A solidarity of life
Psalm 8 New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE October 6, 2024 - World Communion Sunday Photo of a brick wall painted red that has faded with a hashtag stenciled in white paint: #LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND So, how’s everyone doing? What? You don’t like pumpkin spice wartime election eclipse hurricane season? Even without all that, solidarity is hard work and messy. It requires not only empathy, that feeling of having touched our own pain and thus can approach another’s pain with humility, but also the desire to make a material difference. Certainly, the devastating scenes that are coming out of the southeastern states, as well as from Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, from Israel a year ago, from Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine, are eliciting our empathy and our desire to be in solidarity with those who are suffering such catastrophic loss. The Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic literature of Judaism tells us, that when it comes to being responsible with what we have, there are four kinds o