“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
Helen Keller
We live in an “us/them” culture. Human beings have found ways to divide ourselves since the dawn of recorded history. We divide ourselves geographically, economically, ethnically, racially, by gender, by sexuality, politically, by schools we attended, by loyalty to sports teams…you name it, if there is a way for us to divide ourselves up, we have figured it out.
And despite what we know about what we share (science tells us that 99.6% of human DNA is identical!), we still find ways for our world to operate in an “us” and “them” way.
We hear the rhetoric all around us. Most recently, at national, state, and local levels, I’ve heard people question who our elected officials represent. Are they there to represent the majority who elected them? Or are they to represent all the people of a community? It’s a good question.
The preamble to the United States Constitution says: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The intent of this document is to frame the rights that we are all guaranteed. Words are important, and it might be helpful for us to unpack these words just a little bit.
The Constitution exists, the preamble says, to establish justice, tranquility and to provide for common defense, general welfare and liberty for ourselves and our posterity, meaning our descendants.
Look again at these constitutional goals:
- common defense
- general welfare
- liberty for us and our descendants
The framers of the constitution were interested in establishing defense, for the sake of defending the other. They wanted to ensure not an individual’s welfare, but general welfare…the welfare of all. And they wanted to establish liberty that survived us and stretched to generations to come.
This broader understanding of the Constitutional guarantees begins to sound kind of familiar. Jesus teaches us: It is not about me. It is about us.
“When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 22:34-40
Love God and love your neighbor. Period. When Jesus was asked about the greatest law, and the most imperative idea in the faith, Jesus could not narrow it down to just one. There were two: Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
Neither one of these ideas is about “us” and “them.” They are only about “us.” All of us. And as a community, we care for each other. This is what the framers of our nation dreamed of. And this is the way of Jesus.
This post was originally printed in the Owatonna People’s Press, August 5, 2023
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