Göttinger Predigten
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2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 05/29/2016
Sermon on Luke 7:1-10, by Luke Bouman
71After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. 2A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. 3When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. 4When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, 5for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” 6And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; 7therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. 8For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” 9When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” 10When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.
Getting Out of the Ghetto
I did not grow up in a neighborhood with great diversity. The largest differences between the families on our block, differences that caused no small amount of competition, were all about religion. Some of us were Lutheran, whose parents taught at the nearby Lutheran college, and we went to the Lutheran school on the corner of that college campus. Our friends were somewhat determined by the company that our parents kept within the bounds of our Lutheran world. That is not to say that we didn't play with the kids in our neighborhood. But those kids were not from the same world as us. They knew that we were different than them. They went to the Roman Catholic school nearby. They wore uniforms to school. They were the larger, and thus the dominant, group on our block. So, for the most part, we stayed within the relative safety of our little Lutheran world, there in the near west suburbs of Chicago.
It seems so strange now to think about those days. Our neighborhood really didn't have that much diversity. All of the families were white. We all came from the same solidly middle class background, with values that transcended whatever slight religious differences there were. We made a big deal of being Lutheran, not really understanding that the shades of difference between Catholic and Lutheran, or the occasional Orthodox family down the street were simply a matter of colors within the same palette. We had little or no experience of real religious diversity, much less racial diversity. Oh, the Lutheran school provided us with the occasional glimpse of the wider world. Visiting faculty at the college next door would come for a year from exotic places like Selma, Alabama or even Hong Kong. But the children that joined our class became curiosities and were often ridiculed by the kids from families who were less well educated, less connected, less economically secure; families for whom diversity was more of a threat. But these kids whose faces and cultures were different, none-the-less shared our Lutheran identity. We could see each one as "one of us" in time.
Perhaps we didn't realize at the time that we lived secure within this Lutheran ghetto. Some people, when they hear the word ghetto, will think primarily of a place where the poor live. I suppose in our culture that's primarily how the word is used. But I use it here more to signify that people live within a world in which the opportunity to touch the lives and hear the thoughts of people different than your own are limited. Ghettos can be physical, but they can also be just as much about thought patterns, religious practices, even worlds of political thought. If you rarely contact people who live or think or practice piety differently than you then you have a limited understanding of the world and of people in general. I grew up, at least until the age of 10, living in the Lutheran ghetto. It provided me with a certain amount of security and identity. But it limited who I was.
I suppose, in many ways, the segregations of our time are not very much different from the segregations of Jesus' time. There were separations and barriers in Jesus' day as well. Some were political. Most of the known world consisted of occupied provinces of the Roman empire. Israel was subject to the rules and regulations of the occupying army. Other barriers were religious, and often these barriers were enforced in an effort to protect one culture from the next. The people of Israel often kept to themselves out of necessity in a world in which the Roman overlords benevolently tried to assimilate other cultures into their own by taking the gods of those cultures and subsuming them into the Roman pantheon. There were even commandments that could be invoked to prevent losing sight of who you were in Israel, commandments that we invoke today without much thought to their origins.
Even Jesus was well aware that some things were best kept separate. In Mark's Gospel, for example, we have the disturbing story of Jesus calling a Syrophoenician woman a dog, and that his ministry was for God's children first (meaning his own people, I assume). (Mark 7:24-30) In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus suggests that he came for the lost sheep of Israel. (Matthew 15:21-18) In both stories he has to be coaxed to minister to people outside of his own world of thought, culture, and religion. But in Luke's Gospel we are given quite a different picture of Jesus. Perhaps Luke is trying to make a case for followers of Jesus within the Roman world. Or perhaps he simply grasped and understood something about Jesus that enlarged the world of his readers. But for whatever reason, he presents us with a very different story. It is the story of someone who has decided not to accept the boundaries of culture, ethnicity, and even faith.
