The Bread of Life
John 6:35-51
August 16, 2009
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
Back in December of 1946, a businessman named Stuart Luhan checked into the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Luhan regularly made trips there, and his custom was to get a room on the 10th floor so that he could be away from the street noises. Settling in for the night he looked forward to a good night’s rest before doing business the next day. So off he went to sleep.
Sometime in the early morning hours he woke up and saw a red glow out the window. Something was wrong. He heard a commotion outside his door and opened it to find the hallway thick with black smoke. Shutting the door he began to panic. He opened the window to see if there was a way down, but looking down from ten stories only increased his panic. What should he do? He couldn’t go into the hallway, and he couldn’t jump. Not knowing what else to do he retreated to the center of his room and tried to practice something he had been doing every morning for years, which is to calm himself and pray.
Seeking God’s help he said, “God, I put myself into your care and keeping. Let your presence be my fortress. I await your instructions on how to get out of this crisis.” He felt calm, despite the fact that the other voices in the hotel were becoming more frantic. Soon, he sensed a voice, a presence, telling him to calmly get dressed. Then he was to make a rope out of the sheets, blanket, and bedspread. He was getting ready to tie it to the center post on the window and throw the rope down, but from the same presence he sensed, “No. Not yet. Trust me.” He waited. Panic clutched at him, trying to get him to give in, but he stayed calm. After what seemed like forever he sensed the voice saying, “Now! Put the rope out the window and climb out.” As he did, Luhan recited words from the psalms: “God is my life and my salvation. I shall not fear. God is my life and salvation. I shall not fear.”
Climbing down he only reached the eighth floor. There was nowhere to go. Then he saw a fireman extending his ladder to the eighth floor, but it was too far away. Climbing up the ladder, the fireman saw Luhan, signaled him, and swung a rope hanging from the window above. He swung it once, and Luhan missed. Again he swung it, but it was just out of his reach. Finally a third time he swung it, and Luhan caught it. Twisting it around his right hand, he let go of his homemade rope and swung to the fireman, who caught him. Looking back he noticed that his homemade rope had caught fire and was now falling toward the earth. Luhan realized that if he had gone out too soon, he would have hung there to the point at which he couldn’t hold on any longer. He would have died. If he had waited, his own rope would have burned, causing him to fall and die. The timing was absolutely perfect.
I don’t know what you make of a story like this, but I think it explains a lot about what Jesus tried to say in our passage. When you hear him refer to himself as the “bread of life,” what does that term mean to you? Is it just something that you hear me say when I’m doing the words of institution during communion? Does it mean something more? To me it means that when we let Christ into our lives, he comes alive within us.
Jesus was trying to teach the people of the time an insight that they weren’t ready for. He was teaching that he could come alive in each and every one of us, if we choose to let him. He got into a lot of trouble for saying that he was the bread of life. He got into trouble because the Jews didn’t understand what he meant, and because they knew that he was somehow saying that God was in him and working through him. That was blasphemy. Also, they knew Mary and Joseph. They wondered how Jesus could say that he was from God if it was apparent who his parents were.
What they failed to understand, and what many modern Christians and non-Christians fail to comprehend, is that both in our passage and throughout all of John’s Gospel, Jesus was trying to teach people a whole new way of seeing our relationship with God. I didn’t understand this new way of seeing God and Christ until I read a book by the Quaker mystic, Thomas Kelly, in 1990. Reading this quote opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing Christ. Until then I had always seen God as distant and in heaven, and Jesus as distant and in the past. But Kelly opened me to the possibility that I could find Jesus somewhere else. He said, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.”
What he is saying is that we don’t find Christ merely in the past and in scripture. We find Christ in our hearts, in our souls, and that we can live a life that allows that life of Christ, that presence, to grow within us. He is saying that Christ is within us, but that we have to take the initiative to let him come alive.
Stuart Luhan experience that bread of life within. I’ve also experienced how openness to Jesus can be like the bread of life within us. I think I’ve told this story before, but I truly experienced Christ within when it came to writing and publishing my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. I had a dramatic experience of Christ at work. The book has to do with my whole vision for how to do church, a vision based on creating a church grounded in prayer that teaches members how to learn to rely on God’s guidance both in the church and in our personal lives. I felt called to write this book before I came to Calvin Church—for over nine years—but I always sensed that the timing wasn’t right.
