Sermon delivered Sunday, July 10, 2016 (The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
Showing posts with label crowd mentality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crowd mentality. Show all posts
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Jesus offers us a "way out" from crowd mentality
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 20, 2016 (The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, Year C) at
St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.
We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.
Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.
They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.
The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].
A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.
Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.
If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.
The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.
This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:
“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”
We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.
The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.
The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”
“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.
My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.
[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.
We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.
Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.
They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.
The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].
A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.
Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.
If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.
The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.
This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:
“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”
We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.
The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.
The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”
“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.
My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.
[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
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