LIVING CONNECTIONS

This morning seems to be a time, for me, of connections revealed.
First, thinking again of Jesus’s words as to what being ‘the greatest’ requires: ‘If any of you will be the greatest, you must become the servants of all.”
Second, my mind ricochets back to the story of the Fall. What was the first couple’s original sin?
Wanting to be ‘like God’. Perhaps a more accurate rendition might be wanting to be like how they imagined God Is? Think about this, carefully.
In any case, they wanted to take on something for which they were by no means ready. We still aren’t, but with God’s help we cope with it.
But too few of us ask God’s help with this; we act as if we are already gods when the evidence is all around us about how godlike we ain’t. And the first sign of this is our asking Lenin’s question: Kto-Kogo? Who can do what to whom, we ask, usually with a view toward being one of those who can get away with murder or, more benignly, not being one who can be harmed with impunity.
Too many of my own pale cast are aggrieved at not being among those who can get away with murder. As if their masculinity depends on them being able to go out and murder anyone of darker skin tone, and/or a different faith, whenever they’re having a bad day!
More and more, it looks to me as if our Original Sin may well be wanting to think ourselves better than (fill in the blank) as per LBJ’s saying this to young Billy Don Moyers, as he still called himself then. LBJ’s words are a bit altered here to cover a broader problem.
“If you can convince the lowest [white man] [Arab] he’s better than the best [colored man] [Jew], he won’t…