May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
The Southern author Flannery O’Connor, in her short story entitled “Revelation” tells the tale of Mrs. Turpin, a white, middle class, good Christian woman. Mrs. Turpin has accompanied her husband Claud to the doctor’s office, where as they await their turn to see the doctor, O’Connor spins the story of Mrs. Turpin. She writes:
Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them — not above, just away from — were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there some colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincoln’s and a swimming pool and a farm with registered whiteface cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head,…[1]
None of us want to think that we do anything like Mrs. Turpin’s classification system. We’ve evolved above that and we don’t live down south where this sort of thing happens and this is the blessedly liberal city of Seattle. This denial makes us feel just a bit better.
The writer of the book of James knows something about showing partiality and knows that even good Christian folks can be guilty of it. In the second reading today the community of faith to which James writes is being taken to task for showing favoritism to those in their midst who are more acceptable…who have more money and nicer clothes and more expensive jewelry. But the message remains the same; it is as applicable to us as it was to those early followers of Jesus.
Clearly this community of faith had a difficult history with wealthy folks. James says, in effect, “why are you cow-towing to them, to the rich folks, when they are the ones who have taken you to court, when they are the ones who are oppressing you, when they have dishonored God’s name?” Why indeed.
I knew a man once…a fine man. He was a pillar of the community, a patriarch of his congregation. The Fellowship Hall was named after him because of the copious amounts of money he had given to the church. He was a highly decorated military veteran; during the war he had saved the lives of forty men by disobeying an order. He knew the order being given would march his men directly to the enemy so he sent them another way to safety and he himself remained behind to be captured and held as a prisoner of war, tortured and mistreated until the war ended. Every year the men he saved and their families gathered with him to show their gratitude at a huge barbeque in his honor.
But in one of our first conversations, this man used a word to describe a black person that I could not stomach. A word of disrespect, that, though not uncommon in this man’s youth, was now unacceptable.
Imagine what the woman who approached Jesus felt when he called her and her sick daughter dogs. Because there is no two ways around it…this is what he did. You see, in our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus has taken a break, a vacation. He goes to Tyre, which was unfamiliar territory, a place filled with Gentiles, not Jews like him. But a desperate mother hears that he is there. She finds him, despite his efforts to stay hidden, and implores him to heal her daughter. And he calls her a dog.
What we have in our readings this morning are two hard texts. We don’t actually want to think that we, like Mrs. Turpin, still categorize people and that perhaps we even show deference to those we consider to be in the “upper categories”. And we certainly don’t even want to imagine that Jesus, our Savior, our Lord, that Jesus would use a derogatory term to describe another human being. But there it is. In black and white, or perhaps it’s in red in your Bible.
To help us understand a bit more about Jesus in the Gospel reading today, we first need to recall that this story is from the writer of Mark. In Mark, Jesus is not as fully aware of his identity as the Messiah as he is in other Gospels. And so it is possible that even Jesus is not yet aware of how deep and wide and expansive the Kingdom of God truly is. Perhaps what we witness here in this story is the gift of the outsider, of the one who is lowest on the ladder of society at that time. For it is in the dogged determination and the fierce love of this mother that Jesus saw and that we see the incredible wideness of God’s mercy. In this story she understands, before Jesus does, that she is just as beloved in the eyes of the Creator, despite the fact that she is a Gentile, a foreigner, and a woman to boot….as any other person following Jesus. And that she is just as worthy to come boldly to him and to ask in faith for what it is she needs.
Here’s what we can learn from these two difficult readings from Scripture. We are never sure who will bring us the blessing of a greater understanding of God’s grace. We can never predict who will bring greater insight. We can never know what gifts the stranger or the other or the person whom we consider to be somehow less than will bring into our midst.
It has been my great privilege to learn this lesson well here at Luther Memorial. You see, where I grew up and where I lived the vast majority of my life, I didn’t have much interaction with homeless folks. I imagined, if I thought of them at all, that they would be, well different than me. I imagined that they would be dangerous, perhaps mentally ill or on drugs. And it’s true….some of them are all of those things. But then again, so are some of us.
And so it has been such a privilege for me to come to know the incredible gifts that many of our friends have brought into this place. To know Keith and his music that filled Katie’s Parish every Wednesday one cold winter season as he played the piano with skill and grace. To know Robby who was a drill sergeant for the United States Marines at the very same boot camp where my own son trained. To grieve with him as he mourned the loss of his friend. To offer assurance to him of God’s forgiveness. To learn that he is homeless because he puts his monthly check from the VA into a savings account for his son, so that, he tells me, when he is gone his son will remember him in a good way. To know Sheri and to see her art work that has poured from her since becoming homeless. To witness her passion to make a difference within the homeless community. And to know John, who used to bring his tiny kitten with him in the hood of his sweatshirt.
But more than that….more than that for me….is to see the way that we have learned as a community how to open our hearts and minds and to put aside any notions of being greater than or less than and to become one with all of God’s children who come into these doors. As James notes, Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?
Flannery O’Connor’s short story ends with a vision Mrs. Turpin has. She saw [the streak as] a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [niggers] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail [of the hog pen], her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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