the Outlook Blog

Tonight I had the pleasure of sharing desert and conversation with three lovely women from my presbytery.  The topic?  A Shared Future.

At Stanford University Alexandra Lusak, Pastor of First United Presbyterian Church in Troy, NY, had heard a lecture by Byron Bland.  Apparently he had spoken not on a shared vision, but on a vision of a shared future.  He has a good point.  Whether we have the same vision or not we still have to live with each other.  With that in mind, what loses are we willing to take in order to be able to live with, dare I say be in community with each other.

This raised the question of whether Americans knew how to be in community any more.  Kate Kotfila, associate pastor of Brunswick Church and my mother, noted that we are suffering from all the anti-establishment views and life styles of the Baby Boomers.  The golden age was led by the generation before; a generation that had had to live through the depression, a time of shared poverty, and the war, where your life literally depended on the man next to you and the rationing of the families back home.  They knew how to do community.  They had to do community.

And now what do we have?  Lusak noted that "people don't talk to each other anymore."  Now, instead of conversing with the person next to you, you talk with people that are not there through cell phones.

With the rise of globalization, the perimeters of community are nonexistent.  This leads to options, hundreds of thousands of options.  When I was looking at colleges two years ago, Newsweek had an article stating that going to a name brand Ivy League college was not as important as going to the university that fits you.  When I did arrive at Messiah College, I did church shopping until I found the one that felt best.  We have benefited so much from other cultures and the ways in which they have expanded our minds.  And yet, at the same time, there is a danger of loosing community in the never ending search of fulfilling our personal interests and desires.  The current mindset is that if the going gets tough, leave the friendship, the marriage, the organization, the church, or even the country.

Last night, Laura Rogers, an overture advocate for one of the delete B concurrences, led others in removing their rainbow stoles when the committee joined together for communion.  She saw it as a symbolic act of acknowledging unity in Christ around the communion table.

What is most important to you?  What would you die for?  Standards of fitness for ordination, reproductive rights, confessional translations, or the body of Christ?  I did not go to seminary, but I am pretty sure that whether you are right or left, if you are a Christian, then the body of Christ is the most important.  So now the question is what loses are you willing to accept so that at the end of the day there are no winners or losers?  At the end of the day, did the process by which you lived out your beliefs allow you to look your neighbor in the eye and embrace each other?