|
Political correctness is in the air again, the most recent instance being Al
Sharpton’s dismissal of Clarence Thomas this week. Thomas’s “sin,” in Sharpton’s view, is that Thomas
believes that the Constitution prohibits the granting of preference for admission to a university based on
the color of one’s skin, which led Sharpton to sneer that “Clarence Thomas is my color, but he’s not my
kind.”
Political correctness is not new, of course. Ten or fifteen years ago, Dinesh D’Souza, in a book
entitled Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, warned that American universities
were drifting away from their traditional role as centers of careful study and the free exchange of ideas,
centers of study where truth might be pursued without hindrance, and were fast becoming protectors of
attitudes and positions that faculty and students deem to be politically correct.
Political correctness, of course, is not confined to the university. Sharpton’s impeachment of
Clarence Thomas is only the latest evidence that “political correctness” is simply the most recent name we
have given to the human inclination of insisting that everyone should think the same way and believe the
same things and that, if some should disagree, then they should be silenced, because the truth of
something is not found and established in its liberal pursuit -- that is, openly and freely -- but is
established by majority vote and protected by power.
I begin with all this today because a similar illiberality, a similar closed-mindedness, a similar
dependence upon correct formulas rather than upon a genuine search for truth, is a danger in the community
of faith as well. It is a danger at least as old as the Bible itself.
At Pentecost, the disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, began to speak in other tongues as the
Spirit gave them utterance, and those who were there from strange and foreign lands heard the disciples
declaring the wonders of God in their own strange and foreign tongues. And a few days later, when they
were going to church one day, to the Temple, Peter and John, in the name of Jesus, healed a man who had
been crippled from birth. And someone asked what all this meant. And Peter and John told them that it
was all the doing of God, whose Spirit blows where he will and who has raised Jesus from the dead, and
that God had now poured out his Spirit on the whole community of believers so that the believers, too,
might proclaim the kingdom of God and do the works of God, works such as healing and forgiveness.
Now you might think that everyone, especially religious people, would have thought this was dandy.
But in fact many, and especially the religious people, did not think it was dandy at all, because, for
them, what Peter and John were preaching was not what the established church taught and what they were
doing was definitely not the politically or religiously correct thing to do. To those who guarded the
established truth, Peter’s and John’s was a new truth, and a dangerous truth.
So the pharisees and the priests and the teachers of the Law, those established in orthodox
belief, decided to clamp down on this new proclamation, this new way of seeing and believing. And they
had Peter and John and all the apostles arrested. But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the
doors for the apostles, says Luke, and they walked out of jail. And in the morning they went back to
church, back to the Temple courts, and they continued to preach.
And this time the high priest and all his priestly people brought the apostles before the Church
council, the Sandhedrin. And once again they told Peter and John in no uncertain terms to stop preaching
what they were preaching. But Peter and John said, “We can’t stop. We must obey God rather than men.
We’ve got to tell you what we know to be true -- that God has raised Jesus of Nazareth, whom you
crucified, from the dead and has given us new life.”
But the mood in Jerusalem and at the Temple that day was “three strikes and your out.” So the
pharisees and priests and teachers of the Law all wanted to arrest Peter and John again, and this time,
they said, they would throw away the key.
But just at this point, in the fifth chapter of Acts, one of the lesser known saints of God
stepped in. His name was Gamaliel. Now Gamaliel was not a follower of Jesus. He did not understand this
new truth the apostles were preaching. He was a highly respected member of the council, a pharisee, a
leader of the religious establishment. But Gamaliel knew something about the ways of God. He knew that
God is not a bully, that God’s truth does not rely upon coercion and force. So Gamaliel said to his
fellow pharisees, “I advise you not to worry so much about it. God is not so weak that he needs us to put
everyone who sees things differently in jail. There have been others who came through town with different
points of view. Remember Judas the Galilean, and Theudus. They had their say, and they raised some
concerns for a while, but then it all went away.
“Therefore, in this present case,” Gamaliel added, “I advise you to leave Peter and John and their
friends alone. Let them go, and let them preach. For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it
will fail. But if it is of God, you will not be able to stop it anyway, and you will only find yourselves
fighting against God.”
