In the closing week of 2020 and now in these beginning days of 2021 there have been many written and spoken commentaries on the past year. Everyone seems to be awfully glad 2020 has come to an end. There is a general chorus of “good riddance” to a year of pandemic-caused death, sickness, and accompanying grief.
2020 has been a year of closed schools, widening gaps of opportunities for learning based on access to technology. 2020 has been a year of aborted plans, cancelled celebrations, business shutdowns, sequestered living, and endless examples of our social divisions and inequities. The list goes on…and on.
OK. I am done being another ‘Captain Obvious.’ Indeed, we know these things all to well. But what is not so obvious amidst the litany of reasons to bid a glad farewell to 2020 is the number of efforts people have been making to chronicle evidence of great acts of courage and selfless interventions on behalf of others in need. 2020 also has a chronicle of tireless human behavior to discover good – and to do good – in exceedingly difficult times. For all the examples of “lights out” situations, there are examples of those who – despite it all and nevertheless – have been and are lighting candles in the darkness.
How does one “explain” being and doing good? What is the origin and motivation for being a courageous, selfless, candle-lighter person in the middle of any darkness? How is it that no matter the pandemic of hate and hurt there are examples after example of people putting love in action?
The late, Bishop James S. Thomas, a singularly marvelous man of God in The United Methodist Church, proclaimed an answer to this question. Bishop Thomas would often challenge people who would see and point out all manner of tragedy and evil in the world and then question how there could possibly be a loving God by asking a different question. Thomas would ask, “How do you explain goodness? Why do loving, sacrificial, redemptive, world-altering things occur? Why do people, despite all the reasons not to do it, do good?”
As a black man, born and raised in the segregated South of the 1930’s, he faced all the hatreds that human beings justified and visited on others. Thomas was a living example, all his life, of the mystery of doing good and seeing reason for hope. Explain the existence of a James Thomas to me? How is he possible?
Why indeed is there goodness in the world? Again, where does the motivation to make the world better and improve the quality of life come from? Explain the reality of goodness and the desire to be a part or an initiator of good things? Why do people look for, and often discover in themselves or those around them, reasons to be hopeful?
The first two chapters of the Hebrew Bible are ancient stories of Creation. The powerful affirmation of these texts is THE WHO behind the origin of things…and PEOPLE. Each story is different and yet, the same. While the discussion of the first two chapters – again each one unique – is far more extensive, these two verses jump out from the separate creation stories.
Genesis 1:26: Then God said,”Let us make humankind in our (ever wonder who the “our” is?) image, according to our likeness…
Genesis 2:7. …then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.
God is good. God is spirit. That list goes on. But the point is that we are in the image of this Creator. It has nothing to do with how we look, but in how we act. It is God with us and in us that is the origin and the source of our core being accomplishing good, looking for good, living in hope and rising to occasion to live as examples of the image of God within us.
One cannot convincingly explain the reality of people having hope, the motivation for making a contribution to human welfare, or for being a tangible example of the human desire to be a part of the greater good, any other way.