Us VS Them

August 6, 2012

The Rev. Marguerite C. Alley

Us Versus Them

So let’s think about the Chick-fil-A situation for a few minutes. Following the president of that company’s statement about his stance on the blessing of same sex unions, there has been a load of responses, both in support of Chick-fil-A and against. Some responses have been very compassionate and thoughtful (as in discrimination for any reason is wrong), some have been pragmatic (it is private company, he can say or do anything he wants) and some have been down right mean spirited (maybe if all restaurants would stop serving them, they would starve and the problem would go away). Sadly, the overall dialogue has once again caused bigotry to rear its ugly head in the American Christian churches. The potential for any meaningful dialogue has been lost in name-calling and who can shout the ugliest rhetoric the loudest.

I kind of wonder what Jesus would have said to us about this?

Picture this: Jesus is on a lovely grassy hillside, teaching a large gathering of people. He says: "Treat people the same way you want to be treated." Don’t just love the ones you like because they look, act and think like you, I want you to love the ones who are different from you and you find hard to understand and disagree with, too."

As Jesus is closing his day and coming down from the hillside, he is approached by a leper. Now, in this time, a leper was required by law to shout “unclean! unclean!” as a warning to anyone who came near that they were infected with leprosy. Jesus reaches out and touches him! Right there in front of God and everyone he was just teaching, Jesus completely ignores Jewish custom and law, and touches the man. The touch brings healing and restoration to the “unclean” one and the crowd (presumably) sees the importance of his teaching. Do you think that example changed their thinking? Does asking and reminding ourselves “what would Jesus say/do in this situation” change how we think or act?

 

Not too long ago, a well-known young minister was just about to publish a book. In that book, he questioned a long held theological precept that only Christians go to heaven, by asking if Ghandi was in heaven or hell.

That question caused quite a stir and the author was accused of being a heretic and more or less became an “untouchable”. That one single question ended up being more important in the minds of many Americans than the earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed over 25,000 people!

It would appear that here in the last few weeks, the choice of whether or not to eat at Chick-fil-A is more important than the tragic shooting in Colorado, the huge forest fires making thousands of people homeless, the trial of a pedophile, the genocide happening in Syria, or even the Olympics. I would think that Christians would have loads to discuss about how we have an opportunity to work with God in the reconciliation of all things rather than whether or not we should eat at Chick-fil-A.

This brings me to my real point. This controversy is not a new one, nor is it actually about sexuality at all. It is about people who are different. Sexuality is just the newest label we have affixed to this age-old issue of people who are different from us. We do or have done the same to dark skinned people, people who don’t speak English, people who have been in prison, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, no faith, democrats, republicans, libertarians; even people who live in different states, go to different schools or root for different teams! We do it with anyone  we view as "them."

So really, we are the problem. We try to understand the teaching of Jesus but it challenges our understanding of “others”. Sadly, we try to get others to believe exactly the way we do BEFORE we agree to have dialogue with them at all! If we try rather, to engage each other in helpful informative dialogue, before we decide they are “them”, we are more likely to discover that our commonalities far outweigh our differences.

So for the time being, what do you say we completely ignore the question of whether or not to eat at Chick-fil-A and focus instead on reaching out and touching “them”, whoever “they” are for you? I suspect that Jesus would be a lot happier with us all if we tried to follow his example rather than trying to bully/coerce/force someone into seeing through the same tiny lens.