Shutterstock
Divisions
Shutterstock Image
Iowa Annual Conference | April 3, 2025
We are having some work done at our house. My husband and I have moved down to our basement. Upstairs, two workers, a woman and a man, are painting our living room and kitchen. While they work, their voices drift down to us, and the sounds and rhythm of Spanish drift down to us.
Their presence in our home has me thinking about the divisions between human beings.
When I was a teen, I worked in the kitchen of a hospital peeling potatoes and washing dishes. Later in college, I worked in food service. This work required my hands, my feet, and my back. As I became an adult, my work became desk work, less physical, and more sedentary. I became a teacher, a non-profit administrator, and then a pastor. Most of my work was done at my computer, or in committee meetings, or with my voice.
I am not bilingual although I wish I was. I know a few words of Spanish. I have a friend who speaks Russian. I recently met someone who is from the Congo, and he speaks multiple languages, including French, although he has never been to France. I listen to the words drifting down from upstairs. A burst of laughter just interrupted their conversation. I wonder if they are talking about their children, or supper last night, or their plans for the weekend. The gentleness in their back-and-forth communication sounds like companionship.
We all have a story that brings us to this moment. A few weeks ago water appeared on our ceiling—never a good thing. It needed fixing. The couple upstairs are younger than us, stronger, and more agile. They are experienced. When they came into our house, they looked around for a moment, assessing and planning, and then went to work with ladders and equipment. In a surprisingly short amount of time, they are restoring our home, doing work we could not do. There’s a promise of peace ahead when the house is all put back together.
And yet there is division.
Our work and the status and compensation we attach to it divide us.
Gender and the assumptions we attach to gender divide us. Age can do that too.
The words we use, the language we speak, divide us.
History has had its way with us. It brings us to a social context and seeks to divide us.
If we chose division. If we chose mistrust. If we assume one is superior to the other. If we ignore history or try to deny it. If we are afraid. If…if…if…
The evil delights in division. Division builds walls. We lob assumptions back and forth over the walls pointing at THOSE people, creating the other, using privilege to move people to the margins.
But in the midst of division life insists on happening. Our mother goes to a nursing home. A new baby arrives in the family. The roof leaks. And what was division shifts and reveals an essential interdependence. We encounter someone who sees the world differently, understands it from a different perspective, and knows something about thriving in this life that we don’t know. Someone comforts our mother at the nursing home. Someone places a stethoscope on the chest of the new baby and, to our relief, hears a strong healthy heart. Someone repairs our roof. Our diversity of skill, experience, and perspective saves us. The walls we have built look foolish, the world smaller and more knit together. The blindness of privilege falls away. The necessity of sharing our lives with each other becomes obvious. More than necessity, there is joy in sharing our lives. Enemies build walls. Friends build communities. Walls fortify our fear. Communities share peace.
I don’t have much in common with a first-century Nazarene. I arrived on the planet 2,000 years later. He was a faithful Jew. I am a suburban Methodist. He was bilingual speaking Aramaic and Hebrew. He never saw a computer, or a desk for that matter. He was a carpenter. I know very little about woodworking. He used his hands in healing, touching lepers, and taking the hands of the sick. I click away on a keyboard. I have no idea how I would have reacted to him had I been in the crowd in the streets of Jerusalem. He was different. Defiantly gracious. Graciously defiant.
I do not have the courage he had. He spoke with such honesty the people of his hometown ran him out. Courage, love, and faith guided him daily. His life was very different from mine. That is what gives it such meaning. Looking at the life of Jesus has me looking at my own life, discovering where I am free and faithful and where I have chosen division.
It sounds like they are finishing their work upstairs. For a time, they have blessed my house. They have repaired what was damaged.
They have also opened a longing in my heart I had forgotten or walled off.
He just said something encouraging. She laughed. I don’t know the words, but I hear grace.