It's Only a Dream (Isaiah 65:17-25)
A bowl of safety pins, signifying solidarity and support for those less fortunate who have fear.
Reality, according to the flattened world in which we live, views poverty, violence, racism, sexual assault, anti-immigrant hatred as something “you people are just going to have to learn to live with."
'You people'—which means 'other people'—which ultimately means 'not me.'
The church—to the extent that it has promoted a version of the gospel concerned primarily only with helping me to get to heaven—has been complicit in allowing Christians to get comfortable with the idea that poverty, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia aren’t a primary matter of concern when it comes to Christian responsibility—that the cries of our sisters and brothers are of interest only after we’ve secured our individual souls.
In our prosaic reality, all that stuff happens to other people who—although we may not make them targets of our open hostility—qualify as perfect candidates for our indifference.