Religious balkanization
Commentary
Object:
One dimension of religious life we have in common across faith traditions and
denominational lines is the incessant divisiveness that split our seemingly monolithic
communities into dozens of similar yet tenaciously varied subgroups. A Jewish professor
of psychology said of his tradition, "If there are ten Jewish males in a city we create a
synagogue. If there are eleven Jewish males we start thinking about creating a competing
synagogue."
A Baptist police officer had a similar tale. He said, "One Baptist family in a neighborhood witnesses until they bring another family to Christ. Then they form a church, and start witnessing to the rest of the community. When another family joins, they have a schism and form a rival church."
According to a Presbyterian homemaker, her communion was a little like vegetable soup. "We have," she said, "the OPs, RPs, BPs, and Split Peas!"
A Methodist businessman complemented these tales with an apocryphal tale of a man from his faith community who had been shipwrecked for years on a small island. When found by a passing ship, rescuers asked him why he had constructed three huts, since he was there by himself. "Well," he replied, "that one is my home, that one is my church, and that one is my former church."
Religious life in our world is like that. We call it "balkanization." The term comes from the history of the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe where centuries of fierce clannish self-preservation have defied the creation of stable broadly encompassing nation states. Large identities, like huge denominations, may expand rapidly for a time, but inevitably splinter groups form and secede, often at the price of vitriolic rhetoric and great emotional pain.
Today's lectionary passages all deal with family problems and sibling rivalries. We get the tail end of Joseph's story in Genesis 45 where he plays for a while with his brothers' psyches before revealing his true identity to them, only to find that he now must deal with their fears of reprisal against their nasty treatment of him years before. Paul wrestles with the centuries-old antagonism between Jews and Gentiles, now exacerbated in their seeming reversal of fortunes in the eyes of the creator as Christianity tips the balance in favor of previous seeming religious outcasts. And Jesus has to address the prejudice dividing the communities of his world, showing how tinny and awful words of racism and ethnic hubris sound when the parenthood of God is rightly understood.
Genesis 45:1-15
The story of Joseph in Egypt is one of the most interesting and fascinating tales in the Bible. Joseph appears to be a spoiled brat, born to a favored wife and raised to spite the rest of his siblings. No wonder he can't seem to understand the psychological effect of his proud dreams of family domination as he reports them enthusiastically to his parents and brothers and sisters at the breakfast table. Soon the boys are fixated on getting rid of troublesome Joseph and lie through their teeth to keep the family peace.
But skeletons have a way of popping out of forgotten closets, and just when Jacob's family feels most vulnerable the boy is back. He plays hide-and-seek for a while in seeming petulance, and then jumps out like a jack-in-the-box, singing a gleeful tune.
Yet the past cannot easily be rewritten, and Joseph knows it. In today's passage he gives his own interpretation of the divine will in all of this. What had appeared from our limited terrestrial perspective as a case of nasty family squabbles was actually quite a different scene when viewed from heaven's grander plans. Joseph was needed in Egypt in order to make Pharaoh aware of future events through divine revelation dispensed in dreams. The road from Canaan to the Nile might have been circuitous, but it was traveled on a ticket stamped by angels.
Three themes emerge from the larger passage of which this is a snippet. First, the biblical emphasis on divine providence and the trumping direction of God over the whims and whiles of humankind shouts loud and clear. As poet, Robert Browning, put it, "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." The ultimate design for the tapestry of humanity's mosaic is held in the mind of God, and even when we try to pull its patterns this way and that, and spill blood red where subtle shades of lavender would have been more appropriate, one day the whole will make sense and our "mistakes" will appear as bright spots in an even grander array.
Second, the interaction between Joseph and his brothers can serve as a moral warning to us that our peevishness always nets trouble for someone, and in spite of our best efforts, the history of humanity is told in terms of conquest, war, murder, and bloodshed. It takes great grace, along with transcendent understanding, to counter the natural flow of naturally evil society.
