Persevering toward wholeness

LOUISVILLE — Preaching during the weekly online Chapel Service on Wednesday, Kate Trigger Duffert explored the theme of next summer’s 227^th General Assembly, “Persevering Toward Wholeness,” announced earlier this month here.

Duffert, director of GA planning and an associate stated clerk, based her reflection on some of the images found in Rev. 22:1-7, which will help guide the assembly —especially this description of the tree of life: “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Image

Duffert pointed out that some churches throughout the denomination elect to use the GA theme as a worship guide for their own services and ministries. “This year’s theme, like many past themes, speaks to the state of the world and the PC(USA)’s call at this time,” she said.

It comes at a time when many people of faith “are challenged by a deepening sense of isolation,” she said. “We’ve been taught a message of individual success, of celebrating self-made millionaires and lifting oneself up by bootstraps.”

That message “drives policies that claim no one should be dependent on one another,” she said. “It’s a message that tells us to look inward and value our individual needs over the needs of the community, that the services that benefit the whole of the nation — from education to affordable housing to emergency relief to health care and more — should be privatized and made accessible only to those who are deemed worthy.”

Once that value of individualization took root, “we developed a world in which the spaces and tools around us reinforce our separation,” she said, naming redlined highways that divide communities; underfunded public transportation; and the devaluing of community centers, libraries, schools and other third spaces. “Those spaces that remain are often made inaccessible by the cost of accessing them,” she said, citing examples including events that are ticketed, customer-only restrooms and membership-based activity centers.

Social media is often used to separate the individual from others, “perhaps even to separate the truth of oneself from the curated identity portrayed to the world,” she said. “Too often, this curation extends to our news services, where we are driven by an algorithm to see only that which benefits revenue and not the stories of those who are the most vulnerable across the globe.”

“These systems undergird much of the world we live in each day,” she said, “a world that tells us not only to look inward but to push out others, to deport people who have done no wrong … and ultimately to reject a world of diversity.”

“Perhaps most painfully,” Duffert said, “these values are often preached as what it means to be a real Christian.”

“Persevering Toward Wholeness” speaks to this challenge, she said, in part by recognizing “the inherent disconnect between a world of division and the world God calls us into.”

“As Presbyterians, we believe in a sovereign God,” a God who is “so tangibly woven into the whole of Creation that there is nothing that can be separated from God,” Duffert said. “Wholeness requires that we recognize the interconnected ecosystem in which we live, and as part of that, that we honor the diversity of ways in which we show up in the world and do the hard work of accountability, of repair and reformation that enables us to be a community where … the ways in which we handle conflict are centered on honoring the God who is in us all.”

“Perhaps in another time and place, the theme of the assembly could have been ‘Working Toward Wholeness.’ But I suspect many of you, like me, who are tired, have been tired for a long time,” she said. “When every system that we wade through and every message that we hear co-opts our faith to divide us and dishonor God, it is difficult to find holy ground to stand on that’s Spirit-filled, and to breathe.”

It's “a little ironic,” she said, “that the very salve to our current divided world is the outcome we seek in our ongoing work. The wholeness of God’s kin-dom is most evident in community, and it is in community that we find the strength to carry on when the work feels hard.”

It's fitting that the language of persevering “comes from looking at our global community and our partners,” she said. This fall’s 27^th General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, an organization to which the PC(USA) belongs, has “Persevere In Your Witness” as its theme.

“The global church’s call to persevere feels particularly poignant … at this moment,” she said, “and therefore it makes sense that it influence the theme of the upcoming General Assembly.”

According to Duffert, the PC(USA) must persevere:

• Against a narrative in which “Christianity supports the harming of our world.”
• In ordering a church “in ways that bring us back over and over to the bonds of community.”
• In proclaiming “a God who loves all Creation in all of its diversity through our policies and our witness. The PC(USA) must persevere toward a world in which we can come to God and say, ‘We are seeking that your Creation be made whole.’”

John of Patmos envisions leaves of a tree that are for the healing of the nations. Today, that vision “gives us the chance to reflect on the unique witness the Presbyterian Church has to offer the world at this time,” Duffert said.

“May this connectional church persevere in a world that claims our God desires division,” she said. “May each of us be a living witness to the wholeness we are called to seek. Amen.”