Even though I had the vision for writing the book, I also knew that I wasn’t ready to do so until I had been here at Calvin Church for a while. So every year for five years I would pray and ask God if was time. At least three times a year I prayed, and each time I sensed God saying, “not yet.” So I wrote other books on the spiritual life, books such as Paradoxes for Living and Discovering the Narrow Path.
Then in January of 2003 I prayed, and I was surprised to I sense that God was saying “yes.” It was a strange moment because for all those previous years I had kept hearing in my heart, “not yet.” When I finally sensed God saying “yes” I had to keep coming back to God over the next few weeks to make sure that it wasn’t just me saying yes. By the way, I often hear God speaking to me, but not in a loud, audible voice. Generally I sense God speaking to me deep in my soul, through gentle tuggings or impressions. I’ve also learned to test that voice over time because I’m very aware of how easy it is to substitute my own desires for what God wants. Anyway, over the course of the next year I wrote the book, and throughout the writing actively sensed God’s hand on my shoulder, and almost, at times, God’s voice whispering in my ear. I wrote the book, having no idea who would publish it. I finished writing the book in late January of 2004.
A week after finishing it, I received a telephone call in my office at the church. On the line was an editor, Beth Gaede, from The Alban Institute, an organization devoted to helping congregations become healthier. Beth had heard from someone else that I had some interesting ideas about another topic, and wanted to know if I was interested in turning those ideas into a book. I told her that those ideas were more suitable for an article, not a whole book. Pausing, I figured that I might as well as tell her about the book I had just written. I told her that I had just written another book on another topic, a book titled Becoming the Blessed Church. I asked her if she was interested in hearing about it. She said yes, so I described the book.
When I finished describing the book to Beth, I heard nothing but silence on the other end. After almost ten seconds of silence, ten seconds during which I was wondering, “Wow, she must hate the idea,” she said, “Sorry for the silence. I just had chills go up my spine and I’m shaking a little bit. I just got out of a meeting with our director of publishing an hour ago. We had been talking about how we needed to change the direction of our books and move away from books on church growth and conflict management, and into books on bringing spirituality in to the church. We then outlined a particular book that we felt we needed to find someone to write. The problem is that we didn’t know who to ask. For the last fifteen minutes you’ve been describing the very book that we had outlined. And you’ve already written it!”
We are told that we are what we eat. If we eat crap we’ll feel like crap. If we eat what’s good, we’ll feel good. What Jesus teaches is similar. If our spiritual life is crap, our life will be crap. But if we are open to Christ in our hearts, Christ’s life will work through us to make a difference in the world. What he’s talking about is a life where wonderful things happen simply because we are open to them. He’s talking about a life full of coincidences, of providences.
I see this stuff happening all over the place in this church. Let me give you an example of this kind of providential grace here at Calvin Church. A number of years ago we were in the process of trying to put together a church website. The problem was that we really didn’t have anyone in the congregation who could do it, and we also didn’t have much money to spend on it. So we decided to wait and trust that God would provide.
A few months after deciding this, a new member of Calvin Church, Kathy Yaeger, approached me and said, “Graham, for the first time in twenty years I’m not working. And I noticed that you do not have a website for the church. Would you mind if I started one?” Of course I said an immediate and enthusiastic, “Yes, please. I’ll get you whatever you need.”
A year later, Kathy got a job and said to me, “I think I need to step down from managing the website. I seem to have less and less time with my new job.” Again, we decided to pray and see what God would do. About two days later, Jack Haubach approached me. He had joined the church in the previous year. He said, “Graham, I was wondering if it would be possible for me help out on the website. I just finished a class on website design, and I’d love to tinker with our website. I don’t want to get in Kathy’s way or step on her toes, but I’d love to at least share some of my ideas with her.” I laughed and said to Jack, ‘Well, as God would have it, Kathy can’t do the website any longer. How would you like to just take over the whole thing?” And Jack did.
About a year-and-a-half ago Jack moved to South Carolina, but before he did David Sloat came forward and said that he would like to help with the website. Today Jack still helps from South Carolina, even though he’s involved in another church now, but David runs most of the site.
The point is that when we are open to Christ at work within us, whether within us as individuals or as a church, wonderful things happen. And this is true not just for people in regards to the church, but for every walk of life. It all starts with wanting Christ to awaken in us, and then wanting to do Christ’s will in whatever we do. For example, I think this applies to work. Very few of us work in careers that don’t serve God in one way or another. The question is whether we can turn what we do into service to God, and let Christ become incarnated in our work. I don’t mean that we should proselytize. I’m talking about taking a prayerful approach to work where we simply ask Christ to guide us, bless us, and take care of us in whatever we do.