We get so pumped up sometimes about whether everyone sees exactly as we see, or about whether
everyone believes exactly as we believe, so pumped up about whether everyone else understands the Creed as
we understand it, or understands the Bible the way we understand the Bible, or makes moral decisions the
way we make ours. Sometimes we even get anxious about whether everyone else kneels to pray when we kneel
to pray, or whether everyone else stands when we think we stand, or whether everyone likes the same hymns
we like.
Gamaliel, the patron saint of patience and forbearance, knew that God’s truth is not so fragile
that it requires of us such anxiety.
“What is truth?” Pilate had asked. And sometimes, just like Pilate, we can get so worked up about
our own view of truth prevailing that we miss the truth when he’s standing right in front of us! For
truth, the Spirit tells us, and the Book as well, is not a proposition or a formula or a creed or a
position to be defended. The truth is Jesus, crucified and raised.
Sometimes, in the Church, with our various provincial points of disagreement, we are, as someone
once said, “like porcupines trying to cuddle.” And as the Episcopal Church meets once again in General
Convention in Minneapolis this summer, I think that Saint Gamaliel would suggest what he suggested to that
convention long ago -- that we fold in our quills, that we allow the Spirit both space and time to do
his work, that we fix our eyes and hearts on the one thing needful, on Jesus crucified and raised, and
then move together where he leads us.
Did you notice where Jesus led us in the Gospel reading this morning? Once again this morning we
found Jesus spending his spiritual energy, not worrying about religious or political correctness, not
worrying about who has the right formula and who doesn’t, but in strengthening the weak. When we watch
Jesus respond to the woman’s need in Galilee, we see the revealed truth of God healing the sick and the
lonely and raising the dead.
“Who is it who touched me?” he asked. “Where is she?” The disciples wanted to get on with their
business, or what they thought was their business. “The crowd is massive,” they whined. “Dozens of
people have touched you.” But Jesus kept looking around, persevering, knowing that something unusual had
happened, sensing that someone needed him. And he persisted until the woman finally came up to him,
trembling with fear to tell him that she was the one who touched him.
Who was she? And why was she afraid? She had only touched his clothing. Why would that make her
afraid? She was afraid because of who she was, because she was an outcast, a social pariah. She had been
bleeding for twelve years and, according to the thinking of the people of God at that time, according to
convention, that made her continuously unfit for convention and for the embrace of convention. In Torah,
the rules were clear: during the time of a woman’s menstrual period, and for seven days afterward, she
was ritually unclean. Anyone who touched her, or who touched anything she had sat on or lain upon, also
became unclean, unfit for human relationships. She had been bleeding continuously for twelve years. So,
for twelve years, she had not been able to share food, or even to sit on a simple wooden bench, with
another human being.
Imagine the emotional and spiritual state of someone in those circumstances! The very law of God,
she had been told, denied her affection and love and simple human companionship. And she had believed it.
She was afraid because for her to touch Jesus as she did was an act of presumption, an act that made him,
the teacher, unclean, just as she was. And having presumed to touch him, she was now afraid to face
him.
But Jesus was not like the others. Jesus wanted to know who she was. Jesus wanted to speak to
her, wanted to share with her his word and his love, even, if necessary, to become poor for her, that she
might be enriched. And when he did, he assured her that she was a somebody, a daughter, a child of God
whom God loved. “Daughter,” he said, “you took a risk of faith, and the response was not what you feared,
was it? You see that I care for you; know that God loves you. Now go and live that way. No more
cringing in the shadows and corners of life. Live as a whole person. Live as the daughter God loves,
risen and healed from your fears.”
“Covenant to carry the Cross,” said Thomas a Kempis, “and in the end the Cross will carry you.”
It may carry us to places and insights and truths we can’t even imagine at the moment! For the power of
the Cross -- or better, the power of the person on the Cross -- is able to speak in ways we cannot, is
able to reach the hearts of people that our feeble formulas and “correct” positions can never reach.
Peter himself, after all, was certain that one could not be a follower of Jesus unless he was “correct,”
unless he was circumcised. Peter was certain of it, that is, until the Holy Spirit showed even Peter that
God’s Church was bigger than he thought!
