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Surviving on Crumbs

 This morning's sermon is different than I thought it was going to be. As you can tell from our bulletin, my goal was to talk about the huge gap between the rich and the poor. Yesterday afternoon, there was an assassination attempt on presidential candidate Donald Trump. In that attempt, one person was killed and two were severely injured. The shooter was killed by Secret Service,  he was using an AR style gun that allowed him to shoot from a couple hundred yards away. The shooter may or may not have left a note, letter, or post to explain why he was attempting this, and conspiracy theories are already running wild.

To quote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Violence begets violence." This act of violence has only heightened the tension exponentially. I am fearing that this will only embolden more Neo-Nazi, white supremacy, and Proud Boy marches. I am fearing that the minority groups such as Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and LGBTQIA groups will become more of a target for retribution violence. Even if the assassination attempt was successful, it would have only deepened the divide between the Red and Blue in our nation. 

In today's scripture, Jesus tells the crowd and explains to the disciples that evil comes out of the heart, not from the outside. Evil is a power and principality that Paul talks about, but it cannot be forced in and cannot be easily driven out. If the candidate former President Trump was assassinated, his followers would not just shrugged their shoulders and went home. And here is the thing, no one group or political party or religion or nation has the corner on hate or evil or the powers and principalities that seek to dominate or destroy or kill. 

I don't believe that in our human hearts there only resides those sins and acts that Jesus describes. I don't believe that Jesus does either. Yes, thoughts and ideas may be already there, and if there isn't love and compassion and a sense of belonging to correct these evil intentions, they will find those groups and outlets to act. 

I am relieved that the attempt was unsuccessful and pray for those who were injured and the family of the one killed. That is not the way our country is going to be healed and is not the way that we, as a nation, can move forward and progress to be a more perfect union. We are at a tipping point about what kind of nation we will be for the next generation or more. It should not be decided by violence. As I preached last week, we need to double down on compassion being our greatest strength. We need to extend our compassion and our help to all people, the immigrants like those in our scripture today, and even to those who wear the red hats. Otherwise we all will be surviving on the crumbs of the uber-rich as we continue to fight and squabble and fear each other. Amen.


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