That Our Differences May Be Our Greatest Asset of Love

In 1847, my great grandfather, five generations back, travelled with his family from Ohio to Missouri and then across the great plains to settle in Northern Utah. He homesteaded on land that was the traditional winter grounds of the Shoshone people. He took a piece of the land as if it were his birthright. As did all of my ancestors, all of whom settled in northern Utah and southern Idaho. My grandfather, George Washington Hill became well known and is still remembered in the Mormon Church as a missionary to the Shoshone people. He befriended them, learned their language, wrote the first English-Shoshone dictionary so that Mormons and Shoshone could communicate. 

The Bear Rive massacre took place in the winter of 1863, not far from where my great grandparents lived. 200 US soldiers travelled from California to attack the Shoshone in their winter camp grounds. They attacked in the early morning, before the people were awake, and decimated the tribe. A few survived, including the chief and his son. These remnants tried to reform the tribe, but it was difficult. Ten years later the chief had a dream in which he was instructed to align the tribe with the Mormons. So he sent for my great grandfather. That day 102 Shoshone were baptized. Later, when the US government was relocating the Shoshone to the reservation, those who had been baptized were offered the option of staying on their land because they were considered members of the Mormon Church. The Mormon Temple in Ogden, Utah, had become their spiritual home. Some chose to stay, but many went with the rest of the tribe to the reservation. Those who stayed were absorbed into the Mormon culture, essentially losing their identity as Shoshone. 

So, did my great grandfather actually help the Shoshone? Perhaps a bit in the moment, but not at all in the long run. Instead their land is now divided and called Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, and any remaining Shoshone reside on a reservation in Idaho. Today Shoshone reside primarily on two reservations, one in Idaho and one in Wyoming. They are a people, like those we have been reading about in the Old Testament this fall, who have been taken over by a greater power and forced into exile.

Today’s passage from Isaiah comes two generations after the people returned from exile, about a hundred years later. The renewal that Haggai spoke of in our text last Sunday has not happened. Instead the community is in despair and a state of rubble. They are consumed with fear and the threat of greater powers overtaking them.

This is also the reality of the world we live in: dominant culture suppress and oppress less dominant cultures and they do so for power and economic gain. The values and beliefs of patriarchy and colonialism are alive and well in the world today. These values state that certain people, in our context - white people, or Christian people  - and in other contexts it might be the Nazi’s and the Jews, the Serbs and the Croatians, the Hutu’s and Tutsi, the Israelis and Palestinians, the Turkish people and the Kurds - examples are endless of how certain people end up believing that they are entitled while others are not. 

This Tuesday night, Frontline on PBS will broadcast the film, For Sama. It is a film made by 26-year old female Syrian filmmaker, Waad al-Kateab, and shows the violence of war from a woman’s perspective. She made the film for her infant daughter because she was not sure that she and her husband, a doctor in Aleppo, would survive. Eventually that had to leave Syria, spent time in a refugee camp, and then eventually applied for asylum in the UK. The film has won numerous awards. I encourage you to watch it.

Today we begin our partnership in faith with Mother of the Savior.  As we enter into our partnership in faith the film may give us some insight into the lives that some of the members of MotS have lived. It will give us insight and open our eyes and hearts and minds to a deeper level of compassion. It will help us see more fully how we might offer a new reality, in this partnership of faith, a reality that is centered in beloved community.

Into an emotionally laden chaos, Isaiah from our Old Testament reading, speaks to the people about God. Isaiah reminds people that God is with them. God’s presence is sure and steady and always working to restore order and wholeness, justice and mercy, to the lives of human beings. God’s presence is a sign of hope. 

But God can only do this if we work with God, if we become God’s living hands and heart and mind and compassion in the world. Not out of pity, but out of love, hope, mercy, and justice. This requires us to take the long view, to see the world as it is now, as it has been, and as God hopes for the future. 

Voyager I, launched in 1977, is one of NASA’s deep space probes. In 1990, when it was about 4 billion miles away from earth, Carl Sagan asked NASA to have it take one last photo of earth. The photo reveals a streak of red, and one tiny spot, earth. Sagan reportedly said, “That’s our home. That’s us…On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, lived our their lives. The aggregate of our suffering and joy on mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” 

Taking a telescopic view of the world gives perspective, for our lives are no longer measured in days and years, but across a much longer trajectory of time and space. From this far off perspective one might wonder, Are we being good stewards of this earth and of one another? And how might our actions today impact the future, a future we may never see, but one that is there on the horizon, in the vision of God. 

None of us can imagine how this partnership in faith will evolve. But I think we can trust that it is God inspired. Not to make us one people, not have us blend or merge into one congregation, but to become a model of living together as different cultures, embracing our differences and our similarities, our diversity not as a call to power over others, not as my ancestors did with the ShoShone, but a new community of love, a beloved community where we become stronger persons of faith because we honor the dignity of one another and our differences become our greatest asset of love.