There’s a wonderful life ready to grow in us, but to let it grow we have to make a choice by asking, will I awaken the slumbering Christ within me? Will I let that Divine light within shine through me? Will I let a peace live in my soul by letting Christ live in my soul?
Amen.
The Perils of Anger
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
August 9, 2009
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Do you remember how Andy Warhol once said that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame? How are you doing on your 15 minutes? I had part of mine back in 1981 when I was televised on ESPN. I was a senior in college, and was playing on my college’s varsity lacrosse team. We were playing the North Carolina State University in a game that was being televised across the country by ESPN.
We were so excited about playing on national television, even if national television meant that only three people in Arizona, two in Montana, ten in California, and six in Massachusetts were watching. Hey, it was still nationally televised, and I even had some classmates from high school tell me that they saw the game on television the next day in Arizona. Over the years a few others told me that they saw me, too.
In the game, we were playing a North Carolina State team that we had beaten the previous two years, so we were pretty confident that we could beat them. We came out pumped up, ready to show a national audience what we could do. We were playing so well that,… well,… at halftime we were losing something like 10 to 3. In other words, we were terrible. We weren’t playing as a team, but as a bunch of individuals running around without purpose. What would you expect the coach to do in situation like this one? When the Steelers are playing poorly, what do you hope the coach will do to get them playing better? Most of us want the coach to get angry and yell at the players, hoping to motivate them to play better. That’s exactly what our coach did.
He came into the locker room at halftime and, gesturing wildly, yelled at us. He threw a water bottle. He overturned a table. He blistered us up and down, telling us that we were playing like a bunch of high schoolers. We were stunned. The real question is what did his tantrum do to us. Did it motivate us to play better? I can tell you this: we stormed out of that locker room, onto the field, and promptly managed to play even worse in the second half, eventually losing 23 to 11. The game wasn’t that close. By the fourth quarter the other team was putting in the second team. My one chance on a national stage, and it was completely embarrassing.
I learned a lot about anger in that game. I learned that sometimes anger gets you what you want, but if you’re not careful it also kills what you cherish. Looking back at that game, what we really needed was for the coach to come in at halftime and to calmly point to the three things we could do to improve. He needed to tell us that we weren’t out of it, but that we could overcome the deficit by doing this, this, and this. The funny thing is that normally that’s what the coach would have done. He rarely yelled us like that in a game. Practices? Now that’s a different thing, but in games he mainly stayed calm. The point, though, is that his anger and tantrum didn’t help. In fact, I think they stripped us of all of our confidence. We were worse after his tirade that we were before.
We all get angry at times, and we all act out of anger at times, but does that make our anger helpful? The apostle Paul realized that anger can be helpful, but often at a high cost. Anger is very much like vinegar. In small doses is can add flavor and spice things up. Think about an angry comedian or an angry song. They can be fun, but only in small doses. Think about how a small dose of anger can give us a bit more focus and help us accomplish a task. A small amount of anger can help us, but the more anger we pour into our lives, the more it makes life bitter, acidic, and corrosive, just as too much vinegar does.
A little bit of anger can motivate us to solve problems, but over time too much anger corrodes relationships, workplaces, families, and eventually the soul. If you want to understand why anger makes people bitter and corrodes relationships, you have to start with what really causes anger. When you get angry about something, do you know why? Anger is a biological, emotional reaction to threats. We’re built biologically to get angry when something or someone threatens us. We get angry when someone threatens to, or does, steal something from us. We get angry when someone tells us something that we don’t want to hear. We get angry when someone denigrates, diminishes, or dismisses us. We are built to get angry whenever someone hurts us. We are built to lash out when someone says or does something to upset us. The reaction of anger is biological, built on all sorts of hormones that kick in whenever we feel threatened.
This gets to the heart of why anger can be helpful, and why it can also cause people to become bitter and corrosive when they act too often on their anger. The more we give in to anger, the more we live as subjects of our bodies, rather than of our minds or spirits. You see, the goal of Christian spirituality is to free us from becoming slaves to our bodies by allowing us instead to be guided by our spirits and by God. Too often we live as slaves to our bodies, rather than letting our bodies be guided by our spirits.