When we get too concerned about correctness, about our religious formulas and creeds, we are
sometimes blinded to the truth who is standing right in front of us, blinded to Jesus, and fearful to face
him and touch him. At such times it is helpful to call to mind what the great missionary E. Stanley Jones
said about Jesus and Gandhi. “Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu and perhaps the greatest soul in Indian history.
And Gandhi once said to us Christians in India, ‘I would suggest, first, that all of you Christians,
missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Christ. If you will come to us in the spirit of your
Master, we cannot resist you. I would suggest that you must put your emphasis on love, for love is the
center and soul of Christianity.’
“He did not mean love as a sentiment,” Jones added, “but love as a working force,” -- love like
the love of Jesus embracing the unclean woman in Galilee -- “which is the one real power in a moral
universe.” It is the kind of love an ardent opponent of Christianity saw in Gandhi himself, Jones added.
This passionate opponent of Christianity later confessed that he “never understood the meaning of
Christianity until [he] saw it in Gandhi.” But “it will never do,” Jones added, “to have it said that the
principles of Jesus are better exemplified by those we call nonbelievers than by ourselves.” (The Christ
of the Indian Road, Abingdon Press)
“Give Jesus of Nazareth back to us,” demanded the Marxist philosopher Roger Garaudy. “Give him
back to non-churchmen, back even to unbelievers in God. You church people can’t keep him for yourselves.”
Which led Edward Schillebeeckx, a contemporary Christian theologian, to remind us that Jesus does not
belong to us Christians. “Jesus is for the world,” he said, “and we belong to Jesus.”
What Schillebeeckx wants us in the Church to see is that Jesus the person, Jesus the Savior, Jesus
the Truth, speaks to people, even to people beyond the Church, perhaps especially to people beyond the
Church, in ways we in the Church may not even be able to imagine. And we must not try to limit the way
Jesus speaks. In India people are asking, “What does Jesus mean to me as a Hindu?” And elsewhere, “What
does Jesus mean to me as a Muslim?” The woman in Galilee this morning, the one outside the grace and love
of her community, was asking, ”What does Jesus mean to me as an outcast among the people of God.” And
“someone who attempts to size up this phenomenon straightaway on the basis of his interpretation of Jesus
from within the Church” Schillebeeckx warns, “runs the risk of remaining blind to precisely those elements
in Jesus which many find so meaningful and inspiring, while church people have ignored them for centuries,
or have just not seen them.” (Jesus, Seabury Press, 1979)
In 1975, in Nashville, Tennessee, Randall Bean attended the fortieth anniversary of the devotional
guide, ”The Upper Room.” He was not a daily reader of the guide, and he was only in Nashville for a
meeting of his church, but he was invited to attend the anniversary meeting. “And something happened to
me that night that I shall never forget,” he said. “Thirty-five international delegates, representing the
forty-nine editions of “The Upper Room” in forty different languages, processed into the room. In they
came, clergy and lay editors from every corner of the globe, each dressed in his own culture’s attire,
persons fluent in languages I had never even heard of before. Each editor greeted the assembly in the
language common to the edition he edited, and as I listened I began to hear the one name for whom their
publication exists, the name Jesus. I cannot fully describe the overwhelming sense of unity that flooded
that room.”
Let us be done with our insistence upon our private, provincial, views of truth, and dare to touch
Jesus. Let us be done with our own righteousness and fix our eyes on the righteousness of Jesus, who,
though he was rich, became poor for us, that we might become rich. Let us fix our eyes on the Cross, and
on the love we see there, so that all other things -- all our likes and dislikes, all our correctness,
all our righteousness -- might melt away in the loving embrace of Jesus.
For if we spend our time and spiritual energy on lesser things, they will not last, as Gamaliel
knew. But if we fix our eyes on God and the wonderful acts of God, on his acts of kindness and mercy to
those who are lost, and if we draw near to the man of love on the Cross and dare to touch him there, he
will speak in ways we may not even be able to imagine, not just for our kind, but for all kinds. And he
will touch us not for a time, but for all time.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |