email is heypriest@gmail.com
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