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From February 11, 2007 Monday morning I sat down with Jae Gottman who is back ministering at First Christian Church part time now. If you saw Jae's story in the Paducah Sun recently, you know it is truly an answer to prayer that he is still with us. When conversation turned from Jae's illness to the world religions class I took over for him, Jae wanted to thank me. But I wouldn't let him. "Guess who really got the education?" I teased. I hadn't expected to learn so much. Particularly about the Christian point of view of some of Jae's students. Not that their perspective was new. It wasn't. But I was struck again by the American Christian emphasis on the individual. It's so common that we really don't notice it most of the time. But there it is, hidden in plain sight in that most commonly asked question "Is Jesus Christ your personal Lord and Savior?" Now because I was flying by the seat of my pants in Jae's class, trying to follow a syllabus I didn't create, I steered away from other equally valid understandings of discipleship and salvation. But that doesn't mean you and I can't. Or shouldn't. In fact, we need to if we are going to be faithful. Why? Because, to borrow from a popular phrase, "Christianity isn't all about me." Me and my relationship with Christ. Me and my salvation. Me and my eternal life. Although faith in Christ is always a deeply personal thing, it is never ever a me thing or a you alone thing. It is forever and always a we thing. Those healings Jesus did? Guess who his target was? When Jesus healed, he was doing far more than restoring individuals to wholeness. He was also healing those people's families. When Jesus laid hands on one person, he was also restoring whole neighborhoods. He was making entire communities new again. Sure, illness affects one person's body. But suffering? Everyone shares in that. To heal one is to heal many. The reaching out Jesus did to those who were kept on the margins of society? Guess who was touched by this compassion? Every time Jesus reached out to the outcast and drew her close, every time Jesus shared a meal with the fellow everyone sneered at, Jesus was making a difference for more than that individual. He was affecting everyone who looked on. He was influencing anyone who heard about his openness. To change one person's life is to change the lives of many. Jesus had eyes that saw differently than ours. He didn't just see you and you and you, separating people out into this one, that one, the next one, the last one. Sure, Jesus saw people as individuals and he delighted in what made each
person unique. Thing is, so often we don't see that. Most of the time you and I don't see the we that we really are, the wider community, or even the widest community--the human family. You and I see with different eyes. We see lines: county lines, state lines, the outlines of nations marked on the world map. We see color lines and class lines and lines that divide us into all sorts of categories. Blessed are you who are poor, Jesus said. Blessed are you who are hungry now. Blessed are you who weep or who are misunderstood and hated for what you stand for. And woe, woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you whose laughter is not also balanced with somber awareness of the realities of life. Woe to you who tell you what you want to hear. With our habit of dividing the world into parts, we can easily listen to the Beatitudes and miss what Jesus is after. We think he's redrawing humanity's lines; a new group warranting blessing on this side and the previously-blessed having to stand on the other side, the cursed side now. But guess what? It's not that easy. It's not that easy. Because no matter who's doing the labeling - the world or the man from Galilee - blessed ones and cursed ones don't inhabit parallel universes. We are connected, one to the other. And Jesus wants us to see that. He wants to help us see that my circumstance, my reality has something to do with your circumstance, your reality. My wealth isn't just the result of my hard work, my blood, sweat and tears. It also has something to do with your poverty, even if I'm not quite sure how. And your tears, your sadnesses and sorrows, are so often related to the choices someone you don't even know has made. One of the hardest things I have ever done was walk into a fancy-pants Navajo jewelry store in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Case after velvet-lined case showed off handcrafted belt buckles, thick, high-gloss bracelets, and stunning squash blossom necklaces heavy with turquoise and silver. Each item was more beautiful than the next. More expensive, too. While tourists were salivating over the exquisite expressions on display, I was crying inside because of who I loved: a Navajo man who was also a gifted silversmith. Guess who drove 200 miles every time he needed to buy the silver for his unique creations? Eddie did. Guess who spent countless hours hammering and honing, polishing and preparing his work to be sold? Eddie did. Guess whose heart and soul went into everything he made? Eddie's did. But because his elderly uncle suddenly needed to borrow money for firewood or his sister's truck for hauling water was yet again in dire need of repair, guess who regularly found it necessary to sell his work for far, far less than it was worth? Exactly. Eddie. And a hundred Eddies like him. In Santa Fe and in places all around the world, one person's economic desperation means another's exorbitant profit. Sometimes it's silver, sometimes it's seamstressing in a sweatshop in Malaysia, sometimes it's coffee beans in Kenya. Remember that schoolyard come-back, that thing we shouted out when we were young and someone tossed an insult our way? "Four-eyes!" someone would say and we'd say back, "I know you are but what am I?" "Pokey slow-joe!" "I know you are but what am I?" When Jesus flips the definition of who is blessed and who is cursed, he is up to something more than this playground retort. Sure, he wants us to check our "who's blessed-who's not" assumptions at the door. But he also wants us to see that something's wrong when one person's experience of blessing is the result of a reality that is oppressive for someone else. He wants us to see the disconnect, the social and economic and political breaches that give some a consistent advantage in the worldly blessing department. Jesus is after something else, too. When he stresses that the ones who are blessed aren't always the ones who seem so, it's because the thinking of his time was that you could tell a person's blessing by looking at their life. If they were prospering, if they were healthy, if they had power and privilege, then they were tight with God. God had blessed them. By insisting that the last and the least are blessed, that the sorrowful and the forsaken are blessed, Jesus is turning on its ear assumptions about God's interests and priorities. But don't misunderstand Jesus. When he says "woe" to those who were otherwise thought to be blessed, what I hear him really saying is "whoa, hold up there!" Why? Because thinking you're blessed and others aren't needs to stop. If my being blessed comes at your expense, if my state of blessedness is built on your back, then something is wrong, very wrong. And that something is how we live together. Living with the idea that we are separate from one another, that your life and my life have nothing to do with each other because you live in Guatemala and I live in Germany. Listen carefully to what Jesus is saying. Look closely at what he is doing. You'll not find Jesus drawing new lines in the sand today: truly blessed one here, those mistakenly believed to be blessed over there. In God's world, guess who's blessed? Guess who's blessed? One look at Jesus' audience as he gives his Sermon on the Plain and you'll have your answer. Young, old, rich, poor. Men and women, Jews and Gentiles. Country bumpkins and city sophisticates. The broken, the whole, the righteous and the no-so righteous. In God's realm, there's more than enough blessing for everyone. Being a Christian means living into and living out of this truth. And because Christianity is a we thing, you and I help God spread that blessing every time we insist that no one's worldly blessing must ever come at the expense of someone else. Guess who's blessed? We all are. And God is waiting for us to help make sure that each person knows and feels this Good News. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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