Third, getting back to the overall literary structure of Genesis, the Joseph cycle of stories in chapters 37-50 addressed one of the major questions rumbling through the minds of Israel at Mount Sinai: "If we are the uniquely loved and chosen people of God, how did we ever end up as slaves in Egypt?" The answer, of course, is found in the life of the dreamer Joseph. From a human perspective, it was when Joseph dreamed his own dreams of self-aggrandizement that he wound up with a one-way ticket out of the country. Only much later in is life, when he finally got past his own ego, was he able to see that the road out of rightly earned slavery was by dreaming instead the dreams of God. This was a lesson Israel was only beginning to learn some 400 years later. We still need to learn it today.
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Late one Saturday night our phone rang. Our oldest daughter, then a freshman away at college, was on the other end, sobbing. "Dad, why do we treat each other the way we do?" she asked with passion and vehemence.
She had just gotten back to her residence after viewing the movie American History X, a biting story of a prejudiced family and the unfolding horror of the way this bigotry destroyed their lives and their communities. The main character kills someone of another race at the beginning, and proudly goes off to jail as a triumphant martyr for the white supremist cause. Flashbacks show how his father indoctrinated ethnic stereotypes and warlike blood pride into the family over mealtime monologues.
But in prison, the only person who defends this tough skinhead against an even crueler world of torment and dehumanization is a black man. Suddenly, the old prejudices lose their punch and moral worlds collide. The inmate gets an education he never expected and sees color and ethnicity in new ways. He emerges from jail far more reflective, and his boastful prejudices and racial slurs have been virtually wiped clean from his lexography.
Yet the problem of racism grows tenacious roots in a family or community. When the main character returns he finds his younger brother welcoming him like a god, ready to fight at his side in the next genetic clash over turf and social dominance. The story winds to a tragic conclusion in which all of the prejudices come back to haunt and bite and disrupt.
The reality is that we all harbor peevish prejudices, but most of the time we keep them internalized in order to live politically correct lives. What would others think of us if we really told them how we felt about so-and-so or such-and-such? So we parade around in the dignity of refined culture.
Yet the bigotry remains underneath. And only when it is voiced in all of its ugliness, like my daughter faced from the movie screen, or Paul's readers heard reflected back to them as they read Romans 11, is there the start of a revulsion that may bring healing. Romans 9-11 is not so much an exploration of divine mysteries as it is a challenge to our racism and ethnic snobbery in a world where God's ultimate goal is to bring the whole family back together.
Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28
Groups living in an area may have much in common with one another, yet they often become unusually antagonistic in their expressions of contempt for each other. That was certainly the case with between the Jews and some of the other communities in the larger Palestinian world of the first century. In Matthew 15, Jesus is confronted by that bias and seems, at first, to buy into it.
Jesus' fame at working miracles has spread, and a woman from the north, beyond mostly Jewish Galilee, has come seeking his favor. She is from Tyre, now part of Lebanon. Her ethnic lineage could have been any of a dozen local varieties, but it is certainly not Jewish. Jesus and his disciples recognize that immediately. When she requests that he heal her daughter, Jesus comes back with the standard segregationist rhetoric announced day by day in the streets and shops and synagogues. "You seek help from someone from your own kind and we'll look after ours."
Did Jesus mean it? Was he as bigoted as all the rest?
There are dozens of other texts that say otherwise, so Jesus' initial conversation with this woman is unlikely to have arisen from deep ethnic prejudice on his part. Instead, it seems to have had two targets. First, it appears to be offered for the benefit of Jesus' disciples. They carried with them the attitudes of their day, including the racial paradigms and hierarchies that were caught through marketplace conversations. When Jesus at first voiced their judgments it probably took them by surprise. They knew that Jesus did not limit his behaviors to the conventions of the time in other respects. Furthermore, they were well aware that Jesus had initiated this journey into a foreign territory, so he must have wanted to be in that setting in the first place.
As they listened to the words emerging from his mouth, the disciples must have cringed a little. Prejudice may feel right in the mind and it may breathe with the bellows of the emotions, but when it is voiced it has a way of losing its rich timbre and echoes tinny and hollow.
There is a second reason why Jesus might be using these cruel words, and that is to clarify the issues at stake in this moment of teaching and healing. Jesus is not a magician doing tricks. He is not a spiritual shaman with a few spells in a bag. He is not an itinerant medicine man who fixes up elixirs to sell in a scheming con game.
