All in the Family

As of August, my family will have lived in Southeastern Connecticut for ten years. My, how time flies when you’re having fun! The biggest adjustment when moving to this area was learning all the new traffic laws. Well, it’s not that the laws are really all that different, it’s just that drivers in New London county have their own unique interpretation of those laws. For instance, turn signals are not required here. You see someone using their turn signal and you think to yourself, “Ha, he’s from out-of-town!” And when a light runs red, that means someone behind you three or four cars back is supposed to stop.

I learned a new traffic law this week. If there’s a left hand turn lane at a light up ahead say, 200 feet away, you can swing out across the double yellow line and drive against oncoming traffic until you get to that turn lane. That’s an exciting rule! I haven’t tried it yet, but Kay tells me I’m learning the other ones pretty well.

So what happens when we get behind the wheel? Is it a Dr. Jeckle-Mr. Hyde kind of thing? As soon as the fireworks were over last evening we heard ambulance and fire truck sirens wailing down our street as thousands of mad motorists played bumper cars in the streets of New London.

They say it’s a territorial thing, that we all want to control our own space and that would be any space we think our car belongs in. Forget the bigger picture, that we are actually a community of drivers who need to cooperate and share the road. It’s everybody out for themself!

They didn’t have cars back in Jacob and Essau’s day, but if they did, the brothers would have made lousy drivers. They both had turf issues. All Essau cared about was his hungry belly: “Forget the family, just give me what I want and give it to me now!” And Jacob wasn’t any better. By hook and crook he stole Essau’s inheritance and blessing for himself.

Of course, as some of us know all too well, it can be difficult getting along in a family like that. It’s also difficult to get along if society is like that. When we lose sight of the bigger picture, that we’re really a community of people who need to share, to cooperate in the same space, then they have to send out the ambulances and fire trucks.

It happened in London, England this past week when terrorists struck the subway and bus system there, killing scores of people and injuring hundreds more. For many people, it was September 11, 2001 all over again. The shock, grief and fear all returned. Of course, leaders in England and the United States were quick to assure us and the rest of the world that the perpetrators of these violent acts would be hunted down and brought to justice. We will not back down. We will strengthen our resolve. Brute force will bring terrorism under control.

We’ve seen a lot of brute force in the past several years, but can’t help but wonder if it’s doing any good. We hope it is, but could it be we’re just dealing with symptoms rather than the systemic social problems? Are we having a knee-jerk reaction, grabbing the wheel, taking control, plowing the car headlong into traffic? Is this some Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest instinct? Have we been reduced to turf battles over space, getting our way, satisfying our hungry belly?

University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape recently completed a study that led to a book titled, “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.” He studied 15 major suicide bombing campaigns between 1980 and 2003. He discovered that turf battles, not religion, are the overwhelming reason why terrorists are willing to kill themselves and others. Religion may be used as a recruiting tool, but it’s nationalist fervor that fuels terrorism, the belief that drastic measures are required to get foreign occupying forces out of one’s homeland. When opposing forces claim dibs on the same space - physical space, political space, economic space, cultural space - people sometimes resort to drastic measures.

In our lesson from Romans today, the Apostle Paul speaks of a different way of seeing God’s creation and our place in it. He talks about not seeing things “in the flesh”, but in the Spirit, that ultimately what connects us all is not the physical realm, not the stuff of this world at all, but our relationship with God. In this passage he speaks specifically about followers of Christ, but a few verses later he speaks more broadly, saying, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.”

All things, all people, working together for good because they love God and as a consequence, love all things of God, God’s creation and God’s children. Sounds good to me. It would be all in the family then. We would want to honor our inheritance first and foremost, our relationship with God and our participation in God’s family. We would want to get along and cooperate and share what we have. Turf battles would give way to bridge building, community building, reconciliation.

We are members of Christ’s Church and as such, have a great opportunity and repsonsibility to show the world how this works. As we are forgiven in Christ and forgive one another, as we set personal agendas aside for a greater good, as we let go of turf battles and boundaries and learn to cooperate for common purpose, we demonstrate how this works, how things can be in this city and in our world. We have this example, this hope, to bring to troubled times.

But how can any one of us or even this community of faith hope to make any

real difference when there are so many problems in the world?

Author Loren C. Eiseley gives an answer in the story, “The Star Thrower”:

As the old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a young man picking up starfish and flinging them into the sea. Catching up to the youth, he asked why he was doing this. The answer was that the stranded starfish would die if left until the morning sun. "But the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of starfish," countered the old man. "How can your effort make any difference?" The young man looked at the starfish in his hand and threw it to safety in the waves. "It makes a difference to this one."

We have a different way of seeing things, a spiritual perspective, a Christ-orientation, a God-centered way of seeing things that makes real peace possible. There is hope for the family of God and we have this time and this opportunity to model it and share it.

We sow seeds in a field. Some won’t make it, but some will. And that can make all the difference.