Last year for Christmas my sister gave me a mug that said “2020: Horrible! Do not recommend” and had a 1 star rating out of 5. I thought the 1 star was very generous. I don’t use the mug, because I don’t care to remember the year while drinking my morning coffee.
But 2021 has proven to be a second marathon. It started out with a bang, literally, on January 6 and is ending with more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than at any other time during the pandemic. And in between we’ve had supply chain woes, deadly tornadoes, school shootings, and a shortage of workers.
I pastor a local church, and while we’ve weathered the pandemic better than some, we still face challenges. We’re back to requiring masks of all our worshippers, and we still have members that are extremely cautious about being in crowds. When the Omicron variant first reared its ugly head, one of my members asked “What are we going to do?” I’ve been asked this question more times than I count, as I’m sure all pastors and leaders of businesses and organizations have been. “What are we going to do?” people want to know. But this time instead of answering the question, I turned it around and asked, “What are you going to do? What am I going to do? What are we going to do?” Because honestly, I’ve done everything I can do to keep the church safe. The onus is now on all of us, and I really mean all of us, to do our part to put this thing to rest once and for all.
In a few short days, the Church will celebrate Epiphany. Epiphany is the day Christians celebrate the Wise Men finally making it to Bethlehem with their gifts for the baby Jesus. People tend to forget that the Wise Men were outsiders; they wore strange clothes and looked different. And they were astrologers, and people who follow stars tend to beat to their own drummer. But there they are, the very first visitors to see the infant Jesus, and no one turns the Wise Men away because they’re different. In fact, they’re welcomed at the manger. But should this surprise us? Throughout his lifetime Jesus will keep company with all sorts of “outsiders”. And before his story is over, he’ll try his best to tear down the walls we love to construct because apparently, Jesus doesn’t understand that one of our baser instincts is to exclude people who don’t think, look, act and vote like we do; doesn’t seem to understand, or even care, that we prefer division over compromise.
And that’s tough for anyone of any faith or no faith at all to hear, because we have a harder and harder time conversing with people or reaching consensus with people who don’t agree with us. It is, unfortunately, just the state of the world we live in. It seems we argue about everything these days, and there’s hardly a moderate voice left in a country that increasingly views compromise as a dirty word.
But folks if we’re going to turn this thing around and avoid 2022 being the third leg of a triathlon, we’re going to have to do better. We’re going to have to start welcoming people who don’t look, think, act or look like us to the table and sit down with them and listen to them. We’re going to have to be willing to compromise to find solutions. It can’t be all or nothing, my way or the highway. Eventually, we will have to work out our differences in order to work through our problems so 2022 has a higher ranking than 2020 and 2021.