Lovers of Debate and Controversy

It's late again, and I think copying some of what I've written earlier today will need to serve double duty as a blog post.  

What I will paste here was a comment on someone else's post.  In the OP, my Facebook friend said people like to joke about her love for debate on controversial subjects.  She sought to counter that perception of her by saying that speaking out comes at considerable cost.  I believe her.  

Although she did not reference the pandemic specifically, I know that this was often a conflictive topic in her writing.  I agreed with her about pandemic matters, even with less skin in the game than she had. She is motivated by the fact that she is the mother of medically fragile adopted and homemade children.  She has spent many years living abroad, so Amish/Mennonite provincialism seems foreign to her.  She also was drawn to Anabaptism from other religious traditions, and in the past two years was deeply distressed to see people around her seeming to flaunt those humble, loving ways that she thought of as representative of Anabaptism.

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Here's what I wrote:

Miriam Iwashige

I identify with so much of this. Mistakenly being labeled as someone who loves controversy, and wading in anyway when a love for people, for truth, for obedience to the promptings of the Holy Spirit propels us forward . . . Last night I was in a church prayer meeting where someone confessed the personal and collective sin of being more concerned about protecting our rights than exercising our responsibilities. The pandemic was not specifically mentioned, but that's where my mind went immediately.

Earlier, I had latched onto the Scriptures where Jesus stated the two greatest commandments as the bedrock foundation for directing pandemic responses. Getting our heads and hearts straight on rights/responsibilities and loving God and our neighbors would go so much further in showing Jesus to the world than promoting "snake oil" remedies or uncovering conspiracies or clinging to "business as usual" ways of being the church.

I'm happy to say though that I saw people around me doing things exactly right in some of the ways that everyone should have done. Adjusting wedding and funeral plans could happen, as it turns out, as well as finding safe and legal ways to gather and to worship. I know that there were losses and regrets, but I believe that not many people who honored the guidelines the government imposed feel today that not honoring them would have been preferable. On the contrary, they experienced much blessing and even delight, growth, and effectiveness during that time of restricted circulation.

This is getting too long . . . sorry. I still want to mention one more thing: the matter of Christians and politics/government involvement. I believe that the pandemic revealed something that has really gone off the rails in Anabaptist communities: the conflation between right-wing politics and righteousness. The answer is not to veer toward left-wing politics, but to see all of its purposes as belonging to a different realm than the Kingdom of God, and to re-orient ourselves to Kingdom loyalties and purposes.

Thank you [Facebook friend]  for using your voice to speak truth in such kind ways. I'm convinced that it accomplishes more than you'll ever know.