(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on October 7, 2018, Proper 22)
Our Shared Scatological Humanity
By now, you’ve heard me talk
about my studies in Sheffield enough to know that I had a meaningful time
there. Not only academically, but
also socially. I traveled with
fellow fans to Liverpool soccer games on several occasions. I journeyed to Scotland, Slovakia, and
Romania, where friends from Sheffield warmly welcomed me into their homes. And a few of these friends have made it
the other way across the Atlantic, so that I’ve had the opportunity to
introduce them to all the wonders of American culture that they’ve seen in
movies but never experienced themselves—like the Olive Garden and Waffle House
and gas station beef jerky.
But looking back on my
experience, I am surprised at the friendships that blossomed over the course of
my graduate studies. Because at
first, I found the graduate academic atmosphere rather stifling. The world of academia—like any field of
work, I imagine—is competitive.
The conferences and colloquia and lecture halls that I attended were
filled with posturing, pretension, and the putting on of appearances (which is
to say, tweed jackets). If you
wanted to make it in your field, you had to prove that you had something
groundbreaking to contribute. You had
to prove that you belonged. You
had to sell yourself. Even in the
bathrooms of the university—the one place maybe I expected for these social
standards to slip—even there, I found the walls plastered with stickers and
posters about poetry journals and reading groups and requests for human test
subjects in edgy new experiments.
How in the world did I make
genuine friendships in such an ambitious and at times artificial
environment? Well, I have a
theory. I can trace nearly every
sincere Sheffield friendship back to a potty joke. Nothing off-color, of course. By potty joke, I just mean a story or an observation similar
to the one made in that coffee table bestseller (which you probably don’t have
on your coffee table, and I don’t blame you)—Everyone Poops. Potty
humor broke through the pretense of it all. Laughing about the common experience that we all try to
hide, about our shared scatological humanity, somehow loosened us from our
academic posturing and drew us closer together.
Now I know that potty humor
doesn’t translate to everyone. But
I wonder if perhaps you can observe something comparable in your own
experience. Have you ever noticed
how the sharing of embarrassing or blushable moments, instead of separating us
and sinking us in shame, can summon us closer together?
One Wounded Man Helping Another Wounded Man
These last few weeks, I’ve been
wrestling with a basic question.
As I observed first four weeks ago, God’s good news in the Bible is
predominantly for the poor—and I’m not (poor). So I asked, “Where am I in the good news?” The next week, I found myself
identifying strongly with the rich man in Jesus’ story about poor man Lazarus. I found myself with the rich man in
front of a chasm. A chasm of
security and strength and self-sufficiency—and great loneliness. Last week, however, I gleaned a piece
of good news from the experience of Jesus, who himself faced a similar
chasm. For Matthew tells us that
he rejected and even insulted a Canaanite woman because of her ethnicity…and
yet he also listened to her cry and changed his mind. In other words, Jesus changed, and so can I. I too can come to see the poor, the
homeless, the regularly drunk and hopeless, as my brother, as my sister.
But how does that change
happen? What does it look like in
living color?
In today’s scripture, a very
respectable religious man asks Jesus how he can inherit the life of the age to
come, the life of the kingdom, the life that is abundant and worth living. Jesus answers with a story. A story that invites change.
A man is beaten, robbed, and left
half-dead by the roadside. Later
two very respectable religious men walk by the injured man. They see him and they keep
walking. Jesus doesn’t explain
why, but we can take a good guess.
These two respectable religious men, both active servants in the temple,
had not achieved their station in life by accident. They would have both been focused on their accomplishments,
on maintaining their ideals of purity, on preserving their pious
appearance. To help this injured
man would threaten their place in life.
It would render them unclean and they would be unable to serve in the
temple for a period of time. It
would certainly make other demands on their time, too. Instead of teaching and leading others,
elevating their image in the public eye, they would be thanklessly serving the
needs of a stranger. (And this, of
course, was before the time when pictures could be taken and posted to Facebook
to celebrate their own virtue.
There would be little reward in this.)
Next a Samaritan walks by. He sees the man, and his reaction is
the opposite. He is moved to
compassion. Literally, his insides—his
guts, his stomach—are disturbed.