C.S. Lewis was right. We are amphibians who live simultaneously in the physical and spiritual realms. And like amphibians who begin life underwater, but are eventually meant to live in the world of open air, we are born as physical beings, as animals, who are meant to rise above our physicality to live as embodied spirits. Over the course of life we are called to mature in a way that lets the spiritual guide the physical.
Now, I am not saying that you should never get angry. It isn’t a question of whether or not you get angry. It’s all a question of what you do with your anger. Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin.” He’s saying that there are times when anger is appropriate. It’s normal, for instance, to get angry with children when they do something wrong, or refuse to follow our guidance. We are charged with helping them to grow up, to learn responsibility, and to guide them on how to live. Flashes of anger tell them that what we are saying is important. The problem is that too much anger with our kids can become oppressive. We shut them down. And it can lead us to become abusive.
Also, anger in the workplace can be good in very, very small flashes, as long as the anger is focused on how to get people to work better together. The problem is that too often we have bosses, co-workers, or others in the workplace for whom anger is a permanent condition. People like that kill initiative and creativity. They kill productivity. They kill people’s spirits.
There are also times when the Spirit guides us to be angry. There are times when it is appropriate to be angry for God when we see injustice. It is appropriate to be angry when we see someone being mistreated. It is appropriate to be angry when we see the poor and hungry ignored. It is appropriate to be angry when we see abuse. Jesus modeled this anger when he went into the Temple, overturned tables, and shouted that we shall not turn God’s Temple into a marketplace.
The problem is that too often anger can control us, and when it does it ends up tearing life down rather than building it up. That’s what happened when our coach yelled at us. I see the same thing happening right now regarding the healthcare debate. Everyone on both sides of the debate are so angry that they are no longer building up a system, but tearing each other down to the extent that they very well could stop the efforts at both health care reform and universal health care. I see the same kind of anger tearing apart marriages and families. When couples become permanently angry at each other, it corrodes the marriage, sometimes to the point at which it can’t be saved.
Paul’s whole point is that we need to focus our lives on what builds up, not what tears down. Over time uncontrolled anger tears down. So what do we do to overcome anger? Well, I have three basic rules to letting go of anger:
1. Build a peaceful center: too often we have a tumultuous center. We aren’t centered in our lives because we let everything around us control us—our schedules, our tasks, our expectations, our demands,… everything. Part of letting go of anger means becoming more centered, mentally and spiritually, in a way that enables us to let things go. We do this by simply slowing down and creating space for God in our lives. In fact, that’s part of what Sunday worship is meant to do. It is meant to slow us down for at least one hour a week so that we can have a center. Of course, too often we feel we are too busy for this.
2. Put things into perspective: Another reason we get so angry is that we blow things out of proportion. We turn things that are relatively minor into major mountains that overwhelm us. If we are getting angry a lot, are we are guilty of taking things out of perspective.
3. Pray: Regular prayer overcomes anger, both by putting us into a more spiritual state before we get angry, and by helping us when we get angry. Regular prayer centers us, but praying when we are angry short-circuits anger. Try it. Next time you find yourself getting overly angry, take a breath, slow down, and pray. It makes a difference.
Let me close with a story that captures all of this. A number of years ago there was a young woman named Julie who was just plain angry. I’m not sure why. It might have had something to do with her parents’ messy divorce when she was twelve, and her father’s aloofness. Whatever the reason, she tended to get angry at people very quickly and easily.
She seemed to lack a sense of focus throughout her life, which eventually caused her to drop out of high school. With no diploma and an angry attitude, it was hard for her to both get and hold a job. She struggled. Eventually her father managed to get her a job at a local hardware store with an old classmate of his, a man named Frank. It was a match made in Hell. Frank was an angry man who tended to treat his workers terribly, which was why he always seemed to be looking for new clerks. He and Julie clashed from the moment she came into the hardware store.
The very first day she asked him what time he wanted her to come to work. He held up one hand, spreading his fingers out. The problem is that he had lost his pinky and ring finger many years before. So she didn’t know whether he meant be at work at 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. for an evening shift. With an irritated voice, she asked, “What does that mean? 3 or 5?” Frank lashed back: “It’s obvious!” Then he walked away. Julie visibly rolled her eyes and cursed Frank under her breath.