The Roman centurion in today's text knows that he has the power to enforce is occupation differently. He also knows that he can, if he chooses, make the lives of the people in his area much more difficult. But he is presented as a very different kind of person. He honors the religious practice of the people he is charged with keeping in line. He builds them a synagogue, and in the process earn their respect. But he also has servants that he treats with respect, as human beings rather than as cattle. In fact it is his affection for one such slave that causes him to send representatives to Jesus. Respectful of the standing of this itinerant Rabbi, he sends Jewish friends to approach Jesus rather than do it himself. He respects the boundaries of the cultural ghetto even as he himself lives by moving beyond those boundaries.
Jesus' response, consistent with Luke's typical portrayal, is to move beyond the boundaries as well. He does not respect the ghetto in which his own people lives. He demonstrates, by his actions that things like faith, love, healing, wholeness; all of these things and more belong not to one people but to all people. God's love in Christ is for everyone. It knows none of the limits we ourselves place on it. Jesus moves beyond those limits and invites us to follow. It is a notion that is just as out of place in his time as it is in ours.
My world is much more diverse now that when I was 10. My movement into that more diverse world began when my family moved from Chicago to a new city where there were no Lutheran schools in which I could hide among the like minded. I began, with fear and trembling at first, to attend schools and live in neighborhoods where people were much less likely to think or act like me. But then I became enlightened, or so I thought. I could count people of many ethnicities and religious backgrounds as my friends. I didn't follow the rules of blind hatred that governed so many of my former classmates in my old Chicago neighborhood. I may not have been "color blind" but at the very least I didn't think myself "color phobic". I remained ignorant that I had the privilege and opportunity to choose diversity, while remaining protected by the privilege that being white and male affords me in our culture today. I was blissfully ignorant of how little my life is actually impacted by the diversity of the world.
Then, recently, a friend pointed out to my chagrin that I lived within a new kind of ghetto in my world today. She looked at my friend list on Facebook and noted that the faces there were mostly white, mostly Lutheran, mostly people very much like me. I protested, but had to admit that her observation wasn't wrong. I was still living in a thought ghetto. Most of us, today, do. The algorithms of social media platforms play into that. They determine, by watching our behavior, people we might "like" as friends. They determine what things we "like" when posted by others and show us more of those things. Without realizing it, I have become captive to the same kind of ghetto that sheltered me from diversity as a child. I am tempted, without even knowing that this has happened to me, to think that most everyone thinks and believes things as I do. It is an illusion created in order to keep me connected to the platforms that complex algorithms use to make money from people like me.
I imagine that Jesus does the same thing with me and people who live in thought ghettos today that he did centuries ago. He crosses the boundaries. He loves people who are different. He loves people who are hated for taking risky stands and he loves people who are stuck in their patterns of life and thought. He moves out beyond the places that are safe and into the risky, messy, mass of humanity that is struggling to survive the forces that herd us into groups and make us suspicious and hateful , one of another. And here's the kicker to what Jesus did and does. He calls us to follow. He does not simply love us where we are safe and leave us there. He calls us to join in a new era where the barriers of race, religious expression, economic oppression, gender inequality... where all the barriers of this world are broken down and all our joined together in love. He could see it, affirm it, live it. We often cannot. But that does not prevent him from calling us out of safety and into the messy world.
My Facebook feed is starting to look a little different. I am intentional about nurturing a wide range of friends and expressions in my daily news feed. I "like" lots of things, even some things with which I disagree, so that I continue to see alternative and diverse opinions and expressions of humanity within my feed. It takes work. I am uncomfortable. Sometimes, lots of times, I don't like it. But once again, it is time for me to move out of my ghetto. Jesus calls from beyond the walls. And I understand the future to be much more rich and vibrant because of it. My Facebook feed is gradually changing. I only hope that my mind and heart can follow. Someday, hopefully sooner than later, my feet and body will do the same as well. For Jesus calls to us all from beyond the walls that surround our hearts, tearing them down with his love. He waits patiently while we vacillate between cowering in fear and moving out with courage, between frantically rebuilding our walls and taking a bulldozer to them. It is the hope of love itself that all walls will, in time, be reduced to the rubble from which they were built and that from that rubble bridges will rise instead of walls.