Serendipity again! (And thanks to Geico for popularizing this lovely word!) A conversation at Book Group on Tuesday led to a phone call with Rev. Marlayna on Thursday, and that contributed to the conversation at the Deacons’ retreat on Saturday. Sunday I was planning this peephole when I looked at the day’s scripture, and the pieces for this peephole fell into place.
In his most memorable speeches, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” closely paraphrasing words spoken by minister and noted Transcendentalist Theodore Parker a century before. The Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus’ own message focused on our ability and our responsibility to participate in that arc toward justice. Sunday’s responsive Call to Worship contained words of the Apostle Paul to the emerging church in Rome: “Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable, and perfect.” Paul was an apocalyptic who believed the world was going to send soon, so keeping apart from the world to be perfect would have made sense to him, However, reading Jesus’ words, as brought to us in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke,) I think Jesus would have told his followers to conform the world to the vision of God’s Kingdom on earth.
In reality, history is never a smooth arc. Jesus’ disciples included many women, most notably Mary Magdalene, and Paul praised several influential women in his letters. About the time that early church organizers were trying to silence women, Pliny the Elder wrote to the Emperor Trajan that two deaconesses – early church leaders who at the same time were slaves – had revealed under torture that Christians gathered in defiance of Roman law to sing, pray, eat together, and care for the sick. Some civil disobedience! Through the ages, Christian slaughtered Jews, Muslims, indigenous peoples, and even other Christians to enforce their preferred brand of orthodoxy. It used to be that women could not own property and only property owners could vote. My mother could not teach school after her marriage, and I could not teach when pregnant. Many of these practices have been rectified, so I see lots of progress, but the arc toward justice still has a long way to go.
We are not there yet.
Lyn Pickhover, Would-be Perfecter