{"id":2563,"date":"2023-04-26T09:21:25","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T13:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2563"},"modified":"2023-04-26T09:22:12","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T13:22:12","slug":"us-vs-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/26\/us-vs-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Us vs. Them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>.
 
A man was walking across San Francisco\u2019s Golden Gate Bridge when he saw a woman looking lonely and despondent.
 
Fearful that she was about to do something desperate, he ran to tell her that God loved her.  A tear came to her eye.  Then he asked her, \u201cAre you a Christian, Jew, Hindu, what?\u201d
 
\u201cI\u2019m a Christian,\u201d she said.  He said, \u201cMe too!  Small world.  Protestant or Catholic?\u201d
 
\u201cProtestant.\u201d
 
\u201cMe too!  What denomination?\u201d
 
\u201cBaptist.\u201d
 
\u201cMe too!  Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?\u201d
 
\u201cNorthern Baptist.\u201d
 
He was delighted.  \u201cMe too!  Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist?\u201d
 
\u201cNorthern Conservative Baptist.\u201d
 
\u201cThat\u2019s amazing!  Me too!  Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist, or Northern Conservative Reformed Baptist?\u201d
 
\u201cNorthern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist.\u201d
 
\u201cRemarkable!  Me too!  Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Eastern Region?\u201d
 
She said, with growing excitement, \u201cNorthern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region.\u201d
 
\u201cA miracle,\u201d he gasped.  \u201cNorthern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?
 
She answered, \u201cNorthern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.\u201d
 
Whereupon he shouted, \u201cDie, heretic!\u201d and pushed her off the bridge.
 
That joke, written by comedian Emo Phillips, was voted the funniest religious joke of all time by the website Ship of Fools.  What makes jokes funny, of course \u2013 painfully funny \u2013 is when they mirror a reality that everyone recognizes.
 
The mission of Ship of Fools, which was founded on April Fool\u2019s Day 1998, is \u201cto help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith.\u201d Simon Jenkins, the Ship\u2019s editor and designer, adds, \u201cAs committed Christians ourselves, we can\u2019t help laughing at the crazy things that go wrong with the church, and we\u2019re also drawn to those questions which take us beyond easy believing.  In the end, we want to make sense of the Christian faith in today\u2019s complex world.\u201d
 
People who get excited about their faith sometimes surrender to a strange, sad impulse \u2013 to divide the world into Us vs. Them.  They even do this in the name of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus never provided the least encouragement or grounds to do so.
 
At one point in the Gospel of Luke (9:51-55), Jesus and his disciples are journeying toward Jerusalem.  They ask permission to walk through a Samaritan village.
 
This would be like a group of North Carolina basketball fans asking if they could hold a rally on Duke\u2019s campus.  First century residents of Judea and first century residents of Samaria couldn\u2019t stand the thought of each other, and regularly consigned each other to the fires of hell.
 
Predictably, the Samaritans inform Jesus and his disciples that they can take a hike in the opposite direction.
 
The disciples are incensed.  They decide to take a stand.  \u201cLord, do you want us call down fire from heaven?\u201d  In the 21st<\/sup> century that might sound something like this: \u201cDo you want us to bomb them back to the Stone Age?\u201d
 
This is one of those texts where it\u2019s clear that Jesus\u2019 own apprentices haven\u2019t yet remotely grasped the true nature of his mission.  Instead of rebuking the Samaritans, Jesus rebukes them. <\/em>
 
As one commentator puts it, Jesus treats people on the other<\/em> side as if they are people on our<\/em> side. 
 
That\u2019s because in the reign of God there are no \u201csides.\u201d  There is no Us and there is no Them.  God\u2019s hands are extended to everyone<\/em>. 
 
Letting go of the Us vs. Them mentality is one of the hardest things God will ever ask us to do.  But in order to grow up spiritually, we have to surrender to its deep wisdom.
 
Otherwise, when it comes to being identified as passengers on \u201cthe ship of fools,\u201d the joke will certainly end up being on us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. A man was walking across San Francisco\u2019s Golden Gate Bridge when he saw a woman looking lonely and despondent. Fearful that she was about to do something desperate, he ran to tell her that God loved her.  A tear came to her eye.  Then he asked her, \u201cAre you a Christian, Jew, Hindu,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2564,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[592,593,591],"class_list":["post-2563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-diversity","tag-jokes","tag-unity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2566,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions\/2566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}