Many years ago I watched a great movie called The Longest Day. Do you ever wonder why you only remember parts of movies or maybe you are like my second son who remembers everything? I wonder about my mind’s inclusive - exclusive decisions, why I remember certain scenes and forget others. This applies to much of my life. Why do I remember some things and completely forget others? Where else do these inclusive – exclusive decisions take place?
In The Longest Day Red Buttons has parachuted into an enemy town, but his chute gets caught on a church steeple. He hangs helplessly over the town square below, hanging very close to the bell tower and its periodic clanging. The people in the square below only have to look up to see him and shoot him. It appears the church has made him a public display; deaf and doomed to destruction.
In the movie it is a church steeple, but are we intellectually, emotionally, spiritually caught in the vortex of anything that makes us helpless, unable to objectively function with all our faculties and unable to hear someone else?
Most of us have a general idea of who we think we are in our own environment, family, community, culture. How would you, no, can you define yourself and your values in a different culture? If you and I cannot, then how can we truly be intellectually honest with those different from us? Do we consider their questions legitimate?
Of course we can always simply ignore the question. Exclusion is a safety valve most of us rely on. It desensitizes us from giving any credibility to those who live and believe differently from us. It insulates us from the possibility we may be, heaven forbid, wrong.
In the first chapter of Romans Paul tells his readers we are all without excuse. Those who have never seen a Bible and never heard a missionary are without excuse to know God? If some of those who do not know God the way I do … know God none the less, should I not listen carefully to what they have to say? If I cannot listen carefully to those who believe differently from me, if I say they do not know God because they do not know God the way I do, do I know God at all?
Jesus told parables where the hated lower class Samaritans proved more righteous than the so-called good folk, not because of what they believed, but because of what they did.
Funny. I take comfort from the fact that Red Buttons did not die hanging from that roof top.
Micah 6:8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
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