October 1, 2006
Membership has it’s privileges, says an ad for American Express. When you’re in, you’re in. You can bet that a lot of money and time was poured into connecting the idea of inclusion with the business of selling charge cards. A lot of creative minds and social science types got together and smiled when they came up with that ad because they knew they had hit upon a great truth. Everybody wants to be an insider, cause if you ain't in.......you’re out.
I remember achieving membership in the discerning group of illuminati who know in from out back in 1965 at the ripe old age of twelve. It was that year when I convinced my mother that I would be cast out of junior high school--banished back down the hill to the elementary school--if I didn’t show up soon wearing a particular shirt. I do not remember a time before that day when I was conscious of or cared much about what I was wearing. But that year that shirt became an absolute necessity.
Reading the stories today of Eldad and Medad, and of the healers who were not part of Jesus’ little group, I get the idea that we were not created to spend our time focusing on who’s in and who’s out. We learn that stuff. The lessons start when we are young, and they accelerate through adolescence. We learn to fit in as we negotiate the tricky paths between our fear of being ostracized....and the joys of strutting around the lunch room in a bright blue cotton shirt with huge white polka dots all over it. That shirt made me feel good all over.
The power, of course, that drives us to get it right--to learn our lessons well is the sure and certain knowledge that not everyone can be in. That is the foundation upon which marketers sell not just clothes, but almost everything else in our lives...cars, food, vacations, homes, toothpaste....the list goes on. The message is the same, “You can be one of the lucky ones. The blessings being offered here are limited. Don’t be left out.” The better we learn our lessons about insiders and outsiders, the more we guard our boundaries to make sure we are where we’re supposed to be. We can’t be sure of our place unless we know where the lines are.
Back in the early eighties, Mary’s cousin, who had been living in San Francisco for many years, learned that he had AIDs. He decided to return to Memphis where he had grown up to spend his last days. His family were all Baptists, but Billy had become an Episcopalian, so he approached the rector of our church about joining the congregation. People with AIDs were still very much in the news in those days and the disease was not well understood, so he wanted to be careful about his entrance into that community. In the weeks before he arrived, word began to spread that he was coming, and one Sunday, the rector decided to talk about Billy’s arrival in his sermon. I was singing in the choir in those days, and one of the tenors started kind of twitching as he heard about this new person with this dread disease who would be coming among us. He was obviously disturbed, and as we left our seats to go for communion, he just kind of blurted out in a loud, anxious whisper to the whole back row, “how’d he get it?” The guy who responded was a bass, about seventy, maybe seventy five--a long way from junior high anyway--he just said, “it doesn’t matter.”
In the two stories we hear today about outsiders acting like insiders, the focus shifts quickly to the real insiders who are shaken up by a change in the rules. In both cases, supposedly grown up, mature people, the apostles, for Pete’s sake, go running to their leader to tattle on the outsiders who are not acting as proper outsiders. You get the sense that these unauthorized healers are not just confusing to the ones who complain to Jesus and Moses, but that they have really shaken them up. The new prophets and healers have somehow messed with their assumptions about how things are supposed to work. They react because their framework for understanding an important part of their lives has been disturbed.
They might have responded differently. They might have recognized healing as a sign of God’s presence and approached the new healers like relatives from some different branch of the family, distant cousins maybe. They might have seen the other healers and marveled at the wildly extravagant God who spills power among the people as if that power were inexhaustible. They could have taken God’s generosity in spreading Spirit and power as signs of the limitless nature of divine love, but they didn’t. Instead, they did what we all do. They took everything they had learned about the world and about life and they worked with their image of God until that image sort of fit what they knew. And one of the things we all know deep down....one of the things we have all learned is that there just cannot be enough love in the universe to go around. When it comes right down to it, that’s what sells shirts.
God’s extravagant love and inclusion upsets us and exposes how much we are formed in our human outlook of limited commodities. God’s extravagance upsets us as it threatens to blur our boundaries, and at the same time it is good news because it includes us. Even when we are back in camp, even when we don’t have the right credentials, god finds us, includes us, uses us, comes to life in us.
I don’t believe we are meant to get all caught up in the who’s-in-who’s-out business, especially in that junior high version that’s so hard to unlearn with it’s strong emphasis on who’s out. I do believe we are created so that we want to belong--to be a part of something more. That desire to belong was written into our spiritual DNA to lead us home. It can lead us deeper into God if we let it.
This wildly extravagant God whose rules we can’t figure out is always a challenge, the kind of challenge that leads to growth. These stories of God operating in ways that shock the faithful, ways that stretch the community’s understanding of what it means to be the people of God, that expose the limits we imagine around the love of God......these stories runs all through the bible. The love of God being more than we can imagine is the gospel....the good news. That’s it. Today we hear of that love blowing like snow or seeping like light into places we don’t expect it......through cracks and under doors, working its way into our world past the barriers we create to protect the little bit of love we’ve experienced. Our response, if we can remember that the extravagant, inclusive love of God is for us too, might just be, praise God!
JMB