Religious Balkanization
Sermon
Sermons On The Gospel Readings
Series II, Cycle A
As a seminary intern in St. Louis, Missouri, I was part of a Jewish-Christian Dialogue group. We were seeking to understand one another's traditions, work together for the good of our neighborhoods, and promote tolerance and respect in society. I had been invited into the group by a member of the church at which I was serving. She grew up Jewish, and in recent years had, in her words, "completed my faith" by gaining an understanding that Jesus is the Messiah foretold by the prophets of Israel.
One of the dimensions of religious life that we all found we had in common across faith traditions and denominational lines was 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!"
And 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 Bigotry?
Religious life in our world is like that. We call it "Balkan-ization." 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.
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 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. Think of his camaraderie with the Samaritan woman in John 4. Samaritans were even more despised by the Jews than were folks from this woman's background, and Jesus showed no aversion to that woman at all. Or remember Jesus' tenderness with the Roman Centurion (Luke 7) whose servant was dying. Jesus praised the man for his faith, and treated him as a colleague and friend.
A Teaching Moment
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 taught 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 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.
I remember a Saturday evening when I was already in bed and the telephone rang. I had often told my elders and ministry staff not to call me after about 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening unless there was a really severe emergency. By that time, my mind was leaning heavily into Sunday morning worship preparations and I needed my rest and sleep in order to be well prepared. Furthermore, we had so often told our daughters that they could not have friends over on Saturday night, and that if they had to be out, to come in quietly so as not to disturb Dad.
But this Saturday night, the phone rang at 11:10. Worried, I rapidly answered it. Our oldest daughter, then a freshman away at college, was on the other end. She was sobbing. My heart clenched. What could have happened? Was she hurt? Did I need to rescue her?
Quickly she assured me that she was not in any danger. Then she asked one of those unanswerable rhetorical questions, "Dad, why do we treat each other the way we do?" She asked it with such passion and vehemence that I knew I needed to wait for a better explanation of her mood, and not too abruptly try to fix things.
She had just gotten back to her residence hall after going to a movie that was shown on campus. It happened to be American History X, the 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.
So that's the movie my daughter had been viewing. And now, in tears, she needed to talk to me. "Why do we treat each other the way we do?" she asked. What could I say? What would you say? What answer is there to give?
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 the disciples of Jesus heard reflected back to them from the uncharacteristic words that shot at this woman, is there the start of a revulsion that may bring healing.
A Test
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.
So 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 which have no purpose. Jesus must be recognized as the one sent by God to turn human history around.
So 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 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. And 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.
Leo Tolstoy wrote a brilliant little story about such desires and the quests they lead us on. He told of a man who had found favor with the governing powers of his society in a Russia now historied, and was allowed to select a parcel of ground as his own possession. The only limitation on this field's size was the requirement that the man be able to plow a furrow around the property in a single day.
Early one morning he set out, drawn by the lure of free land and excited about the small farm he would stake out and claim as his own. He didn't need much, of course -- just enough to make a simple living for himself and his family.
By mid-morning he had moved a great distance. Still, when he looked back, the area seemed terribly small. So, since the day was still young, he decided to angle out a bit more. After all, a larger farm would make him a wealthy man. In his mind scenes flashed of his children, robust because of the fine meals they would take off this land. He could see his wife gliding at the ball adorned in a Parisian gown. Men would sidle up to him and seek his opinions; women would giggle with delight as he tipped his hat to them. He was becoming a person of importance!
As noon approached the plowman grew impatient with his slow progress. The circle of land now seemed much too insignificant. He must have more; so once again he widened the sweep of his plow.
Throughout the afternoon he fantasized of kings and princes calling him to court, and the fever for more acres burned in his soul. He plowed with a passion, forgetting to watch the sun as it slipped in the western skies.
Too late he realized that he might not make it back to the starting stake by dusk. In panic, he whipped his horse, pushing at the plow handles as the furrow began to zigzag madly. His heart pounded, his stomach churned and his muscles tightened in desperation. He must make it!
