Sunday is Pentecost Sunday and all are encouraged to wear red! Rev. Phillip Wilson will be leading the service as our Pastor Lise is away greeting her new grandchild. Our choir will perform two anthems: “He Never Failed Me Yet” Robert Ray and “Welcome Holy Spirit” Marc Condon. Scripture will be read from the book of Acts as well as a contemporary reading “God Has a Dream” by the Most Rev. Desmond Tutu
A person is a person through other persons.
None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are.
The first law of our being is that we are in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. In Africa, recognition of our interdependence is called ubuntu, which is difficult to translate into English.
Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks to the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound to yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness; it speaks about compassion… People with ubuntu know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as less than they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.