Us Vs. Them

Friday 5/18/2012 5:06 AM

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”  This opening verse of Psalm 133 was the first thing I read this morning.  I’ve been reading it every day this week but today it reminds me of an email I got yesterday at school from the retiring president of the union.  In the email he thanked those people who had worked with him over the last couple of years and asked for unity and for support for the new, incoming union officers.  A few minutes later a faculty member responded by describing the outgoing president’s job as “to get a bunch of capitalists, who like to hold onto their money, to act like Marxists, who like to share their money.”  That kind of rhetoric and attitude is one of the things that has turned me off to the union over the years.  From the first days when the union was trying to organize the faculty it has been cast as a struggle of the poor, overworked and underpaid faculty against an oppressive, overbearing school administration.

In the four years before the union was voted in the faculty got cost of living raises every year and one year we got an addition raise besides.  There was a collegial relationship between the school administration and the faculty as a whole.  When the union came in they didn’t agree on any part of the contract for over three years.  Any proposal made by the district was viewed with suspicion, gone over with a fine-toothed comb and ultimately rejected by the union.  During those years there was a total of twelve percent cost of living increase and when the union finally settled on the salary part of the contract it was for a ten percent raise, two percent below the cost of living.  When they announced the results of their negotiation it was hailed as a great coup.  I saw it as a loss of two percent.  To this day, ten years later, we still do not have a contract that covers the entire employment package.  The union, of course, blames a stubborn, bullying, recalcitrant district and school administration.

In his book, Imaging God, Douglas John Hall suggests that forgiveness in our relationships with others will transform the church and the broader community.  He writes, “The face of forgiveness, acceptance, and love that has been shown using the compassionate countenance of the God of Golgotha can be reflected in the faces that we show to one another.  We can also begin there to live out of a trust that overcomes the ancient addiction to suspicion that infects our race.  We can begin there to seek and find intimations of the communality that is our de facto status as creatures, though we resist it strenuously and take refuge in the illusion of self-sufficiency.  We can begin there to defy the barriers to peace and justice that arise when human beings are conditioned to regard other human beings as ‘the enemy,’ or to think them less than fully human.”

The suspicion expressed by the union and the propensity to view others as the enemy enters into all areas of life, politics, health care, environmentalism, race relations and even the church, to name just a few.  Perhaps if we in the church practiced more forgiveness, acceptance and love, exhibiting the compassion of God to each other, it might leak out of the church and overflow into the world at large.