Again, Jesus doesn’t explain why.
But I think we can take a good guess. This is a Samaritan in enemy territory. Samaritans don’t worship in
Jerusalem. They worship on another
mountain. So I think this
Samaritan in enemy territory is intimately familiar with the experience of
being beaten and bruised, if not physically, then at the very least verbally
and emotionally. When he sees this
man, whose body has been wrecked, his own body churns within him. He identifies with the wound of this
man. It matters not that the
injured man is a Judean, an enemy of Samaritans. That is the label of culture. And the body knows something much deeper than that.
This is one wounded man helping
another wounded man.
And that, Jesus suggests, is what it looks like to inherit
the life of the age to come, the life of the kingdom, the life that is abundant
and worth living.
Of Maga Hats and Muslim Hijabs
The Bible doesn’t tell us how the
respectable religious man responded to Jesus. Perhaps he was speechless. Perhaps he was pondering whether he could change his life
and live this way. Whether he
could drop the pretense of his personal aims and his professional ambition, so
that he might share the brokenness of strangers, even enemies. So that he might identify with their
wounds.
I read recently a story about an
anti-Trump rally in Austin, Texas.[1] Amina Amdeen, a Muslim student at the
University of Texas who was attending the rally, recalls a moment when she saw
a Trump supporter wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. “I noticed [him], with the hat,” she
said, “and I noticed that [he was] surrounded by some people, and I noticed
that they were kind of threatening.”
The Trump supporter, Joseph
Weidknecht, recalls the moment from his own memory: “I heard a click of a
lighter right behind my ear, and there were about three people trying to light
my shirt on fire with lighters.”
Amina describes what happened
next: “[T]hen somebody snatched [his] hat off [his] head…. And that’s the point where…something
kind of snapped inside me because I wear a Muslim hijab, and I’ve been in
situations where people have tried to snatch it off my head. And I rushed towards [him] and I just
started screaming, ‘Leave him alone!
Give me that back!’”
After the incident, Amina and
Joseph got to talking. Swapping
stories, they discovered a shared brokenness. Joseph had grown up home-schooled and recalls not having
many friends. Amina had grown up
with a hijab in Texas, where she stuck out like a sore thumb in middle school,
the worst time to stick out like that.
In that moment at the protest,
Amina was moved to help Joseph. When
she saw his dignity snatched off his head, she felt the pain in her own body
and she rushed to his side.
She was one wounded person
helping another wounded person.
Not by Our Achievements but by Our Brokenness
When I discovered in my PhD that
potty humor could cut through the pretension and ambition of academia and bring
people closer together, I think I was learning the good news that Jesus
proclaims in today’s scripture—albeit in a rather scatological tenor. What we all share—friend, stranger, and
enemy alike—is our brokenness. No
matter our ideals, no matter the self that we tirelessly work to construct, no
matter our ambition, we are all at the end of the day the same: frail, fragile,
fractured humans. That is what we
share.
“How do I inherit the life of the
age to come, the life of the kingdom, the life that is abundant and worth
living?” the respectable religious man asked. The answer Jesus gives is not to achieve your goals, or to reach
new heights, or to become your better self now. The answer Jesus gives, is to identify with the wounds of
others. To share your brokenness
together. Friends, strangers,
enemies alike. This is what Jesus
himself does. As the Bible puts
it, we are healed “by his wounds.”[2] It is not our achievements but our
brokenness that will bring us close together. It is not our accomplishments but our wounds that will
gather us into the communion of Christ and the kingdom of God.
Prayer
Wounded Christ,
Who crosses over
To be with us—
Help us to shed
The ambition, achievement, and ideals
That covers our own wounds
And keeps us from communion,
So that we might draw near
To the wounds of others
And in our shared brokenness
Gather together at your banquet table.
Amen.
[1] “An Unlikely
Pair Share a Moment That Goes Beyond Politics,” https://www.npr.org/2018/09/28/652195464/an-unlikely-pair-share-a-moment-that-goes-beyond-politics,
accessed on October 2, 2018.
[2] Cf. 1 Pet
2:24; Isa 53:5.
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