Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I heard an interesting statistic the other day on the Radio, NPR. They were talking about the 60th anniversary of the integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The show was about how much we have changed in the United States, but the point was also made about how far we have to go. Nearly everyone in America, according to polls and surveys, is committed to racial and ethnic integration and say they want to live that out. From attitudes of 50 years ago this is remarkable change. What is really odd though is that different ethnic groups have different reactions to a changing neighborhood. Caucasian Americans feel comfortable and safe as long as they form 90% of a neighborhood make up. African Americans on the other hand do not feel comfortable and secure until at last 40% of their neighborhood is Black.
Obviously, you can not have one group feeling comfortable at 40% and the other at 10%. We are still missing one another.
When I heard that statistic I felt very sad, very sad indeed. We have come a long way but the journey ahead of us has a destination that is still out of sight.
Today’s lesson from Luke is about the ‘other” too. Jesus encounters 10 lepers and they have heard about him. They approach him and stand at a distance and implore him "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” They have heard of Jesus – his fame as a healer had spread throughout all the region by now.
Notice the details. They stand at a distance because they cannot come close to him. The kind of leprosy they have is seen as highly contagious. Lepers lived in caves and they lived off the charity of their families and the community. People would leave food for them but they were untouchable. Imagine not being able to hug or kiss your spouse, parents or children? The pain of their isolation was matched by the pain of rotting flesh. Leprosy kills the nerves in your body and you end up feeling no sensation especially in your hands and feet. Toes and fingers literally rot away and fall off.
Jesus does not do anything – he simply heals them. He says, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” The priests certified that their cure was complete and that they could live with people again. In the 5th chapter of Luke we see Jesus healing a leper and sending him off to the priests. The goal is to certify their healing so they return to their families. The 10 are all so excited they scamper off in a hurry to return home and be reunited.
The Samaritan comes back. Jesus seems surprised. The Samaritans and the Jews had a relationship like the Catholic and Protestants of Northern Ireland –they had the same religion yet their expression of that religion was vastly different. There was so much bad history and fighting between them – like a 500 year old family feud that they had concocted vicious stereotypes about each other. The stereotypes were so strong and so pervasive that the Jews could not react to or see a Samaritan as an individual like themselves. Just as there were good and bad Jews, there were good and bad Samaritans – and even good and bad within the same person – Jew or Samaritan. The horror of stereotypes is that they keep us from getting close to one another and so prejudice in our thinking that we are cut off from the one another.
Jesus, of course, is all about changing that. His parable of the Good Samaritan is a direct assault on the viciousness of stereotypes. Even though Jesus was brought up to suspect and mistrust Samaritans, and Romans and Persians and for that matter, anybody else who was “other”, Jesus’ life and teaching were about seeing God’s reflection in each human person regardless of race or ethnicity. His teaching still teaches us that when we think in stereotypes we cut ourselves off from relationships and possibilities that could bring wonderful new life to us.
God is constantly challenging us to give up the stereotypes that limit us. We are all his children, he wants us to find the beauty we have in each other and to live as one. It is a daunting challenge.
Our Bishop asked me to serve on our synod’s race relations team. He knew of my five years spent in Africa and felt that my insights might be helpful. I confess I was reluctant. Sometimes I feel hopeless about the problem of race relations in America. It is so large. Its roots go so deep. There is so much bitter memory. I voiced some of these feeling to our Bishop and he said to me “But John we are the church. If we can not create a new way then we betray the hope on which we are grounded. We cease being who we are.” He was right of course.
I got to thinking about how my own mind has changed over the years and the faces of amazing Africans and African Americans returned to mind. When I was teaching in Zimbabwe, I had a student, Canisius Manumwa. Canisius was brilliant. I had to teach a particular linguistic theory which talks about how language reflects the physical culture and the social cultural of the people who speak it. Yet at the same time it limits the perception of that culture. I had trouble explaining the theory. It is conflicted, sophisticated and illusive. Canisius grasped the concepts right away and explained them with examples from his own language, Shona, so quickly and easily that he left me and his classmates in the dust. He was brilliant, a genius. I remember telling him how impressed I was and envious of his mind. He smiled a big grin. I felt that he had blessed me and helped me shed some of my stereotyped thinking. He helped me grow.
Debbie’s supervisor in Baltimore County is the wife of an African American Pastor. She invited us to a concert they were having at their church off Eutaw Place in downtown Baltimore. The choir sang and they had several ‘Diva’s” who did solos. Their voices were true instruments of transcendence. They reached notes and carried the soul and spirits of all of us up to God, straight to heaven It took our breath away at times. The concert was an experience of pure grace and I was humbled, grateful and glad to have been invited.
Sometimes God uses Samaritans and Black people and Muslims or whatever “other” stereotype happens to trap our thinking to free us to experience grace.
This past June at Synod the same thing happened. A beautiful woman, who is also on the race task force with me, laid hands on me at a healing service. She prayed and touched my head and God used her voice and hands with incredible power.
I look back on the last 50 years and see that while we have not evolved into the loving, accepting society God wants us to be, we have come a long way. Like Moses, we may never enter the Promised Land, but because of Christ, we have hope that our children will.
The people who built the great cathedrals of Europe knew that the task would take centuries. The ones who started the project and who worked on it knew that they would never have the blessing of worshipping in its great nave or behold its beauty. They had faith though that they were building something glorious. That same faith should be with us as we tear down the walls of prejudice, the stereotypical prison that keeps us from loving each other as God intends. We should never underestimate God’s power.
In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
Who We Are