Coming Together (Reality Check Conversation)

How do we bring the world together to be united without forcing our opinions and perspectives upon one another?  We live in a day of ideological battle and blood shed where beliefs become weapons of mass destruction motivating whole groups of people to slay and mutilate another human being and at times even take up arms against them.  Beliefs, the system of assumptions and perspectives we construct to understand the world are transformed into ideas considered to be facts, reality making what is created to become a god who avenges the other, those who do not adhere to the same set of beliefs.  

What motivates a person or group to dehumanize, demonize those who are different from them?  How does following Christ’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves lead us away from beliefs into a lifestyle?  What keeps us from eating with those who are our enemies?   

The event, the story of the cross challenges all of life not because it’s a belief created by religion but because it’s an event that confronts the injustice of the world.  The unjust death of a person who, because of love, willingly died, effects every human being throughout history with a call to love others as human beings and resist, fight against the self-centered desire to force oneself upon another.  With the cross there is no longer divisions of rich and poor, ethnicity, race, or position because everyone is the same at the cross in being confronted with their own selfishness by a love that calls everyone to follow the way of love.  (Colossians 3: 1-12)

bound by the ego’s desire for power

we rape and kill to accomplish our will

seeking to gain to hide our heart’s pain

our song of death masks the need to belong

to the love on the cross where all become one in love

In a neighborhood shattered by economic despair with people chained to a past where those with power used them for their own purposes.  A place where houses sat burned out like souls without a body when the heart becomes too heavy and no longer cares.  That the continuing struggle for a new way, a new humanity, a call to change that transcended despair and healed the souls of the broken with the salve of love.  Where possibility confronted the chains of slavery and lies of powers that demonize the good God created and heal the image of the Divine humanity was blessed with.  

A black man walked down the street, his street, his neighborhood, where he lived.  A black man walked in peace with no ill will and no malice other than to play a joke on the white boy whose parents he was friends with.  A white boy behind his fence, at his house, in his his neighborhood, the same hood, saw the black man and was gripped fear of one who seemed a stranger.  Running to a place of safety the boy fled being driven by fear.  But, what was he running from? 

How does the cross of Christ bring the world together?