The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The 6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 9A
July 9, 2023
This past week, I was scrolling on
social media when I came across an article title that captured my attention: “Why
your brain hates other people: and how to make it think differently.” As if the
title weren’t enough to draw me in, listen to the first few lines: “As a
kid, I saw the 1968 version Planet of the Apes. As a future
primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its
filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate
in separate groups.”
The author
Robert Sapolsky continues, “Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along
lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic
status, and so on. And it’s not a pretty picture. We do so with remarkable
speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and
classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility
that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and
regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by
primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. Pretty depressing.”
He
concludes his introduction saying, “But crucially, there is room for optimism.
Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all
carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us
in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus,
there is hope that, with science’s help, clannishness and
xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that
Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.”[i]
I’ve been
thinking about this us/them division this week.
It shows up in two of our scripture readings—the Old Testament reading
and the Gospel reading. First, in the Old Testament, we see the conclusion of
Abraham’s story that we’ve been following over the last few weeks. Sarah has died, and Abraham has decided that
it’s time for his son Isaac to be married.
But Abraham doesn’t want Isaac to marry a woman from the Cannanites,
those people that he’s been living among.
Instead, Abraham sends his servant back to his old, hometown where all
his relatives still live. “Go to my
country and to my kindred” Abraham tells the servant, and he promises the
servant that God will send an angel before him to help him find Isaac a wife.
So, the servant goes, and when he gets to Abraham’s brother’s compound, he
prays that God will help him. Then we
get our reading for today, when Rebecca shows up at the well, makes herself
notable to Abraham’s servant by offering hospitality in the gift of water to
him (and his 10 camels), and upon his investigation, reveals that she is the
granddaughter of Abraham’s brother. Rebecca
ends up agreeing to journey back to the land of Cana where she will marry Isaac-her
first cousin once removed (and spoiler alert-where she will give birth to twins
Jacob and Esau, and Jacob will go back home and marry not one but two of his
first cousins-Rachel and Leah—the daughters of Rebecca’s brother Laban). This
story illustrates not only how God continues to fulfill God’s promise to
Abraham of making Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, it
also shows the lengths that we will go to preserve our us versus them lines
that we have drawn, and it shows how hospitality can help break down some of
those lines and barriers.
In our
gospel reading for today, we see Jesus fielding complaints as he is on the road
teaching and proclaiming his message in different cities. He’s growing increasingly more frustrated and
angry as he reflects that his critics can’t be satisfied with either the more
austere John the Baptist and his call to repentance or Jesus, who comes feasting
and breaking bread with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus’s critics clearly want him to be more
like “us” and they are criticizing him for his reaching out beyond the division
of us and them. He is frustrated because
the most religious are the ones who can’t seem to grasp his message. But then we see a turning point. Jesus moves from anger and judgement—specifically
a grace-filled judgement that invites repentance and can see broader and better
possibilities of and for these people Jesus cares about; it’s a judgement
that’s all about lifting up and restoring relationships. He moves from judgement to an invitation to
grace and care, where all can find rest and comfort. In this passage we see him breaking down the
barriers of us and them, inviting all into the rest and comfort that he offers.
So, let’s
talk a little more about us versus them, and how that plays out in our own lives
and in the life of our church. Can you
think of a time when you have found yourself in an “us versus them” situation
when somehow the lines became blurred or even broken down? Or can you think of a time when you found
yourself in an “us versus them” situation and the lines weren’t broken
down? We talked about this in our
Wednesday healing service, and as we ended our conversation, we discovered that
we had inadvertently divided ourselves into an us versus them scenario of
people who are ok with women clergy (the us) and people who aren’t (the
them). I couldn’t have created a better
example of all this if I had tried!
In a more painful encounter, I had a conversation with
our nursery supervisor, Dianne Jones, last Sunday. Dianne and I were touching base on how things
in the nursery were going, and she shared with me that she had thought about resigning
her post with us. She told me about how she,
a person of color, had felt the looks from some of our parishioners when she
would bring the children into church or when she would come over for
hospitality time—looks that said to her, “Who are you and what are you doing
here?” As Dianne was telling me all
this, I had to fight my natural inclination to get defensive, to defend
“us.” As I watched her speak, I saw her
gentleness and her heartbreak, I heard her longing, as a long-time Christian
and practitioner of her faith, as the one who teaches and nurtures and loves
our youngest parishioners for it to all be about us and how we live out our
faith together here—no insiders and outsiders, all beloved of Christ in need of
forgiveness, grace, healing, and a place to belong. I apologized and told her that I appreciated
her sticking with us, and that we would try to do better. I asked her if I could share this with y’all
today, and she graciously agreed.
In the article I referenced earlier, Robert Sapolsky
makes a scientific case for how our brains are wired to create these us versus
them strata, these automatic characterizations of people, but he says it is
fairly easy to rapidly recategorize individuals and even whole groups (giving
three powerful examples) and writing, “We all have multiple dichotomies in our
heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right
circumstances, evaporate in an instant.” You can read the article for yourself
and see some of the strategies that he suggests. But what it really boils down to is intentionally
practicing what Jesus taught—the importance of relationship with God and with
each other, how we are changed and become more open when we are empathetic and
curious, gentle and humble of heart, how we all have fallen short of the best
possibility who God has created us to be and are all in need of Jesus’s
forgiveness, and how Jesus invites all into his restful embrace.
Your invitation this week is to pay attention to the
times when you find yourself categorizing someone as a “them” to your us. Take one opportunity this week to be in
relationship with that “them,” even if it just means a brief conversation,
sharing a smile or noting or imagining something that you have in common. Pay attention to how the Holy Spirit works
in, around, and through us to help us break down the false barriers of us and
them. May you be willing to find rest
this week alongside the gentleness of Jesus, who alone can offer you perfect
belonging and perfect rest.
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