Knit Together

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Excerpts from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,    Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

January 25, 2026

We have been cast out of existing structures, that’s the phrase Czech playwright, poet, and political organizer Vaclav Havel used when he was writing about living under the fall of his government. And it feels like an apt description for this moment in our country right now- for we too have been cast out of existing structures, what once held us, in many places is no longer, the rules-based international order, has been shattered and some of us find ourselves looking at the pieces. Shards, cut ties…broken relationships with allies, frameworks fractured. Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month that “For eight decades, (Americans) have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength” and “have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way.” European and Asian allies have cooperated with the U.S. on both defense and trade, while the power of those alliances has prevented serious challenges to that order. Global trade has generally been free, and oceans have been safe for travel both by humans and container ships. Nuclear weapons have been limited by international agreement. “Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely,” “They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney dared to speak the truth of where we are, dared to say it out loud, to the super rich and powerful crowd, the truth. I found it refreshing to hear him refuse the flattery that some superpowers have come to expect, and he did not attempt to act as if the illusions that are no longer in the room were present. As some have written of this speech Mark Carney, “did not offer fantasies about stability magically returning. He named what many of us already feel: the old story is breaking, alliances are fracturing, the post-World War II rules-based order is in shambles, and pretending otherwise will only make the collapse more destructive.” 

Mark Carney said that the old order is not coming back and that we are at a rupture point. But he also said we shouldn’t mourn it. This moment could call us from fortresses to forging a way together in collaboration, he said, built on the truth. 

Havel wrote eloquently about what he called “living with a lie.” Which was his description for the ways in which ordinary people around him began to participate in the lie, performing rituals they knew inwardly not to be true.  He describes a scenario where those who go along, are invested in the false hope that accommodation and compliance will halt the tyrants, that propping up the illusions with appearances of support will procure safety. And while it might work for a short time, he reminds us that when existing structures are cast aside, many of us are automatically placed in the position of being outsiders and then labeled enemies. Havel writes, “You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society.” 

Hundreds of my colleagues and friends joined the General Strike in Minnesota this week. I discerned it wasn’t yet my time, still recovering from the flu and unprepared in other ways, I instead sent my prayers and followed in hope and solidarity. The message being spread is both alerting us to the dangerous situation we are in and to highlight the ways in which we are knit together, in body and spirit, in ways we do not even fully comprehend. My UCC colleague Alexis wrote of her experience in Minneapolis, “The scale is impossible, and the work is urgent. AND the response from the community has been breathtaking. These masked, armed agents are trying to intimidate people into silence and compliance, but they have instead activated a network of neighbors. It’s creating community beyond geography and cultural divides.” She said, “My host family told me that every person they know is involved in some level of resistance: patrolling for ICE, offering rides, bringing food, driving kids to school, facilitating mutual aid, and raising rent money for people who can’t go to work for fear of being abducted. People all over town walk around with whistles around their neck, because blowing a whistle will draw attention, and ICE is less likely to abduct someone in front of a crowd. Minneapolis has a number of active and powerful community organizing entities that have been key to their ability to respond nimbly. Still, many people I’ve met are just neighbors trying to help neighbors, utilizing their established networks. Everyone is taking a shift for the revolution.”

The scripture we have today, this fragment from Paul’s letter to the community in Corinth, picks up where we left off where he is writing to a church that is arguing, they are still trying to figure out the new idea of gathering together across the divides of the time, a group that includes the rich and the poor, Greek people and Jewish people, those who were enslaved and those who never had that experience. All of this in the backdrop of a Roman Empire whose engine was violence. The people are quarrelling amongst themselves, still confused by this weird idea that this new community is bonded together by something different than what they were used to. Instead of what was typical for the First Century, the Jesus groups were knit together not by blood, or ethnicity or even history, they were not woven together by culture, but rather by a new commandment, they were to be a community bound together by a shared commitment, where everyone belongs and the gifts of each are put together, knit together, taking a shift for the revolution of love.

Scholar James Thompson asserts that this is what Paul means when he says to be of one mind and one spirit, he means that the new communities are to be about a common commitment. He says because they are too different to be of one mind on everything so instead be of common commitments, no longer are they bound by the old ties, instead they are knit together by something other than class or culture, instead a new commandment that is love. 

It’s a first century way of saying be like the fungi, who weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking, making sure each part has what is needed, for the flourishing of the whole. This is how we function well as a church and I believe this is what our country needs right now too, all of us giving and taking, seeing ourselves as knit together in a web of reciprocity, bound not by sameness of culture or experience, but rather bound by our shared commitments to adding more love into world, into our interactions, into our showing up right here with one another and out there, each of us, taking a shift for the revolution of love.

I learned yesterday that many of my clergy colleagues who attended the General Strike are being told pictures of their faces were captured and entered into a database and that they have been officially labeled as domestic terrorists, put on a no fly list. 

“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility…”

And here we are….in the unraveling, with truths put out in front of us, the pieces, the fraying or cut ties, so many lies, but that cannot undo the ways we are knit together, the way we are committed to love and the truth. Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of us, connected like the fungi, who weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking, making sure each part has what is needed, for the flourishing of the whole.  Mushrooms do a lot underground and then they pop up!

Mark Carney said we shouldn’t mourn this rupture. He said, “Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.” As if to say, beyond denial, what might be possible if we worked together, seeing ourselves as knit together?

My colleague Alexis says that this revolution of love asks us to show up scared to show up imperfectly to show up without all the answers, doing what we can, when we can, for the sake of one another. This is what is working, she says. We have been cast out of existing structures, but we are knit together, and we know what it looks like to build something on the strength of the truth, the web of reciprocity, the giving and taking will stop the breaking in some places, as we make sure each part has what is needed, for the flourishing of the whole. We are knit together, right here and out there, as we each take a shift for the revolution of love. May it be so. Amen.