Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada

Limp Bizkit, in their song "Take a Look Around," describes the world as a place that has seen too much hate - this world in which we live, breathe, love, cry and die.  A world where it's me against you, us against them, where he who yells loudest wins the precedent, where she who wields the largest weapon gains the right to become sovereign - for a day, a week, forever ...

A week prior to my holidays from the ministry in which I currently walk at The United Church in Meadowood, our family of faith was violated. Our building was broken into, damage occurred and things were stolen. As with many moments of distress and loss, it could have been much worse. That does not ignore the reality that any break-in, any theft, makes us feel vulnerable. It tempts us to want to dig in, retaliate, entrench - discern who is with us and who is against us ... temptations to adopt an agenda of what the band Soul Embraced calls the Shadow World.

The responses varied from concern to support, from questions to moments of despair. Some of these were others', some mine, and some shared. But as the fugue and numbness began to recede, what struck me most and continues to strike me is the response from the Dominant Culture. What I had hoped would be ‘an under-the-radar' approach to reaching out through local media resources to those who had stolen from UCiM, to request a return of some of the necessary things that make a church tick (i.e. computers and back-up USB drives) turned into 15-minutes of illusion, of temptation to condemn those who made a poor decision.

What has struck me most was the focus, especially within the TV media, on privacy and the resulting fear that can occur when personal information becomes public. I do not mean in any way to belittle or detract from the reality that such information can be and is misused. Anonymity, however, in a digitally cyber-connected world is no longer possible. We float as bits-&-bytes where images and names are bandied about recklessly, organically, and seamlessly. Being responsible with how our information is shared is practical. Yet when pragmatism devolves into paranoia, the Shadow World takes ahold of us ...

But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid:

for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people."

Luke 2:10

We live in a world of fear - which is not so different than the one in which the early church struggled to find hope and meaning. The Roman Empire was the social milieu - economic, social and political - in which our early Brothers and Sisters in faith struggled to find and be the light that Jesus' ministry offered to a broken and hurting world. The early church struggled as it was expelled from the synagogue and faced persecution from the Roman authorities who were threatened by the inclusive radicality that people of The Way modelled.

We may share a faith with the early church, but most of us are far removed from the oppression and death that following Jesus meant. As those in the early church had choices - so too do we now. The angel told the shepherds, the angel told Zechariah (Luke 1:13), the angel told Mary (Luke 1:30), and Jesus told Simon (Luke 5.10) DO NOT BE AFRAID.