Still, they worked together for over a year. She stayed because she didn’t know if she could find another job. He kept her because he didn’t want to look once again for a new worker. Both were miserable. In fact, Julie noticed that whenever she drove to work her stomach would swish and swirl around, intensifying as she got closer to the store. It was becoming unbearable. She also felt that she had no one to talk with about it. Her father and mother wouldn’t understand her quitting a good job. Her friends were mostly away at college. She felt trapped.
Everything began to change one day as she was driving to work. Her stomach was flittering around as normal, but a thought came to her mind: Pray for Frank. The thought wouldn’t go away. So turning off the radio she started to pray for Frank. It was uncomfortable because she was not a churchgoer, nor had been since she was a little child. But she prayed for him the whole way to work. She noticed her stomach calmed a bit as she did so.
Frank was as miserable as normal that day, but whenever Julie started to curse him under her breath, she stopped said a short prayer: “God, if you are there, be with Frank.” For a week she prayed for Frank every morning on the way to work. Eventually she started praying for him on the way home. Every morning and evening she would pray for him. Slowly she noticed a difference. Frank seemed to be getting nicer, even if was only in small ways.
One day Frank stopped Julie in one of the aisles and said, “Julie, I need to say something to you. I know I’m not the nicest man in the world, and I haven’t treated you very well. I wish I were different. I had to start working at age twelve, and while everyone else was playing with friends, I was always working to help support my family. I never really learned how to get along with people. And I resented never getting to play, to have fun, and to be normal. So I started taking it out on others. I’ve done that to you, and I’m sorry.” Julie was stunned. What just happened?
Over then ensuing months, Frank changed toward her. She changed toward him. Slowly they became something like friends, teasing and kidding each other, acting almost like father and daughter. As this happened, Julie noticed that that the reservoir of rage within her was evaporating. She was actually becoming something that looked like,… I don’t know,… happy. And she kept praying, even joining a church.
A few years later Frank died. He had never been married or had children. When his will was read, Julie was shocked. He had left everything, the store and his house, to her with a note saying that she was his family. And it all happened because Julie made a decision to pray.
So, what do you do with your anger?
Amen.
Unity in Humility
Ephesians 4:1-16
August 2, 2009
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.’ (When it says, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
I’ve been fascinated and irritated this week by an incident that took place last week. It’s captured the attention of all the news media, so if you’ve missed it, it probably means that you just haven’t been paying attention to the news—which may be a good thing. The incident I’m talking about is something I’m calling Gates-gate. Of course no one else is calling it that, but I’m hoping that it catches on ☺.
Basically, here’s what happened. Upon coming home from a long trip overseas, Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, an African-American, found that he could not open the front door of his house. He asked the driver of the airport car to help him, but neither could get it open. Gates went around to the back, entered the back door, and came to the front. With him pulling from the inside, and the driver pushing from the outside, they finally managed to get the door open.
Meanwhile, a neighbor called the police to say that two men looked like they were breaking into the house. The Cambridge police dispatched a patrol car. The story gets muddled after this, but from what I can piece together, Sgt. Crowley, the responding officer, asked Gates what he was doing. Gates said that he was the owner of the house, and then explained what happened. Crowley asked for his identification. Gates became upset, explaining that it was his house. Crowley asked him to step onto the porch, which Gates refused to do, asserting again that it was his house and that he didn’t have to step outside. Eventually, Gates did get his identification, but he was irate and accusatory toward the officer. According to him, he believed that he was being racially profiled, and that if he were white he would not have been treated that way. Eventually, Sgt. Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct.
The incident sparked opinions from people supporting either Gates or Crowley. Many considered Gates to have been treated fairly, and saw the incidence not as a case of racism, but as a case of a man acting irrationally and uncooperatively. Others saw this as a clear case of racism.
Unfortunately, President Obama inserted himself into the issue by saying that Sgt. Crowley had acted “stupidly,” thus magnifying the incident greatly. He tried to apologize, but by then many supporting Crowley were sniping at Obama. Eventually, he decided to have what has since been called a “Beer Summit,” bringing Crowley, Gates, and himself together at the White House to talk about the incident.