It is important that this woman and all who will be part of the aftermath of his healing miracle recognize that Jesus is from Israel; that he is a Jew; that he is appearing in history in a given context that clarifies his identity and mission. Jesus is the Messiah promised by the Hebrew prophets. To ask for his miracles without having that understanding is to play silly religious games that have no purpose. Jesus must be recognized as the one sent by God to turn human history around.
Jesus' words of challenge to the woman are in part a test. Will she understand that salvation is channeled to the world through Israel? Will she acknowledge that Jesus is more than a genie in a bottle for whoever next finds the lamp?
The issue is not so much whether Jesus can deliver on the request given, but whether the request itself matches the true need. On that basis, Matthew sets next to one another this story and the preceding short teaching. In verses 10-20, Jesus wrestles with the disciples to identify the values that underlie our actions. Do we act on the basis of external demands, like the peer pressure of the Pharisees in their codes of conduct? Or do we express our actions as the outcome of the values we have internalized?
The latter is more true, Jesus says. Our actions reveal what we have come to believe inside. Because of that, too often in life we get what we deserve. The Pharisees valued a particular kind of religious political correctness, and their behaviors matched. Unfortunately, what they lost in the process was a need for grace. If they could define their own needs and then fulfill those needs through a particular set of actions, there was no longer any room for grace.
We get what we deserve unless we seek grace. The Pharisees plowed their furrow around the field of ritual cleansing, and in that field they themselves would be buried. But this woman knows she has nothing to plow around in order to earn healing for her daughter. She pleads for mercy: just a few crumbs from the master's table.
Her understanding is more than mere perceptions about herself and what she might or might not have a right to expect; she is also defining the perspective for any reality that surrounds Jesus wherever he goes. No table belongs to those who sit at it. The table is always the master's table. Whoever presumes to own it thereby forfeits a right to draw up a chair or stool.
This brings us back to the religious balkanization nurtured by our ethnic and religious bigotries. When we claim to own the table and determine who we will eat with, the first person to be sent away is Jesus. Think of Matthew's stories again. He tells about the table manners of the Pharisees. They get upset with Jesus. The next thing you know, Jesus shows up in Tyre, a foreign nation according to the Pharisees and outside of the care of God. There Jesus has a conversation with an outcast about who gets to eat at the master's table. Wherever Jesus goes, the table is always his. Whoever would approach the table must acknowledge that no child and no dog have a right to eat there. Only those who receive an invitation from the master of the table are welcome. These invitations are not hard to get. They come freely to those who know who owns the table, and then come seeking grace.
Application
Our participation in the present humanity of this world drives us often toward distinctions, separations, bigotry, and racism -- even in the church. Sometimes there are children who, in remarkable ways, can both demonstrate this and show this and demonstrate the way out, as Dale Galloway related in his book, Dream a New Dream. A friend's son was very shy, he said. Chad was usually by himself, and others took no effort to include him in their circles of friends. Every afternoon Chad's mother would see the children pile off the school bus in groups, laughing, playing, and joking around with each other. Chad, however, would always be the last down the steps, always alone. No one ever paid much attention to him.
One day in late January. Chad came home and said, "You know what, Mom? Valentine's Day is coming and I want to make a valentine for everyone in my class!"
Chad's mother told Dale how terrible she felt. "Oh no!" she thought. "Chad is setting himself up for a fall now. He's going to make valentines for everyone else, but nobody will think of him. He'll come home all disappointed, and just pull back further into his shell."
But Chad insisted, so they got paper and crayons and glue. Chad made 31 valentine cards. It took him three weeks.
The day he took them to school his mother cried a lot. When he came off the bus alone as usual, bearing no valentine cards from others in his hands, she was ready for the worst.
Amazingly, Chad's face was glowing. He marched through the door triumphant. "I didn't forget anybody!" he said. "I gave them all one of my hearts!"
That day Chad gained something more than just friends. He gained a sense of himself. He won a sense of dignity and worth. "I gave them all one of my hearts!" he said.
That's where God wants to bring us -- circles of hatred erased by circles of love -- circles of judgment blurred by widening circles of mercy. He brings us to circles of death that give way to circles of life. The Bible says that when we had drawn God out of our circles, divine love drew us in. Perhaps Edwin Markham's poem could be translated into the conversation of heaven as the Father and the Son reflect about me:
He drew a circle that shut us out --
Heretic! Rebel! A thing to flout!
