Sermons

“Tribes and Heroes, Nations and Messiahs”
Exodus 16: 13b-30; Philippians 2: 1-13
Desert Palm United Church of Christ
September 28, 2008 – “First Nations” Sunday

During election years I try to get my news from the best sources available- the BBC, the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report. The best of all possible worlds happened a week or two ago when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was a guest on the Daily Show. He made an interesting statement. He said that no two democracies had ever gone to war against each other. Think about that. Can you think of a single war. Then it hit me- he was wrong. Many of the original nations here in North America were democracies- even before our Declaration of Independence. And our democracy certainly conducted ongoing wars of conquest with the various Native American peoples of this continent. Maybe it was the fact that we called them tribes instead of “nations”; maybe using the word tribe contributed our sense of technological superiority over them. For 500 years these First Nations were in jeopardy.

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