My focus here isn’t on whether or not the incident was a case of racism. I have another agenda that I’ll get to in a bit. Still, the first thing everyone latches onto is issue of racism because of the nature of the event. Personally, I don’t think the officer was racist. I think he was doing his job, and from everything I’ve read it appears that he was acting fairly professionally. Now, I can’t say the same thing for another police officer, a Boston police office named Justin Barrett. In response to a Boston Globe opinion piece that said the incident was a racist incident, Barrett sent an e-mail to the paper and to friends stating, among other things, that had he "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC [oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray] deserving of his belligerent noncompliance." He referred to Gates several times as a jungle monkey. When confronted with his comments, he vehemently defended himself, saying that he wasn’t racist. Yeah, right!
As I mentioned before, I don’t think Crowley was racist, but when an African-American says that she or he has been the victim of racism or racial profiling, we need to be sensitive to it. What many of us whites don’t appreciate enough is that when you experiences racism your whole life, you become overly sensitive to it, to the point where non-racist events feel racist. I learned this through my best friend from high school.
His name is Ty, and he is African-American. Even though he has always had an ability to let bigoted comments and acts roll off his back, I’ve been with him a number of times when he experience active racism. To his credit, he always dealt with it better than me. He has always been incredibly dignified. I remember in high school that occasionally other students would tell him inappropriate black jokes, almost as a way of being cool, that they could say a black joke to someone who is black. Ty would always smile, but not react much other than that. The first overt racist incident I experienced with him came in 1984. I had been living in Roanoke, Virginia, and I needed help moving my stuff from Roanoke back to this area. So we drove down to Roanoke to rent a U-Haul and drive back. I had made reservations for our night there in a small, mom-and-pop mote that I had stayed in before. When I made the reservations, I had asked if I could stay in a room I had stayed in before. The owner said, “Why sure. We have almost nobody staying here this weekend. You can have whatever room you want.”
Late in the afternoon of that day we pulled in, Ty in the passenger seat and me driving. The owner came to our car window, and I said, “I’m Graham Standish, and I have a reservation.” She said, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” I told her that I had a reservation, and she said, “We are all booked up.” I was stunned. How could she mess up the reservation? I argued with her a bit, and then it dawned on me. The reason she had no room was because of Ty. So I decided to explore this a bit. “What about next week, do you have an opening then?” “I’m sorry, we are all booked up,” she replied. “What about next month?” “We are all booked up.” Finally, I turned to Ty and said, “Sorry, Sweetie, looks like we have to go somewhere else.” I figured that as long as she was being a bigot and a racist, I should double her bigotry by letting her think that we were gay. It helped that I had long hair, an earring in my ear, and cut off sleeves on my t-shirt. We found a Holiday Inn and stayed there, but the incident has always bothered me. Ty and I used to kid about it, saying to each other, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” But the fact is that what she did was plain wrong.
Now, perhaps you think these kinds of things only happen in the South. Back in 1987, I helped Ty move into an apartment in Penn Hills. As we were moving stuff into the house, a group of about six or seven white men stared at us from across the street with their arms crossed. I said to Ty, “This isn’t good.” He said, “It’s okay. You get used to it.” A few days after moving in, the landlord called him and told him that a mistake had been made, and that he had to move out. This wasn’t the only time. Over the years it happened two more times when Ty, who by then had a family, had to move out of apartments after moving in. Once was in Coraopolis. I don’t remember where the other place was. Eventually after one of them he actually sued the landlord. What would it be like for us if we were told to move out of places once we moved in because of the color of our skin?
Ty works for USAirways, and he has said that over the years he has received nasty, racist notes in his box at work. They are always anonymous. I learned from him that we whites are often ignorant of what it is like to grow up African-American. When you grow up experiencing racism and bigotry, it becomes hard to tell what is and isn’t racist. As I said before, I don’t think that Sgt. Crowley was acting in a racist way, but I am also sensitive to Professor Gates. Just as a child of abuse will recoil anytime a hand is raised, even when someone is just brushing aside a hair, to grow up experiencing racism means to grow up not knowing when whites are acting normally or racially. To be gentle and humble, as Paul teaches in our passage, is to be sensitive to the experiences of others.
Even though I’ve just talked about racism, that isn’t really the aspect of the incident that intrigued me. What intrigued me was how the controversy progressed so that every step created more controversy. As the Beer Summit was being prepared, Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts complained about the beer choices. President Obama was going to drink Bud Light. Sgt. Crowley wanted a Beck’s beer. Gates wanted Red Stripe. Neal was outraged. Since the incident took place outside of Boston, they should be drinking a Boston beer such as Samuel Adams, not beers owned by European corporations.