But our love alone had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Alternative Application
Genesis 45:1-15. The story of Joseph, with its reflection on the mysteries of divine providence, makes a wonderful treasure to explore more fully. Leslie Weatherhead pondered it marvelously in his sermon "That Immortal Sea." Grant Tuller's poem is a fitting emotional link to people who innately understand what he is talking about:
My life is but a weaving between my God and me.
I do not choose the colors; He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper- and I the under-side.
Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why
The dark threads are as needful in a skillful weaver's hand
As the threads of gold and silver, in the pattern he has planned.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 133
"How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!" The words that open this powerful psalm are nearly universal in their ability to inspire. However, the dream somehow seems to rarely find itself materialized in our common life. Our nation is polarized to the point of being paralyzed. Our churches are at war among themselves, striking out at one another in internecine struggle. And globally, we are descending into a frenzy of greed and intolerance.
Where, one has to ask, is this unity?
Is unity to be found in common ideology or theology? Is it to be discovered in cultural homogeneity? The answer to each of these is a resounding, "No." Unity, if it is ever to be discovered and strengthened, is relational in nature. It is based, not in agreement over ideas or principles, but on the intimate knowledge and experience of human interaction.
To put this concept in the language of faith, we would say that our unity is in Jesus Christ. We, as the body of Christ, are in relationship through Christ. And it is there and only there that we claim any hope for unity.
And yes, it is indeed good when this unity emerges. It is a unity not forged in conformity, but in the cauldron of human interaction. It is deeper than the inevitable conflicts that arise; broader than the countless perspectives we bring to the tables, and more powerful than forces that seek to divide and fracture.
Such unity as this is what our psalm attempts to describe. Like precious oil or morning dew, this unity is indeed precious. Like anything important or precious, this kind of unity requires intention, care, and constant effort. A good starting place for this effort is within our local congregations. How are we handling our relationships at church? Is the sanctity of relationships within Christian community a priority? Is there an intentional focus on helping people to feel safe and loved? Are there avenues for conversation, sharing, and prayer?
The world is starving for this kind of unity. Amid the chatter and panic of the media, perhaps this church can quietly and steadily begin to build a new vision and hope for the world. And just maybe, as it builds a unity based on relationships with one another and with Jesus Christ, there will be a chance for healing.
A Baptist police officer had a similar tale. He said, "One Baptist family in a neighborhood witnesses until they bring another family to Christ. Then they form a church, and start witnessing to the rest of the community. When another family joins, they have a schism and form a rival church."
According to a Presbyterian homemaker, her communion was a little like vegetable soup. "We have," she said, "the OPs, RPs, BPs, and Split Peas!"
A Methodist businessman complemented these tales with an apocryphal tale of a man from his faith community who had been shipwrecked for years on a small island. When found by a passing ship, rescuers asked him why he had constructed three huts, since he was there by himself. "Well," he replied, "that one is my home, that one is my church, and that one is my former church."
Religious life in our world is like that. We call it "balkanization." The term comes from the history of the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe where centuries of fierce clannish self-preservation have defied the creation of stable broadly encompassing nation states. Large identities, like huge denominations, may expand rapidly for a time, but inevitably splinter groups form and secede, often at the price of vitriolic rhetoric and great emotional pain.
Today's lectionary passages all deal with family problems and sibling rivalries. We get the tail end of Joseph's story in Genesis 45 where he plays for a while with his brothers' psyches before revealing his true identity to them, only to find that he now must deal with their fears of reprisal against their nasty treatment of him years before. Paul wrestles with the centuries-old antagonism between Jews and Gentiles, now exacerbated in their seeming reversal of fortunes in the eyes of the creator as Christianity tips the balance in favor of previous seeming religious outcasts. And Jesus has to address the prejudice dividing the communities of his world, showing how tinny and awful words of racism and ethnic hubris sound when the parenthood of God is rightly understood.
Genesis 45:1-15
The story of Joseph in Egypt is one of the most interesting and fascinating tales in the Bible. Joseph appears to be a spoiled brat, born to a favored wife and raised to spite the rest of his siblings. No wonder he can't seem to understand the psychological effect of his proud dreams of family domination as he reports them enthusiastically to his parents and brothers and sisters at the breakfast table. Soon the boys are fixated on getting rid of troublesome Joseph and lie through their teeth to keep the family peace.
