Summer of Love - Spoon River
March 20, 2018
This was written as part of an invitation to a planning event for the Spoon River district of the IGRC of the United Methodist Church. My wife thought it was more of an essay -- hence I posted it.
It was not a quiet time in American history. It was a year when healing and meeting hate with love was possible. It was the year before. It was the year before Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. It was the year before the Tet Offensive when LBJ declared he had lost Walter Cronkite and Middle America, yet we still doubled down in Vietnam. The year before the Kerner Report on race relations was shelved and ignored. The year before racial backlash propelled the George Wallace campaign to be the last third-party effort to win electoral votes. It was the year before the Chicago convention of protestors and police battles. It was the year before we became the United Methodist Church.
Governor Wallace Segregation Speech
The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Jesus instructed us to Love God and God’s creation, even those of us whom we do not like. A cultural clash has been flowing through America ever since 1967. What we could have healed we have often made worse. A poison of division has come to infuse itself in partisanship in today’s culture. It seeps into our own congregants. Much of the tension in our own churches is the tear in our society never healed or mended from that time following the so-called Summer of Love. In my experience here in Elmwood we have grown stronger when united in practical acts of love. Our members straddle all sides in the cultural division, but we worship and work together. Let us come together and share our stories; we have much to learn from each other. We will plan four events of outreach into our communities. Celebrations in music that are united around the practical good act of supporting families and children through Our Conference Our Kids. If you come on April 14th I will even explain the story behind the psychedelic sports car. Not all the Hippies were dirty, and they didn’t usually have purple hair and nose piercings. Some of us are not easy to love. We require the overwhelming Spirit of God’s Love. Fifty years hence a great time for a Summer of Love; we are Jesus’ church after all.
The invitation to a Summer of Love
Click
to Return