INDEPENDENCE AND INTERDEPENDENCE

The Fourth of July! Independence Day! To be sure, it is a day set aside to remember an event in national history. And yet, so often it seems like we turn it into a statement about our individual lives. The rugged individualist who stands on their own, never needing any help from anybody else, independent—it’s a powerful myth in our culture, fed by stories of pioneers and settlers, entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires—stories that, when you scratch the surface, don’t really hold up as telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The pioneers and the settlers were given land by the government which then funded the development of canals and railroads that made survival possible. The entrepreneur and the self-made millionaire, more often than not, had parents who provided education and an inheritance and valuable connections; a government that provided security and favorable fiscal policies and infrastructure—all of which were necessary for their success. And so, despite the powerful, cultural myth, the truth is that we are not individually independent. 

But there is another story that begins with a declaration from God. “It is not good that the man should be alone,” God declared all the way back in Genesis 2, at the beginning of the Bible. “I will make him a helper as his partner.” And, as that story goes, God made the first woman. Or, in other words, according to this other story, God made us so that we need each other. God made us for community. God made us to be interdependent.

Which is something to remember and appreciate as you watch the fireworks—all the people who contribute to make our lives what they are—teachers and doctors, soldiers and first responders, farmers and bakers and fireworks makers—a human community in which the primary feature of any successful life must be the help that is given to others along the way.

--Pastor Don Steele             

The Birds of the Air

            It was a bit ironic that on Sunday, June 18, we began worship with a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter six, in which Jesus reassures people that they do not have to live overwhelmed with anxiety because they can trust God. And the verse that we lifted up that morning was this one: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:26). And it was ironic to begin worship that Sunday with that verse referring to “the birds of the air” because during the preceding week, one of those birds of the air—a pigeon, to be exact had taken up residence in Central Church’s Sanctuary. We assumed it flew in through one of the open windows in the Sanctuary, and while we tried to help it to find its way back outside, it found its own way eventually into a large organ pipe from which it could not seem to escape. That Sunday, June 18, a number of organ pipes were still disassembled, removed on the preceding Friday so that the organ tuners could reach the pipe. They were able to set free the pigeon, which flew off from the Maple Street lawn, alive and well.

            Of course, in the passage in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus was trying to reassured people who were worried and anxious. They could trust God, Jesus told them, and he pointed to “the birds of the air” as an example of how God takes care of God’s creation. “The birds of the air” don’t worry. Indeed, “the birds of the air” are presented by Jesus as being pretty passive. God feeds them. God takes care of them. And yet, in many ways in contrast to what Jesus was saying in Matthew’s Gospel about “the birds of the air,” that week, we were not passive, waiting for God to take care of the pigeon. The pigeon needed our help, and so we did something.

            And that leads me to two thoughts. First, from time to time, we all need some help along the way, because we all can get trapped. And, sure, we can spend time blaming ourselves or listening to others blame us for the choices that we made that ended up in us getting ourselves trapped, but what use is there in that? When somebody is trapped, they just need some help, and all of us need some help from time to time, and there does not need to be any shame in that.

And second, from time to time, when somebody is trapped and in need of help, it is our hands through which God helps and feeds and sets free. Indeed, it seems to me that is usually how God works—not through some disembodied miracle, but through human beings, using our hands and our mouths and our minds to help each other along the way.

It is hard to know how the pigeon felt when it flew off that Friday, but I know how I felt. I felt relieved, truly glad that the pigeon was alive and well and free again.

--Pastor Don Steele

Little Children

I just got back from watching the end of the year programs put on by the children of our Weekday Nursery School and Kindergarten. They were wonderful! And as I watched those precious children singing about Mommy and Daddy in a room filled with Mommies and Daddies, not to mention Grandma’s and Grandpa’s, I couldn’t help but remember that exactly one week before, I was watching the Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen. Evan Hansen is a 17 year old boy who is isolated and filled with self-doubt. As the backstory goes, his parents divorced when he was 7, his father moving away and starting a new family. Evan grew up being largely ignored by his father. And as the story unfolds onstage, you can’t help but wonder how that experience impacted him. And as I stood here at Central today, I couldn’t help but be struck by how precious these children are, entrusted to our care and worth everything that we can muster to support, to nurture, to see and to hear.

We Must Do Better

Yesterday, I was driving to the church, listening to NPR when I heard that on Wednesday, somebody left a noose at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture. A noose. NPR had a guest on speaking about it, Carol Anderson, the author of "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide". She suggested that after the investigation into the act, the museum ought to implement the noose into an exhibit to show that racism is alive and bold in 2017. Seems like a brilliant idea to me. It's devastating to hear stories like this. Just when we start to get comfortable in our own little world...boom, a dose of reality that shows us how far we still have to go. We must learn and then come to terms with our nation's real, sometimes ugly history. We have to put ourselves in situations where we meet people unlike us, and realize there is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, there is a lot to learn from people who don't share the same background as ourselves. A LOT. We have to do it for ourselves. We have to do it for our children. We have to do it for future generations, so that we can create a new chapter in the history books. It seems like every day we get another dose of bad news, so we have to individually, and then collectively, work hard to change that narrative. We must do better. Humanity desperately needs it.