But skeletons have a way of popping out of forgotten closets, and just when Jacob's family feels most vulnerable the boy is back. He plays hide-and-seek for a while in seeming petulance, and then jumps out like a jack-in-the-box, singing a gleeful tune.
Yet the past cannot easily be rewritten, and Joseph knows it. In today's passage he gives his own interpretation of the divine will in all of this. What had appeared from our limited terrestrial perspective as a case of nasty family squabbles was actually quite a different scene when viewed from heaven's grander plans. Joseph was needed in Egypt in order to make Pharaoh aware of future events through divine revelation dispensed in dreams. The road from Canaan to the Nile might have been circuitous, but it was traveled on a ticket stamped by angels.
Three themes emerge from the larger passage of which this is a snippet. First, the biblical emphasis on divine providence and the trumping direction of God over the whims and whiles of humankind shouts loud and clear. As poet, Robert Browning, put it, "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." The ultimate design for the tapestry of humanity's mosaic is held in the mind of God, and even when we try to pull its patterns this way and that, and spill blood red where subtle shades of lavender would have been more appropriate, one day the whole will make sense and our "mistakes" will appear as bright spots in an even grander array.
Second, the interaction between Joseph and his brothers can serve as a moral warning to us that our peevishness always nets trouble for someone, and in spite of our best efforts, the history of humanity is told in terms of conquest, war, murder, and bloodshed. It takes great grace, along with transcendent understanding, to counter the natural flow of naturally evil society.
Third, getting back to the overall literary structure of Genesis, the Joseph cycle of stories in chapters 37-50 addressed one of the major questions rumbling through the minds of Israel at Mount Sinai: "If we are the uniquely loved and chosen people of God, how did we ever end up as slaves in Egypt?" The answer, of course, is found in the life of the dreamer Joseph. From a human perspective, it was when Joseph dreamed his own dreams of self-aggrandizement that he wound up with a one-way ticket out of the country. Only much later in is life, when he finally got past his own ego, was he able to see that the road out of rightly earned slavery was by dreaming instead the dreams of God. This was a lesson Israel was only beginning to learn some 400 years later. We still need to learn it today.
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Late one Saturday night our phone rang. Our oldest daughter, then a freshman away at college, was on the other end, sobbing. "Dad, why do we treat each other the way we do?" she asked with passion and vehemence.
She had just gotten back to her residence after viewing the movie American History X, a biting story of a prejudiced family and the unfolding horror of the way this bigotry destroyed their lives and their communities. The main character kills someone of another race at the beginning, and proudly goes off to jail as a triumphant martyr for the white supremist cause. Flashbacks show how his father indoctrinated ethnic stereotypes and warlike blood pride into the family over mealtime monologues.
But in prison, the only person who defends this tough skinhead against an even crueler world of torment and dehumanization is a black man. Suddenly, the old prejudices lose their punch and moral worlds collide. The inmate gets an education he never expected and sees color and ethnicity in new ways. He emerges from jail far more reflective, and his boastful prejudices and racial slurs have been virtually wiped clean from his lexography.
Yet the problem of racism grows tenacious roots in a family or community. When the main character returns he finds his younger brother welcoming him like a god, ready to fight at his side in the next genetic clash over turf and social dominance. The story winds to a tragic conclusion in which all of the prejudices come back to haunt and bite and disrupt.
The reality is that we all harbor peevish prejudices, but most of the time we keep them internalized in order to live politically correct lives. What would others think of us if we really told them how we felt about so-and-so or such-and-such? So we parade around in the dignity of refined culture.
Yet the bigotry remains underneath. And only when it is voiced in all of its ugliness, like my daughter faced from the movie screen, or Paul's readers heard reflected back to them as they read Romans 11, is there the start of a revulsion that may bring healing. Romans 9-11 is not so much an exploration of divine mysteries as it is a challenge to our racism and ethnic snobbery in a world where God's ultimate goal is to bring the whole family back together.
Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28
Groups living in an area may have much in common with one another, yet they often become unusually antagonistic in their expressions of contempt for each other. That was certainly the case with between the Jews and some of the other communities in the larger Palestinian world of the first century. In Matthew 15, Jesus is confronted by that bias and seems, at first, to buy into it.
