R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I’m sure that most of you have probably heard of the recent events on a Jet Blue flight in which a flight attendant got into an altercation with a passenger who had stood up and was trying to get her bags out of the overhead bin before the plane came to a stop. The attendant then said some choice words to her over the intercom and left the plane, also before the plane came to the gate.

Essayist David Sedaris recently wrote a piece about people behaving badly on airlines. "We're forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters," Sedaris wrote. "But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport's just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?"

I certainly hope that’s not the case and this story stands in contrast to a story covered on This American Life. Allen Wigington, a former chief deputy in the Pickens County Sheriff’s Department in Georgia, recounted an incident he had on a flight. After they had landed, but before they got to the gate, the flight attendant came on and said that there was a soldier sitting at the back of the plane who was returning from his tour in Iraq. She told the passengers that the soldier’s wife and newborn daughter, whom he had never met, were waiting for him, and she asked everyone to remain in their seats so that he could be the first one off the plane. Amazingly, everyone complied with the request, and once the soldier was off, then everything returned to the normal rush that we’ve all experienced.

In my opinion, most of the rude and terrible behavior that we see all around us, and even sometimes have directed at us, is the result of individualism gone wrong. Many times it seems we have lost a sense of community; we focus on the pluribus rather than the unum. When we no longer feel connected to others or believe they have nothing to do with us, then we believe we can treat others as if they are not equals or deserving of respect.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism said that as Christians we have to think collectively. “Scripture knows nothing of a solitary religion,” he said. In other words, we are all in this together. We should hear this each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, which begins not “My Father,” but instead “Our Father.” In fact, each time a pronoun is used in the prayer it is plural. We are linked together in this prayer, just as we are linked together by our faith.

This does not mean that we sublimate ourselves, but that we recognize that, as Paul tells us, all of us are necessary and important. Even though all of us play different roles in the church, all of us are equals in the eyes of God and so we should also be equal in each others eyes and we are all deserving of respect. As we rapidly move toward a new program year, let’s begin a revolution amongst ourselves, which can spread to the rest of the world, in which we pledge to treat everyone we encounter as a child of God, worthy of value and love.