But his desire had overextended itself, and inches short of a complete circle he fell to the earth he so desperately coveted, dead of a heart attack. Ironically, wrote Tolstoy, the man was buried on all the land he really needed: a plot of ground three feet by six -- a farm for the dead.
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.
Whose Table Is It?
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. And these invitations are not hard to get. They come freely to those who know who owns the table, and then come seeking grace.
Our participation in the present humanity of this world drives us often toward distinctions, separations, bigotry, and racism -- even in the church. That was powerfully brought home to me during our time as missionaries in Nigeria. We were received with openness and love by our friends in the Church of Christ in the Sudan among the Tiv.
But one of their practices really bothered us: on Communion Sunday, everyone was expected to wear white. Now, in itself, wearing white to symbolize purity before God is a great idea. But if a person in those neighborhoods didn't wear white on Communion Sunday, regardless of her spiritual condition, she was physically directed to the back of the church building. And when the loaf and cup of communion were passed, those whose shirts were yellow, or whose skirts had pink designs on otherwise white backgrounds, or those who were too poor to buy a white blouse -- these were served the bread and wine last, as if they were second-class citizens in the kingdom or inferior members of the church.
As a bit of a protest, we never wore white on Communion Sunday, and we always sat at the back and received communion last. Even though we were treated nicely enough, we felt the pressures of racism and the horrors of pride and judgment.
That experience taught me the meaning of the old spiritual, "I Got Shoes." While the richly dressed white folks in the old South of the United States marched off to their churches wearing their polished Sunday shoes, the black slaves, with their bare feet, were left to gather for worship as they could. And while white folks were singing about the worldwide church of Christ, black folks were singing:
I got shoes! You got shoes! All God's chillun got shoes!
And when de angel Gabriel calls us home, Gonna walk all over God's heab'n!
For they knew that God takes care of God's children, and when God brought them finally to glory, God wouldn't check to see the color of their skin, or the whiteness of their clothes, or even the place where they were born. Instead, God would simply ask them if Jesus was their brother. And then, like the only begotten Son, they too would receive a pair of shoes, the sign of people who were no longer barefoot slaves of others but cared-for children of God. Amen.
One of the dimensions of religious life that we all found we had in common across faith traditions and denominational lines was 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!"
And 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 Bigotry?
Religious life in our world is like that. We call it "Balkan-ization." 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.
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 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. Think of his camaraderie with the Samaritan woman in John 4. Samaritans were even more despised by the Jews than were folks from this woman's background, and Jesus showed no aversion to that woman at all. Or remember Jesus' tenderness with the Roman Centurion (Luke 7) whose servant was dying. Jesus praised the man for his faith, and treated him as a colleague and friend.
A Teaching Moment
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 taught 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 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.
I remember a Saturday evening when I was already in bed and the telephone rang. I had often told my elders and ministry staff not to call me after about 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening unless there was a really severe emergency. By that time, my mind was leaning heavily into Sunday morning worship preparations and I needed my rest and sleep in order to be well prepared. Furthermore, we had so often told our daughters that they could not have friends over on Saturday night, and that if they had to be out, to come in quietly so as not to disturb Dad.
But this Saturday night, the phone rang at 11:10. Worried, I rapidly answered it. Our oldest daughter, then a freshman away at college, was on the other end. She was sobbing. My heart clenched. What could have happened? Was she hurt? Did I need to rescue her?
Quickly she assured me that she was not in any danger. Then she asked one of those unanswerable rhetorical questions, "Dad, why do we treat each other the way we do?" She asked it with such passion and vehemence that I knew I needed to wait for a better explanation of her mood, and not too abruptly try to fix things.
She had just gotten back to her residence hall after going to a movie that was shown on campus. It happened to be American History X, the 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.
So that's the movie my daughter had been viewing. And now, in tears, she needed to talk to me. "Why do we treat each other the way we do?" she asked. What could I say? What would you say? What answer is there to give?