Jesus' fame at working miracles has spread, and a woman from the north, beyond mostly Jewish Galilee, has come seeking his favor. She is from Tyre, now part of Lebanon. Her ethnic lineage could have been any of a dozen local varieties, but it is certainly not Jewish. Jesus and his disciples recognize that immediately. When she requests that he heal her daughter, Jesus comes back with the standard segregationist rhetoric announced day by day in the streets and shops and synagogues. "You seek help from someone from your own kind and we'll look after ours."
Did Jesus mean it? Was he as bigoted as all the rest?
There are dozens of other texts that say otherwise, so Jesus' initial conversation with this woman is unlikely to have arisen from deep ethnic prejudice on his part. Instead, it seems to have had two targets. First, it appears to be offered for the benefit of Jesus' disciples. They carried with them the attitudes of their day, including the racial paradigms and hierarchies that were caught through marketplace conversations. When Jesus at first voiced their judgments it probably took them by surprise. They knew that Jesus did not limit his behaviors to the conventions of the time in other respects. Furthermore, they were well aware that Jesus had initiated this journey into a foreign territory, so he must have wanted to be in that setting in the first place.
As they listened to the words emerging from his mouth, the disciples must have cringed a little. Prejudice may feel right in the mind and it may breathe with the bellows of the emotions, but when it is voiced it has a way of losing its rich timbre and echoes tinny and hollow.
There is a second reason why Jesus might be using these cruel words, and that is to clarify the issues at stake in this moment of teaching and healing. Jesus is not a magician doing tricks. He is not a spiritual shaman with a few spells in a bag. He is not an itinerant medicine man who fixes up elixirs to sell in a scheming con game.
It is important that this woman and all who will be part of the aftermath of his healing miracle recognize that Jesus is from Israel; that he is a Jew; that he is appearing in history in a given context that clarifies his identity and mission. Jesus is the Messiah promised by the Hebrew prophets. To ask for his miracles without having that understanding is to play silly religious games that have no purpose. Jesus must be recognized as the one sent by God to turn human history around.
Jesus' words of challenge to the woman are in part a test. Will she understand that salvation is channeled to the world through Israel? Will she acknowledge that Jesus is more than a genie in a bottle for whoever next finds the lamp?
The issue is not so much whether Jesus can deliver on the request given, but whether the request itself matches the true need. On that basis, Matthew sets next to one another this story and the preceding short teaching. In verses 10-20, Jesus wrestles with the disciples to identify the values that underlie our actions. Do we act on the basis of external demands, like the peer pressure of the Pharisees in their codes of conduct? Or do we express our actions as the outcome of the values we have internalized?
The latter is more true, Jesus says. Our actions reveal what we have come to believe inside. Because of that, too often in life we get what we deserve. The Pharisees valued a particular kind of religious political correctness, and their behaviors matched. Unfortunately, what they lost in the process was a need for grace. If they could define their own needs and then fulfill those needs through a particular set of actions, there was no longer any room for grace.
We get what we deserve unless we seek grace. The Pharisees plowed their furrow around the field of ritual cleansing, and in that field they themselves would be buried. But this woman knows she has nothing to plow around in order to earn healing for her daughter. She pleads for mercy: just a few crumbs from the master's table.
Her understanding is more than mere perceptions about herself and what she might or might not have a right to expect; she is also defining the perspective for any reality that surrounds Jesus wherever he goes. No table belongs to those who sit at it. The table is always the master's table. Whoever presumes to own it thereby forfeits a right to draw up a chair or stool.
This brings us back to the religious balkanization nurtured by our ethnic and religious bigotries. When we claim to own the table and determine who we will eat with, the first person to be sent away is Jesus. Think of Matthew's stories again. He tells about the table manners of the Pharisees. They get upset with Jesus. The next thing you know, Jesus shows up in Tyre, a foreign nation according to the Pharisees and outside of the care of God. There Jesus has a conversation with an outcast about who gets to eat at the master's table. Wherever Jesus goes, the table is always his. Whoever would approach the table must acknowledge that no child and no dog have a right to eat there. Only those who receive an invitation from the master of the table are welcome. These invitations are not hard to get. They come freely to those who know who owns the table, and then come seeking grace.
