Wednesday Wonder – October 18, 2023

I long for a simpler time. Pretty sure many of you would say the same. The state of the world today has me longing for a time before 24 hr news cycles and constant connectivity.

There was a time when we could all go without being contacted multiple times a day by friends and loved ones. Or, when we would have to wait until the 6 or 11 o’clock news to hear what was happening in the world. And even then, what we saw and heard was not in hi fidelity and exceedingly graphic. That is not the way things are now.

There was a time before cell phones. I would head out the door first thing in the morning and I would come back in time for supper. No one called to check on where I was, none of my friends needed to find out what I was doing if they were not part of, well, what I was doing. That really doesn’t happen anymore.

It is the situation in Israel that has me thinking about this. Information is no longer confined to the nightly news. We can watch it play out in real time. It is harder to find a space away from all this. Peace, of any kind, seems so much more distant.

When I was an undergraduate, studying politics and history, I was sure that situations like what we are watching unfold today could be solved so simply. I thought the brightest and the best would be in leadership positions and would know how to find diplomatic resolutions. I thought I might even be one of them. Naïve I know, but it was a simpler time, and I was young.

Then I would read my Bible. Situations like this have been part of history, biblical and otherwise, forever. How do we deal with the knowledge that the story tells us that God condoned one people attacking and overcoming another? People lived in the Promised Land when the Israelites arrived, but God said they had to go, and that meant, for the most part, by the sword. The weaponry may be more advanced today, but weapons are part of the story nonetheless.

That is the Old Testament God. When we turn to the New Testament, we encounter God as incarnated in Jesus telling us love and compassion are how to live. By this time, the Israelites have conquered and been conquered for centuries. They are a conquered people under Roman in Jesus’ time. And yet, Jesus’ contemporaries were awaiting a Messiah who would be a warrior king who comes to save the people and overthrow their oppressors.

As an adult, I struggle many days to make sense of who is oppressor and who the oppressed. So many can be seen in either role. Whose side am I supposed to take? What is it my faith, and the story of my ancestors in the faith, telling me about it all? Nothing seems as simple and clear as it did when I thought there could always be a resolution.

History is always bound to repeat itself until we learn the lessons it is teaching us. As we struggle as a society and world to figure out those lessons, I will have to find my own way. We all do. And so, as someone who professes to be a follower of the Christ, as shown in Jesus, I continue to find ways to live love and compassion for all. I pray for all to find a way to live together rather than to destroy one another, for whatever reason.

Love and compassion is the cornerstone. If we each live that, in our own small sphere, imagine what the world might look like. All those spheres of love and compassion overlapping and supporting one another. We may not know all the details of what we are watching on our screens each day, but we can know that the only way we can continue is doing our part, in our way, in our place.

And let’s pray for all, that resolutions can be found and peace, true peace which is more than an absence of war, can be restored.

Peace,
Rev. Mary-Jane