About Neighbours, Heroes, and the Stories We Live
What story are we living?
As people of faith, we believe a very peculiar story.
It’s the story where the hero sides with the losers of his day, the cast out, and calls to pay attention to “the least of these” among us. In this story often times the hero sides with unlikely folks of questionable character. It’s a story where weakness is said to be our greatest strength, because only through it do we experience his strength.
The logic of this story is missing per our own understanding. It says things like the first shall be last, to love our enemies, and that trouble is to be part of regular living.
Last June, 75-year-old Martin laid on the pavement, while a red stream from his ear formed a puddle around his head. The images showed his body, life-less in appearance, in front of Niagara Square, in Buffalo, New York. He was there to join the protests that characterized most American cities during the summer of 2020, following the shocking death by chocking of George Floyd.
“What did they see??!” I said tear-eyed. My husband sighed. “They didn’t. That’s the problem.”
At that moment, my brain wasn’t cataloging who stood for or against what. All I saw was an elderly man who, safe the fair skin, could have been the grandfather who raised me, with his slender frame and tall legs laying on the pavement. Nearby, two young men in uniform. One, who a few minutes earlier had motioned with his hands the equivalent of “back off” in words, along with another, both acting out their concern over the forming puddle of blood near their feet, devising quickly what to do.
Who's the hero in that story?
We don’t always get the benefit of front-row seats to witness our human fallenness in such dreadful realism. It’s usually far more subtle. Often under the guise of “I was having a bad day”, “he offended me first”, or “I couldn’t help myself.”
But this incident from last summer (and the tragedy that originated it in Floyd’s horrendous death) is burned in my memory and keeps making a re-appearance in my thoughts. My question to my husband shrieks against the strange moments of socially accepted division and disdain that have become normalcy online and face-to-face. I see it ALL the time.
We become judge and executioner without blinking. Just watch a person’s allegiance quickly evidenced when the wrong thing is said. People storm out of the proverbial room, Tweeter feed, Facebook rant, and even in-real-life social-distanced crossing at a local store. Whether the “you-do-you” mindset is threatened, or someone’s entire hope and value system are embodied in the candidate you just dared speak against, or worse yet, vote against. I see it left and right; literally and politically.
We no longer see a fellow human being, but a set of beliefs that by virtue of not being my own, clothe the person with the epithet opponent, and invalidate them.
I see us all part-taking in a collective shoving of one another, and the life-less labels we so easily slap on each other piling up with puddles of blood forming around our image-bearing status.
Too much? Forgive me, I don’t mean to be overly dramatic. But my heart is so grieved, friends.
How do we move from this hostile room we’ve made of our common space, online and right down to our church pews?
I think the answer to that is the peculiar story we who follow Jesus believe.
If we are in Christ the story we live out is so much richer and complex than labels and the rights we think they give us. I anticipate this will make some of you reading this, uneasy.
If you identify as conservative you may be wondering where exactly am I headed here. Those more progressive-leaning might wonder if I’m joining or declining your side. I am sorry to disappoint you both. And with both hands extended, if you self-identify as a Christian, I say, please pray with me.
The Truest Story
Here’s what I know to be true, and where I know there’s ample space to sit around each other, albeit uncomfortably, at least at first, but where there’s room to be cruciform and stretched and broken by the One who was broken for us all:
I don’t need to agree with you, to listen to you.
I don’t have to like you, to love you.
And while not everyone is my fellow Christian, anyone is my neighbour.
So, what are we going to do to live out our faith in such a way that others who look, act, vote, and think differently from you or me, can feel like we treat them and see them as our neighbour?
Do we tell with our actions the strange ending of the good Samaritan parable?
Do we care for our cultural enemy and go through the effort of ensuring their well-being?
Who is the Samaritan, you may ask? If you are a democrat, the Samaritan is a staunch republican. If you are a republican, then the Samaritan is a committed democrat. There is only one hero of the story we are called to live out, and He alone makes it possible for either to do the right thing.
I want to fight in my own heart the knee-jerk tendency toward tribalism, whereby an “us” is formed around those who see from the same angle as me and cease seeing and hearing anyone who doesn’t, feeling they are a threat to my/our stability. If the Kingdom of God is so frail that only one political party can guarantee the spiritual well-being of a nation, culture, or “tribe”, then friends, I don’t think that kingdom is built on the Rock of Ages who rose from the dead.
Please don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a call to sweep all wrongs under the carpet and hold hands and sing Kumbaya together.
It is a plea to see the other, even in the midst of our collective discontent.
The woman who stands for rights many of us feel are not rights as much as liberties with detrimental consequences; we need to see her. Not agree with her, but see her. Hear her voice, to understand the story in her mind. There is freedom in Christ she knows nothing about. If you follow him, how is your life going to show her a different story?
The man who fears foreign accents may bring foreign problems to his backyard, kids’ school, and neighbourhood. I certainly don’t agree with him, I’m an immigrant! But I need to see him. Listen to his life, to understand the fears, the narrative that roots those fears. Does my life, hidden in Christ (not secured by a political vote) tell him and others who think like him, a different story?
So much of life in 2020 and now in 2021 feels lived through the megaphone and technicolour of our screens. I want to re-calibrate my eyes toward the average moments of my small life and find who I need to see and hear, to better understand. Not agree with, but build toward.
In Christ, the only “us vs. them” is who we are before we know Jesus, and who by his grace I become in him. We all start in the first category, yet here some of us are. Saved by grace. I want to have eyes to see others accordingly. Politicians, like us all, will wither. And political agendas and slogans will come and go, but the Word of the Lord stands forever.
What’s the story we are living? Who is the villain and who is the hero?
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Pray with me?
God, teach us how to love and care for one another. When words need to be used, temper our tongues to say what is needed and not what will make us feel better, or the other worse. Teach us how to be kind toward the unkind, and love him or her even more than we would give affection liberally to a friend. Gives us discernment to know what that love might look like according to each occasion, and to submit to You, not to our fears or lesser heroes. We pray in the name of your Son Jesus. Amen.
