Gospel reading: Matthew 4.12-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)
It's a little unsettling for me that this topic follows "The Feminist Impasse". Because when I think about being a chosen one or an insider, I remember the clan of boys that my brother and I ran with on Western Hills Drive.
We weren't officially a group and didn't have a name. But the Little Rascal's "He Man Woman Hater's Club" might have been more appropriate than we'd like to remember. There were girls on the block. But we had very little use for them. At least no polite uses.
Those childhood relationships expose something that remains true, even when we've grown up enough to be polite, or fall in love. They expose a tension between inclusion and identity.
Asked to choose between inclusion and exclusion the virtuous choice is deceptively easy. Of course we must be inclusive. But into what are we including these hypothetical outsiders?
We boys would have been much more inclusive if we forwent our affection for Wiffleball. We played long into the summer nights. Lewis kept statistics for us each season on his Commodore 64 computer (that's an instrument just this side of the quill pen for those who don't know). And loving that game as we did was a form of exclusion. If you couldn't hit or throw a curve or at least dive boldly into the skin-tearing holly bushes against the center field wall, you'd probably never feel chosen by this group.
We organize our lives in much the same way as adults even if the particulars change. You may not have joined a Wiffleball game lately (my brother, Kirk, who now works for a large research firm in Georgetown, still does fairly regularly). But I'm willing to bet that when you decide to invite someone to dinner or find a companion for a movie you don't open the phone book and call the first name your finger drops onto.
We don't get out of the inclusive/exclusive dilemma by choosing to be one or the other. The wonder of human personality might be described as a unique collection of loves. And nobody wants to live in a world free of preference, because that world would be free of us. Without our loves, we simply are not.
Believe it or not, I think the Christian tradition has something to offer (imagine that). One of the ways that the Episcopal Church excludes people is through our worship, and I'm not talking about churches that exclude the unbaptised from Communion. A vast, vast majority of the people in Arkansas have no interest in going to a church service where a priest who, based on his or her outfit, seems to have been upholstered to match the other furniture in the chancel (the what?), and then reads prayers in ancient forms that ask God to show up in some mysterious way in the bread and wine we consume together. Our identity excludes everybody who is disinterested or disdainful of the forms of our worship.
But I talk to people all the time who say, "I didn't know a church like this existed. I didn't think I'd ever find a way to be a Christian again." Being a faithful church demands that we hold on to something of our unique identity and welcome people graciously if they might be nourished here too. Otherwise we have no self to offer. If the Episcopal Church stopped being itself some people would have no religious home. Nowhere that they feel chosen.
A liturgical scholar named Gordan Lathrop puts it this way: "The task of the assembly is a task of polarity: make the center strong, the symbols large, the words of Christ clear, and make that center accessible, the circle large, the periphery permeable" (from his book, Holy Things). It's possible to make the periphery so permeable that there is no center. No place to welcome another person into. No way to chose. And it's also possible to make the center so strong that it becomes sealed off. This isn't only exclusive and uncharitable. It's a good way to suffocate.
On Sunday we read of Jesus' call to the first disciples. He told them to drop their fishing nets and follow him. He didn't ask everyone he met the same thing in the same way. We think would like God to be perfectly inclusive. But Incarnation meant living in the same world we do. So even Jesus chose twelve friends to spread the good news of grace to all kinds of excluded people. And that good news is still reaching people in unlikely places and unlikely times today. He showed us not how to live without preference. But rather, how to make our preferences a source of grace for others.
We boys on the block got the strong center part, but it took some growing up to allow for those much needed punctures in the periphery. I'm not sure anything less than a merciless surge of hormonal activity could have changed us. But it, and other people, and new experiences did. Those relationships became a source of strength. They gave us something we could then give away. They made us feel chosen. So that eventually we could learn to return that gift to our world. Even girls.
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(ramblings on theological things)
About Me
- Scott Walters
- Rector, Christ Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR
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And He said to them, “Follow me…” (Matt 4:19)
Hearing my Granddaddy Mark’s south Mississippi dialect in my head is a whole lot easier than putting words on a page that make you hear it.
“Hey bwah, com’ere!” Sometimes those words mean orange slice candy, or his outstretched fists, and the guessing game of which hand holds the silver dollar. He throws back his head and laughs like something is really funny. In that moment I know I have been chosen to be the first-born son of two parents and four grandparents who love me more than life itself.
“For Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Jacob, Ruth, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Mary and Jesus himself, being God’s chosen does not mean doing well. It does not grant access to all the answers but means contending with the hard questions, thankless tasks, and usually a harrowing journey, which in Jesus’ case leads to the cross.” Kathleen Norris Amazing Grace
My cousin Allen and I are small enough to sit side by side on the bench of the old player piano. We pump away to the scroll of a Ragtime tune. From behind, my grand mother’s hand grabs my arm. She shakes her finger in my face. “That’s his piano. You leave him alone and let him play it!” My aunt Catherine grabs my grandmother and pulls her off of me. My mom takes me out to the yard. We sit in the swing under the tree and through tears she explains, “Your grandmother is an alcoholic. She’s had too much to drink. She doesn’t mean what she is saying and she won’t remember it tomorrow.” In that moment I was chosen for a life long education in addiction, an education that has become very personal.
