Coach’s Corner

American Paradox

Dear friends,

I just returned from a study leave which turned out to be an odd combination of studying and a trip across the continent we live on. It seems appropriate to return just as the nation is celebrating another birthday. You know about our plans to deepen our Hawaiian Sundays in August with a sermon series about Hawaiian ideals. So it can be considered fitting to have a three week series in July about “American visions.” Next month we will also have another Americana concert at Parkview.  In the sermons in this series I hope to combine what I have learned from my readings and bring it together with the whirlwind journey across the US I just made with Andrew followed with a brief visit to French Canada. I plan to do that by focusing on three topics: leadership, a sense of place and spiritual perspectives. In doing so I hope to highlight the apparent contradictions (paradoxes) that emerge from and at the same time to expose the contradictions we all live with and struggle with.  Having just taken highway 80 all the way from Sacramento County to where it disappears in the maze of New Jersey freeways and continued beyond toward the Northeast has impressed on me once more the contradictions of America.  It is a place of individualism and uniformity, generosity and frugality,
loss and hope, renewal and decay, innovative thinking and lazy ignorance, kindness and rejection, anger and pride to mention just a few of the apparent contradictions.  Of course these are not unique to the American story, they are part of the human condition.  Reading the Bible we find contradictions the people face: staying home and finding a better place, humanity and divinity, hatred and forgiveness, justice and injustice existing side by side, bondage and liberation. If the apparent contradictions are part of the history of people, they are also true of us as individuals.

We will look at leaders North America has brought forth and nurtured and we will see that most of them have done good and most of them have done bad in one way or another. We look at the history of this country and find that it is a mixture of cruelty and benevolence.  We will consider the spiritual perspectives that have flourished more abundantly than in any other place on earth and realize that the traditions that developed out of them brought solace and joy, but also oppression and guilt.  If we are paying attention we will see that the only way to understand the place we live is to see the paradox. America is neither boogyman or superhero.  She can only grow in the tension between the different influences that it has held within her.  The freedom of speech and the right to choose one’s leaders and the rule of law has made her greatness possible sustained by the abundant wealth of her natural resources.   God has allowed its people to grow in the midst of the tensions our diversity has brought with it.  May God iron out all our confusion in time. May we be grateful and humble this July. For as with the people of the Bible it is by God’s grace that the nation and the people have always lived. Thanks be to God. Aart