One love

Swing the sickle (Joel 3:13) 

In Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man, Death finds work as a farm hand, with a surprising gift for cutting corn with a scythe. In one scene he competes with a new harvesting machine. Death cuts every stalk separately, which puts him at somewhat of a disadvantage, though his anger at the machine's carelessness of the corn drives him on. It is Pratchett's way of saying that every individual life matters, that we should never see or treat people as groups but always separately.

In the USA and across the world, people are marching under the banner of Black Lives Matter. A call to recognise every individual as of equal worth. It's a bit of an upward struggle in many parts of our world. In the USA, the founding fathers valued slaves at only three-fifths of a person in the Constitution and one in thirteen African Americans are denied the vote due to criminal convictions, four times the rate of non-African Americans. In countries all around the world migrants make up much of the workforce but with few rights and little job security.

So it horrified me more than a bit to find this sentiment in Scripture. God even seems to be encouraging his people to think of their enemies en masse, like a vat of grapes or a field of wheat. It is unsurprising then that sometimes the church falls into this trap, having an approach to mission that values structures or programmes above individual people. But love is particular not general. Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion on them for they were like sheep without a shepherd, and told a story of how a shepherd went out and searched for one lost sheep. God loves each one of us, irrespective of age, ethnicity, gender. Let us find a way to do the same.

Walking together