March 8, 2020
Sermon Excerpt
Whether it’s underground networks of roots in a forest, or complex ant societies, or starling murmurations, nature can offer powerful examples for how to move toward deeper community and stronger resiliency.
…Because we especially need deep community as we confront the challenges of our time – epidemics, climate change, white supremacy, patriarchy, poverty, threats to democracy…
An age-old religious question has been: “Who is my neighbor? For whom am I responsible?”
It may have been easier to answer this, and the circle may have been drawn small, before transportation enabled humans to meet peoples very different from ourselves. It may have been easy to answer this, and the circle may have been drawn small, before TV and the internet brought us a constant stream of images and stories of human suffering and human joy. It may have been easy to answer this, and the circle may have been drawn small, before we learned that something we do in our backyard can affect someone across the world, or seventy generations from now.
Now that we know, deep in our bones, of our common humanity with all… Now that we know, deep in our bones, that there is no “other”…. Now that we know that we are interconnected….
Now we know that we can no longer afford to go it alone.
We can no longer pretend that we are not interwoven. We can no longer imagine that change cannot happen without all of us.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon