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A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From July 23, 2006 At the conference I attended in Albuquerque recently, each table had a centerpiece. Unlike those at weddings or banquets, these were meant not for decoration but for provocation; that is, they were intended to get us thinking. Set in the middle of every table was a shallow terra cotta dish filled with sand. In that sand rested a length of barbed wire, a silent and steely reminder of our desert border to the south. A border separating two countries with two very different realities. On one side of the border live people of promise and possibility. On the other live people of poverty and oppressive circumstance. When those who live on the southern side of the border stay there, we call them neighbors. But when they clip their way through the wire and race north at night, when they travel across the border crammed in windowless vans, they are no longer neighbors but strangers in a strange land, aliens. Some boundary lines are imposing--the Great Wall, the Berlin Wall, Hadrian's Wall. Others are invisible but no less impressive in their message - the Iron Curtain, say, or the veil of violence that this very morning reinforces enemy lines in the Middle East. As plain as some walls are, others easily go undetected. Unless you know what to look for or find yourself caught up in one by mistake. This was the case a number of years ago when my Navajo boyfriend, Eddie, and I traveled from his reservation home to do some errands in the closest border town. How many times had we made this trip? Many. All that time a wall had been there and I hadn't any idea. After loading the truck with groceries and a few bales of hay, we pulled into a pizza parlor for a quick bite before returning to the reservation. On our way to the cash register, Eddie recognized a friend sitting on the other side of the restaurant and so he veered over to chat. Absent-mindedly I handed the cashier our ticket and a large bill, my attention focused on the drive home. That is until the cashier shocked me back into consciousness when she began screaming at someone to my right. "Leave her alone right now. Do you hear me? Get out of here this minute or I'll call the police!" What was going on? What was going on involved me, it involved Eddie, and it involved the cashier and a thick, ugly wall I had no idea ran straight through the pizza parlor. You see, while I had been standing there in my cash register reverie, the woman behind the counter had witnessed this: a strange Navajo had sidled up to me, an Anglo woman, and had made a sly remark about wanting my money. A life-long resident of this town on the reservation's edge, this place where Native have-nots were endlessly loitering at gas stations and in supermarket parking lots pressing the locals for handouts, the cashier had fallen prey to habit. She had assumed that this unfamiliar Navajo had brought his panhandling inside. And so she had confronted him with disgust and anger. That we were not strangers, this Navajo man and I, but instead were a couple was something that never crossed the cashier's border-town mind. "I'm not a racist. I went to high school with some of those people," the cashier offered when I confronted her with her mistake. There in the pizza parlor, I saw an immense wall I had not realized existed. On one side of the wall was the Anglo community - with its language and culture and traditions - and on the other side lived the Navajo - with theirs. Like our nation's southern border, on one side of the wall was an abundance of privilege and prosperity, while on the other was a surplus of struggle and despair. The wall's blueprints were well worn and time tested. Ignorance and fear were its brick and mortar. Decades of prejudice and suspicion had maintained it. It cut the town in two, the wall did. There wasn't anyone who lived there or shopped there who didn't know it was there or know which side to occupy. But to a visitor, to the uninitiated, you'd never know that wall existed unless you came crashing into it. Growing up in a community, in a culture, you often learn where the walls are without even realizing it. To the outsider, the fellow in line at the Post Office is being a gentleman by giving you his place at the window. But if you know what's what, you quickly perceive his motivation; he gives up his turn at the counter because he has no intention of being waited on by an African American clerk. He'll wait for a white-clerked window to come open. Sometimes the wall is in plain sight, as when you drive past the newest gated community. Or maybe, because you've been given eyes to see it, the wall is evident at your workplace: spousal benefits are extended to some employees but not all. Sometimes what divides isn't a wall so much as a glass ceiling. Sometimes a wall is revealed by the presence of something. But other times it is exposed because of an absence, as when there's no wheelchair ramp or Braille markings in the elevator. The walls that divide us, some of them, are set way down. Down further than citizens of this young country might be able to imagine. Perhaps if we lived in Rwanda or the Middle East, some setting where cultural and religious divisions are so great as to be reason to kill or be killed, perhaps then we would understand. Then perhaps we could more fully grasp the size and scope of the ancient wall that separated Jews and Gentiles in the holiest of places. In Jesus' day, the temple in Jerusalem made it clear who was allowed in and who must be kept out. Featured prominently were signs warning that under no circumstance was a Gentile to proceed past a certain point in the temple yard lest he be put to death. There was, you see, a wall that clearly divided the inner court of the temple from the outer court. Gentiles, pagans, (people of the uncircumcision, as they are called in Ephesians), these strangers could only go so far before they took their lives in their hands. Those signs crumbled when the Romans laid waste to the temple in 70 AD. But not even the Roman army could destroy the enmity that existed between the Jews and the Gentiles. Only the Spirit of Christ at work in the hearts and minds of the people could accomplish that. Hear again these words written to Christ's church in Ephesus: For he [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. (Ephesians 2:14-16) Powerful isn't it? This image of Christ, this one who with his very own flesh draws us together into one body, his body, so that we might experience wholeness as a people. I picture Christ reaching, reaching, reaching out to all humanity and scooping us up in his arms, cradling us there as a mother would. Holding us there in his great arms, whispering to us words that remind us of our true nature, our identity as God's beloved children. Can you see them, Christ's great arms around us while he loves us into wholeness? His unending peace, his unconquerable love dissolving, eroding, chipping away at the long-established hostilities that have divided and conquered us? Those great arms stretching so wide to hold us now have stretched wide before. Wide, wider, widest from his place on the cross. There he showed us how far love is willing to reach. How it seeks always to restore relationships. How that love wants to do more than to repair relationships but indeed seeks to transform them. Those great arms had plenty of practice before the cross. Remember how Jesus stood on the beach still wet from his baptism in the Jordan, still bearing the stamp of his wilderness testing? Remember how he reached out to strangers hard at work mending nets and patching holes in their fishing boats? Remember how quick he was to call them friends, disciples? Remember the scandal? How he drew a circle and kept no one out? Not tax collectors in cahoots with the Romans? Not the faithless or the ones with weeping wounds? Not the hungry, the hurting, or those who seemed lost to the world? Remember how easily he embraced children and how respectfully he regarded women? Remember how Jesus accepted dinner invitations from all the wrong people and how quick he was to seek out the ones everyone had been taught to avoid? Remember? And remember how, when it came time to tell a story about who one's neighbor truly is, Jesus chose to lift up the Samaritan - the one whom his fellow Jews claimed was alien, a stranger, an enemy? Remember how, as his days on earth drew to an end, Jesus set a table for his disciple friends and made it clear that their life's work would be to deliver invitations to anyone and everyone? That at his table there would always be room for one more, and then one more, until all of humanity gathered in peace to taste the gift he came to share? The writer of Ephesians remembers. And reminds us... So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers or aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus himself the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. Jesus' priority on earth is now Christ's eternal pursuit. He will not rest until every wall comes down and our hearts have grown so soft and so open as to become, finally, the temple of the Lord where we find our common humanity and the oneness God has intended from the beginning of time. May we be a help and never a hindrance to the Christ whose peace dwells in us. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
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