Glued to our television screens or whatever other news outlets appeal to us, we have been unable to ignore events in the USA during this summer of discontent. The UK has also seen placards and protest marches. We are not an island apart.
Inescapably we are linked with the USA. We speak the same language, more or less. We like the idea of democracy, even if on both sides of the Atlantic we are only belatedly recognising its implications. We in the UK are embarrassed by a colonial and patriarchal legacy. The USA is slow to come to terms with its nation-building history. Both countries cannot but respond to the immediacy of television reporting. It makes us shudder. What happens on the streets of Washington is felt on the streets in LA. It is also felt on the streets in London.
Along with the pictures that we see on our television screens we have to consider two thousand years of history. They lie behind our view of those pictures. For St Paul a new understanding of identity came with his faith in Christ. No longer confined to a tribal entity, a burgeoning community of faith foreshadowed an ever-widening spread of that new identity to include humans of every background and previous history.
In western Europe we have seen popes and emperors at odds over the centuries. We may be tempted to assume that the time is ripe to forget all that and to take a leaf out of the bustling mega-churches of north America. They have not been subject to the strains and stresses that have dominated European intellectual life and European power-struggles. They can start afresh without any burden of history. Lakewood church has a weekly attendance of over 50,000. Willow Creek and Toronto airport vineyard church have been influential in shaping UK church life. Trinity church, Boston, Massachusetts embodies a flourishing Episcopalian tradition. But pace-setting churches, flourishing as they may be, are sometimes not without their blemishes. We should not be too impressionable as we look to north America.
Of course, as Christians we have to expand our sympathies and understanding with every breath. Whatever faith is, it cannot be static. And we have to do this while at the same time remembering the great claim that we find in John 14.6. That is never easy but if we can enter fully into that understanding, we shall be the better for it, better in our kindness and human sympathy and better in our discipleship. Jesus, remember, was one who paid the price that misguided obstinacy inflicted upon him. He had his place in the tribe and empire that knew all about violent street scenes.
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