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 the disciples of Jesus heard reflected back to them from the uncharacteristic words that shot at this woman, is there the start of a revulsion that may bring healing.
A Test
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.
So 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 which have no purpose. Jesus must be recognized as the one sent by God to turn human history around.
So 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 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. And 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.
Leo Tolstoy wrote a brilliant little story about such desires and the quests they lead us on. He told of a man who had found favor with the governing powers of his society in a Russia now historied, and was allowed to select a parcel of ground as his own possession. The only limitation on this field's size was the requirement that the man be able to plow a furrow around the property in a single day.
Early one morning he set out, drawn by the lure of free land and excited about the small farm he would stake out and claim as his own. He didn't need much, of course -- just enough to make a simple living for himself and his family.
By mid-morning he had moved a great distance. Still, when he looked back, the area seemed terribly small. So, since the day was still young, he decided to angle out a bit more. After all, a larger farm would make him a wealthy man. In his mind scenes flashed of his children, robust because of the fine meals they would take off this land. He could see his wife gliding at the ball adorned in a Parisian gown. Men would sidle up to him and seek his opinions; women would giggle with delight as he tipped his hat to them. He was becoming a person of importance!
As noon approached the plowman grew impatient with his slow progress. The circle of land now seemed much too insignificant. He must have more; so once again he widened the sweep of his plow.
Throughout the afternoon he fantasized of kings and princes calling him to court, and the fever for more acres burned in his soul. He plowed with a passion, forgetting to watch the sun as it slipped in the western skies.
Too late he realized that he might not make it back to the starting stake by dusk. In panic, he whipped his horse, pushing at the plow handles as the furrow began to zigzag madly. His heart pounded, his stomach churned and his muscles tightened in desperation. He must make it!
But his desire had overextended itself, and inches short of a complete circle he fell to the earth he so desperately coveted, dead of a heart attack. Ironically, wrote Tolstoy, the man was buried on all the land he really needed: a plot of ground three feet by six -- a farm for the dead.
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.
Whose Table Is It?
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. And these invitations are not hard to get. They come freely to those who know who owns the table, and then come seeking grace.
Our participation in the present humanity of this world drives us often toward distinctions, separations, bigotry, and racism -- even in the church. That was powerfully brought home to me during our time as missionaries in Nigeria. We were received with openness and love by our friends in the Church of Christ in the Sudan among the Tiv.
But one of their practices really bothered us: on Communion Sunday, everyone was expected to wear white. Now, in itself, wearing white to symbolize purity before God is a great idea. But if a person in those neighborhoods didn't wear white on Communion Sunday, regardless of her spiritual condition, she was physically directed to the back of the church building. And when the loaf and cup of communion were passed, those whose shirts were yellow, or whose skirts had pink designs on otherwise white backgrounds, or those who were too poor to buy a white blouse -- these were served the bread and wine last, as if they were second-class citizens in the kingdom or inferior members of the church.
As a bit of a protest, we never wore white on Communion Sunday, and we always sat at the back and received communion last. Even though we were treated nicely enough, we felt the pressures of racism and the horrors of pride and judgment.
That experience taught me the meaning of the old spiritual, "I Got Shoes." While the richly dressed white folks in the old South of the United States marched off to their churches wearing their polished Sunday shoes, the black slaves, with their bare feet, were left to gather for worship as they could. And while white folks were singing about the worldwide church of Christ, black folks were singing:
I got shoes! You got shoes! All God's chillun got shoes!
And when de angel Gabriel calls us home, Gonna walk all over God's heab'n!
For they knew that God takes care of God's children, and when God brought them finally to glory, God wouldn't check to see the color of their skin, or the whiteness of their clothes, or even the place where they were born. Instead, God would simply ask them if Jesus was their brother. And then, like the only begotten Son, they too would receive a pair of shoes, the sign of people who were no longer barefoot slaves of others but cared-for children of God. Amen.
