Thinking the Best of Ourselves

July 10, 2018

Beloved:

One day of rain last week made all that’s green get greener.  The corn in Unionville is well higher than knee high.   My son is just back from a year in Asia and snapchatting Southern Indiana for his worldly friends.  They say this place looks like every schoolbook photo of America:  the fields and hills and skies, the barns with animals and trucks.

Talking about the American South in his book The Character of Virtue, Stanley Hauerwas calls it a mythical land constituted by a storied geography.  By mythical he doesn’t mean that that favored South doesn’t exist but, rather, that the story that constitutes the geography doesn’t quite fit the facts.  While he was speaking specifically of the South, his words ring true for any given land or set of people.*  We are determined to think the best of ourselves at all times, to nimbly rinse away what truth might otherwise leave a stain.

Church is no exception. Our history crawls with facts flushed from our telling of it.  We remember persecution against the Church far better than the persecution we inflicted.  We recall missionary zeal more fondly than the conquest and colonialism that traveled on those same boats, all delivered in the name of Christ Almighty.

Amber waves of grain are not all there is to see in an Indiana summer.  Poor people here are really poor, many of them drug-addicted and homeless too.  The same sun and rain that draws corn skyward makes their long outdoor days even longer, hotter and more miserable.  I see them in the grocery store, pushing a cart with things pretending they will buy, hoping to cool off a minute.  They summer too, here in our Midwest town.  May we not forget them.

~peace & prayers,
pastor annette

* Stanley Hauerwas, The Character of Virtue, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), p. 100

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