For the Love of Walls
(Posted April 25, 2024)
“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. he wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.” -- Simone Weil, French Philosopher
The great poet Robert Frost began one of his most famous works with the declaration, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” I’d actually like to take a little bit of issue with that idea. There are many ways that nature and weather contemptuously try to bring down a wall. But for every thing that tries to tear a wall down, there are things that LOVE a wall, especially those urban walls that were made, brick upon brick, held together with mortar, maintenance and love.
Church Services on Sunday
In-Person Service begins at 10 a.m. Facemasks are optional if you are fully vaccinated.
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Walls, Art and Community
Sometimes it’s the city-born wall that receives love from artists in the form of a public mural, such as the one above. These walls declare to everyone the many lives that helped create a community of people, no matter how deeply different those people might appear to be.
In bright colors that none can ignore, and covering up old bullet holes of forgotten hatred, the urban wall mural shows how that brave, strong person created a network of people who were brought together in a way nothing else could. There on the wall, is the Vine, and around about, are all the branches.
The Vine Upon the Wall
It’s the Sunday in which Jesus declares, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” On our bulletin cover this Sunday is this urban wall in Chicago (below), where Jesus stands as the strong vine, the anchor, and from him flows the branches of people joined hand-in-hand, hands of many colors and ages.
Jesus Belongs to All People
Jesus himself is a piecework of mosaic colors. Each color corresponds to those of the people around him. It drives home the truth that Jesus belongs to all people. He is ours and we are his, even if we sometimes lose our way and start to think in terms of “tribe versus tribe,” instead of the one vine and branches we really are.
Even our other reading for Sunday (Acts 8:26-40) records how it came to be, since it is the first recorded story in the New Testament that tells about the first man of African descent to be baptized to follow Jesus.
Come and join us at 10 am this Sunday to have a firsthand experience of how the Wall of Love allows us to communicate with all people conjoined to God.