Then the Republican National Committee Co-Chairman, Jan Larimer, complained that the beer summit was taking place at all. She said that with all the problems with the economy, health-care, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama shouldn’t be drinking beer with anyone. Now, you’re free to think what you want about the issue, but one thing is certain: it reveals how easy it is for Christians to ignore Paul.
Go back to our passage for this morning. Paul offers a completely different vision for dealing with controversies like this one. Here’s what he says: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Wow! What an alternative vision. Instead of being offended, sure that the other is wrong and we are right, Paul calls on us to respond to others with humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. What a difference.
What if everyone in the incident had acted that way from the start? What if Crowley had acted that way, not just acting professionally, but lovingly understanding the outrage of Gates? What if Gates had acted with humility and patience to Crowley, understanding that he was doing a difficult, and often terrifying. job of keeping people like him safe? What if Obama had acted with humility and patience, bearing with both Gates (a friend of his) and Crowley? What if all the critics from one side or the other had responded with humility, gentleness, and unity, recognizing both sides, rather than jumping in on one side or the other? What if Congressman Neal had reacted by saying that he was just glad there was an act of humility, gentleness, and unity on the part of everyone in the Beer Summit, regardless of the beer? What if Jan Larimer, a Presbyterian elder in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, had responded with gentleness and humility, praising any effort to “maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace?” What if we reacted to all controversies in the way Paul calls on us to act?
Paul has a challenge for us in life. Basically Paul is inviting us to respond to controversy with humility, a humility that leads to unity. Ironically, the person who taught me the true meaning of humility wasn’t a Christian, although he wanted to become one. Mahatma Gandhi, who lived a life of humility, patience, gentleness, seeking to maintain unity of the Spirit, lived what Paul taught. Gandhi wasn’t a Christian, although he tried to become one. He was very much influenced by the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount. When he started his career as a lawyer in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century, he decided to go to a Christian church. He entered, sat down in a back pew, and waited to experience Christ. Soon a firm hand was placed on his shoulder, and he was escorted to the door. The white ushers told him that there were other churches for his kind, and that he wasn’t welcome there. That did it for Gandhi. He couldn’t reconcile the message of unity he found in the New Testament with the bigotry he experienced in that church.
Still, Gandhi lived as Paul taught. There was one particular incident, recreated in the 1982 film, Gandhi, that brought home what Paul taught. It was in the middle stages of the Indian struggle for independence from the British Empire. Gandhi had just been released from prison for leading a non-violent movement to stymie the British. He had become something of a national hero for standing up to the British. He had been invited to a meeting of members of the Indian National Congress at the home of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who eventually would become the first president of Pakistan. Also in attendance was Jawaharlal Nehru, who would eventually become the first prime minister of India. Other powerful Indian figures were in attendance. They were gathered to talk about what the next step toward Indian independence would be.
Each of these men, having grown up in wealthy families, were atop the Indian caste system, a rigid system in which everyone belonged to a certain strata of society, never to move up or down. Servants were among the lowest in the system. Surprisingly, Gandhi came to the meeting wearing a sarong and a loincloth, the clothing of outcasts and servants. As they talked about what to do next, Jinnah proposed stepping up violent, terrorist acts. Others weren’t so sure. Gandhi offered his view. They should engage in active, non-violent resistance in a way that would paralyze the British. His way, though, would be a spiritual resistance. They would call on all Indian people to engage in a day of prayer and fasting, praying for Indian independence. Of course, with everyone praying and fasting, there would be no police, postal service, transportation, or manufacturing. For one day the British Empire in India would be paralyzed.
Gandhi was calling on everyone to act in a humble, gentle, and unifying way. As if to underscore his idea, he walked up to a servant with coffee and tea, took the tray from him, and began to serve the others. This was shocking! Men of power and wealth did not serve. But Gandhi was giving them an example of humility. He was showing them literally what would be required of them. That they become humble, gentle, and patient as leaders, and in that way unifying India. He was embodying our passage. And it worked. India shut down for a day, and the British were petrified. Eventually, this non-violent way led to Indian independence.
Paul offers a radical vision of how to live life. It is the way of humility. Do you want to know the quickest way to find unity with others? It comes from humility. It comes from refusing to see ourselves as better than others, and by refusing to act as thought we are better than others. It comes through a willingness to serve others. It comes through humility, gentleness, and patience. And it leads to God.
Amen.
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