Application
Our participation in the present humanity of this world drives us often toward distinctions, separations, bigotry, and racism -- even in the church. Sometimes there are children who, in remarkable ways, can both demonstrate this and show this and demonstrate the way out, as Dale Galloway related in his book, Dream a New Dream. A friend's son was very shy, he said. Chad was usually by himself, and others took no effort to include him in their circles of friends. Every afternoon Chad's mother would see the children pile off the school bus in groups, laughing, playing, and joking around with each other. Chad, however, would always be the last down the steps, always alone. No one ever paid much attention to him.
One day in late January. Chad came home and said, "You know what, Mom? Valentine's Day is coming and I want to make a valentine for everyone in my class!"
Chad's mother told Dale how terrible she felt. "Oh no!" she thought. "Chad is setting himself up for a fall now. He's going to make valentines for everyone else, but nobody will think of him. He'll come home all disappointed, and just pull back further into his shell."
But Chad insisted, so they got paper and crayons and glue. Chad made 31 valentine cards. It took him three weeks.
The day he took them to school his mother cried a lot. When he came off the bus alone as usual, bearing no valentine cards from others in his hands, she was ready for the worst.
Amazingly, Chad's face was glowing. He marched through the door triumphant. "I didn't forget anybody!" he said. "I gave them all one of my hearts!"
That day Chad gained something more than just friends. He gained a sense of himself. He won a sense of dignity and worth. "I gave them all one of my hearts!" he said.
That's where God wants to bring us -- circles of hatred erased by circles of love -- circles of judgment blurred by widening circles of mercy. He brings us to circles of death that give way to circles of life. The Bible says that when we had drawn God out of our circles, divine love drew us in. Perhaps Edwin Markham's poem could be translated into the conversation of heaven as the Father and the Son reflect about me:
He drew a circle that shut us out --
Heretic! Rebel! A thing to flout!
But our love alone had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Alternative Application
Genesis 45:1-15. The story of Joseph, with its reflection on the mysteries of divine providence, makes a wonderful treasure to explore more fully. Leslie Weatherhead pondered it marvelously in his sermon "That Immortal Sea." Grant Tuller's poem is a fitting emotional link to people who innately understand what he is talking about:
My life is but a weaving between my God and me.
I do not choose the colors; He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper- and I the under-side.
Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reasons why
The dark threads are as needful in a skillful weaver's hand
As the threads of gold and silver, in the pattern he has planned.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 133
"How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!" The words that open this powerful psalm are nearly universal in their ability to inspire. However, the dream somehow seems to rarely find itself materialized in our common life. Our nation is polarized to the point of being paralyzed. Our churches are at war among themselves, striking out at one another in internecine struggle. And globally, we are descending into a frenzy of greed and intolerance.
Where, one has to ask, is this unity?
Is unity to be found in common ideology or theology? Is it to be discovered in cultural homogeneity? The answer to each of these is a resounding, "No." Unity, if it is ever to be discovered and strengthened, is relational in nature. It is based, not in agreement over ideas or principles, but on the intimate knowledge and experience of human interaction.
To put this concept in the language of faith, we would say that our unity is in Jesus Christ. We, as the body of Christ, are in relationship through Christ. And it is there and only there that we claim any hope for unity.
And yes, it is indeed good when this unity emerges. It is a unity not forged in conformity, but in the cauldron of human interaction. It is deeper than the inevitable conflicts that arise; broader than the countless perspectives we bring to the tables, and more powerful than forces that seek to divide and fracture.
Such unity as this is what our psalm attempts to describe. Like precious oil or morning dew, this unity is indeed precious. Like anything important or precious, this kind of unity requires intention, care, and constant effort. A good starting place for this effort is within our local congregations. How are we handling our relationships at church? Is the sanctity of relationships within Christian community a priority? Is there an intentional focus on helping people to feel safe and loved? Are there avenues for conversation, sharing, and prayer?
The world is starving for this kind of unity. Amid the chatter and panic of the media, perhaps this church can quietly and steadily begin to build a new vision and hope for the world. And just maybe, as it builds a unity based on relationships with one another and with Jesus Christ, there will be a chance for healing.