“You did not choose me but I chose you.” (John 15:16)
The organ recital is at 2:00. My friend Paul said “I don’t know if I can make it but go ahead and I will try to meet you there.” The old Christ Episcopal Church is unfamiliar and beautiful. I am keyed up, like something is going to happen. Paul shows up right at two. We listen as “Pipe Dreams” is taped for public radio. It’s exciting. At intermission, Paul says, “Trey I want you to meet my friend Ann.” Behind us is a white haired woman with an aura of dignity. A retired Presbyterian minister, she becomes my councilor and guides me back to the church. She introduces me to her friend Mary Craig, who introduces me to her friend Larry. Now that old church is very familiar.
“When others label me and try to exclude me…I refuse to be shaken from the fold. It’s my God, too, my Bible, my church, my faith; it chose me. But it does not make me ‘chosen’ in a way that excludes others”. Amazing Grace
It’s been a long time since I’ve had any orange slice candy.
I don't think Scott should be so unsettled by this topic because we women had our little groups that excluded boys. But I won't go into that!
I think the topic actually follows quite well. After all, Jesus didn't include women in his little group of chosen disciple friends and they were a pretty "official" group! Then again, Jesus might have been a victim of the times and may have chosen women if he had lived today.
The First Amendment's right to freedom of religion and worship has always set Americans apart from each other and from other modern countries; A right I'm committed to keep in tact. So I have no problem with people who are "disinterested" in our religious form. However, I fear those who are "disdainful" of it! They're not just exclusive in form but in choice as well! They're doomed to the days of heresay in Christianity. I just hope they stay in their own little group so we can stay free.
Anyway, Jesus chose his disciples, taught them the word,(sometimes in parables) and expected them to go out and spread that word to all who would listen. That chosen group of men became the large group of Christians we see today; men and women.
However, what some Christians have done is to break down into different groups of Christian beliefs due to conflicts in biblical language and translation. I believe they have the right to do that but some groups have complicated a very simple concept,(that concept being the Ten Commandments) changed the rules and formed a tight center.
It's like the game of Wiffleball; if you believe what we believe, you can be part of the team. As a result, the message is being lost. I think this happens because we inject judgments into those biblical translations and make them the rules of the game. Rules like no women in the clergy, and having to be Catholic to receive Communion in the Catholic Church, no drinking or dancing, no immunizations or use worldly medicine, and using the church as a political Bully Pulpit to exclude people and ideas. What do any of those injected rules have to do with religion? How crazy is that?
I think if we all tried to follow the Ten Commandments to the best of our ability and let God do the judging and deciding we'd all be better off and there would be no question about who could play and who couldn't.
I think though,that I have to partially disagree with Scott on one part of his analysis of the Episcopal Church. I don't think we exclude people at all, in fact, I think we are remarkably inclusive. It's not our identity that excludes people from our worship services it's a choice they make to worship in a different way or perhaps in a different group. We, I mean Episcopalians, could say the same thing about other forms of worship. Especially, the ones who find comfort in worship by Microsoft Power Point. I have no interest in that; Way too cold for me!
I think our church periphery is wide open and many people would find our rules and center more closely related to those associated with religious application. I think we are substance over form. But if we are all meeting people who didn't know about who we are and what we do inside the walls of our church, then we need to do a better job at advertising.
"You'll always be my son, David." These are words that anyone would hope to hear from their mother after the startling exclamation of "I'm gay, Mom."
Today, four days after these words of endearment that I received from my mother, I still haven't quite put them into perspective. I have to be objective. I can't allow myself to be hurt. Not again.
You may be wondering what it is that made me so skeptical of these words, after all Maggie sounded genuine enough. Well, here goes. Maggie is not my "mother" but she was my biological carrier. She gave me away after a couple of failed years at trying to raise me. I don't remember her. In fact, I never even heard from her until I came home Friday night from a wonderful outing with some members of my Christ Church family.
"You'll always be my son." I suppose that means always, except for the last thirty years of my life. Or, maybe it means she truly has the mindset that being gay is 100% okay. Or, here's the ticker. I'm trying to figure out if it simply means that she longs for my forgiveness so deeply for what she did to me that she is willing to accept "anything" about myself that I might later reveal. If this is true, perhaps I should send my adoptive mother Maggie's way for a lesson on acceptance, considering she hasn't spoken to me in the last two years. "I want David in my life," she tells my friends who still inhabit the mountain town where I grew up. "I just don't want him bringing his boyfriend around."
Maybe I'm selfish, but I am just not willing to accept these "terms and conditions." I love Jassiel. I've loved him for three years now. I go to bed with him at night and he's the first person to greet me when I wake up in the morning, except for Husky the Chihuaua who has become a new addition to our family since the beginning of Advent. He just showed up on our doorstep, ironically enough. He has occasional seizures, but I'm not giving him away or refusing to love him because of it. I've wanted a dog for two years and he just fell out of the sky. I'm willing to accept him with all his imperfections. I have a lot of love to give Jassiel and Husky. I only ask that they love me in return, which they both proven unequivocally in the simple presence of themselves in my life.
As you can see, inclusion means SO MUCH to me. I could rattle on forever, but I'll save it for another day. After all, I know my Christ Church family will be there to listen for as long as I need them to. Unconditional, tolerant, perfect, sacred, God Given, Christ exemplified love! Isn't that what it's all about.
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