“Where did you go to high school?”
When I first came to Louisville, I
didn’t realize the importance of that seemingly innocuous question! “High school?”
I would wonder. “If strangers are going to make conversation with me, why don’t
they ask me where I went to college or where I work, for goodness’ sake?” The Question
can begin with an appraising glance, a piercing look balanced upon an invisible
measuring stick, a haughty hesitation that expects a certain answer. Or it can
pop out in a spontaneous, friendly way. But however the question is asked, in
this town, whether one spent four years at St. X or Trinity, Sacred Heart or
Assumption, St. Francis or Collegiate, Male or Manual or PRP … that is the
standard by which we categorize one another. So ingrained is this way of
thinking that people don’t really know what to do with you if you say that you
grew up in another town. I know that when I would tell people that I went to
high school in Houston, they might look at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes,
unsure how to proceed with me, until I learned to interject that my mother grew
up here and graduated from Atherton. Only then could they relax, able to place
me in a known category.
In Louisville,
already a city with clear geographical divides of race and class, we mentally
line up our dividing walls around our high schools, creating a complex mix of subtle
partitions that juggle differences in religion, class, race, academics, wealth,
and even sports. So engrained is this way of thinking, that we often don’t even
realize that we are judging when we ask the high school question, but we are. Perhaps
St. Paul, if he were writing today to Christians in Louisville, would argue,
“Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made all high schools into one and
has broken down the dividing wall... He has abolished social cliques with their
rules and etiquette, that he might create in himself one new humanity, thus
making peace.”
I sighed as I
read today’s Scripture lessons that point out so clearly that Almighty God
cannot be enclosed in a house built by human hands or human minds, and that
Christianity is to be a religion without dividing walls. You don’t even need a
sermon from me in order to recognize the truth of these things. And yet, where
is that promised peace and unity in Christ? It is so easy to say that Christians are supposed to
welcome everyone into one family in Christ, that we are all supposed to get
along, that the dividing walls are to be no more. We don’t seem to be any
closer to attaining it today, though, than the quarreling Jewish and
Greco-Roman Christians were in Paul’s day. Even in a loving Christian community
like St. Thomas, one can often see walls between age groups, between
parishioners and staff, between present vestry and past vestry, between
ministry groups, between church and preschool, between parishioners and “renters.”
In our diocese, we maintain walls of rivalry between one parish and another,
and our churches can’t seem to breach those walls that divide Louisville into
separate enclaves. (I am ashamed to admit that I have never set foot in either
St. George’s or in Messiah-Trinity, and I doubt that I am alone.) At the wider church
level, as we work to break down a wall to include one group, we often alienate
another group, who start piling up stones for a new wall on the other side. And
of course, among clergy, the question is not, “Where did you go to high
school?” but is instead a sneakily suspicious, “Where did you go to seminary?”
as we roam between partitions made of theology and churchmanship.
Strangely
enough, it is not joyful worship but tragedy that seems to push us to tear down
our dividing walls. That movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, was made up of
people from different high schools, ages, classes, churches, political parties,
and races. They were sitting peacefully next to one another, ready to lose
themselves in a story, rather like we do in our church services. Yet, there
too, the peace was only surface deep. A discussion or a common project or, Lord
knows, a committee meeting, would have stirred up the judging wall-builder
within each one of them. When the larger-than-life deranged gunman entered,
however, and tore through their lives with evil and death and sprays of
bullets, these strangers suddenly became brothers and sisters. According to the
news reports, they shielded one another, pulled one another to safety,
collapsed with relief on one another when it was over, and reached out to the families
of strangers who had died. The survivors of that attack are now members of a
community so strong that the dividing walls have all come tumbling down. I
would even venture to say that our compassionate God now dwells in the midst of
them. And if we were to meet one of them on the street, we would not ask him
where he went to high school. We would not ask her if she were gay or if she believed
in Evolution. We would not turn up our noses at the way he dressed or spoke. We
would automatically reach out with love and offers of help.
As good,
obedient Christians, we try to make peace and unity happen in our communities
like we try to get people not to chat noisily in their pews before the service. We think that it is
something that we can moralize about and will upon ourselves as we sit in
meetings and in the pews. According to Paul in our lesson from Ephesians,
however, peace and unity are the result of Jesus Christ entering our lives and
our communities in a powerful way—almost, dare I say it, with the force and overwhelming
drama of a madman entering a movie theater. The shock of God upon the Cross is
supposed to rip through our lives like a spray of bullets. The powerful promise
of Life in Christ is supposed to unite us just as strongly as the threat of
death from a killer with a gun.
We read in our
Gospel lesson of the transformative power that Jesus had over the crowds. All
anyone had to do was to touch the fringe of his cloak, and they were healed.
When he traveled throughout the Galilee, the crowds followed him everywhere. So
hungry and desperate were people for the healing and new life that Jesus and
his followers could give them that they pestered them without ceasing, not even
letting them eat a meal in peace, racing ahead of their boat to meet them when
they tried to get away for a rest.
So … what is
missing today? Where is Christ’s commanding presence among us, his followers?
Where are the crowds? Why are our communities transformed by the aftermath of
sin and death, yet not by the power of life? Paul writes, “Jesus himself is the
cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a
holy temple in the Lord … into a dwelling place for God.” Perhaps we, like
Nathan and David, have been too busy planning our own dwellings for God, rather
than letting ourselves be inhabited by Christ. We Christians are now the Body
of Christ; we are the ones with the arms and legs to walk into the crowds and
bring healing in Christ’s Name. We are the ones to turn things upside down by
our proclamation of a crucified God. Is that what we are doing? We are only in
unity insofar as we are in Christ, bringing Life and caring for his sheep.
I can actually
give you all a fresh, real-life example today of what I am talking about. When
you get home, go to the St. Thomas Facebook page and take a look at the picture
of the five children from this week’s first annual Reading Camp standing in
front of our church. You will see five elementary school children who will
probably attend five different high schools. This picture could be a poster for
racial diversity. The children have their arms around each other in genuine
affection, and they have huge smiles on their faces. These are children who
have trouble in school and who spend most of the school year “like sheep
without a shepherd,” not needy enough to receive special services in the
classroom, yet struggling to keep up with their classmates. Yet, they had so
much fun working on their reading skills all morning at St. Thomas and then
receiving attention and affection from St. Thomas parishioners all afternoon,
that they didn’t want the week to end. This Reading Camp was a lot of work for
our volunteers. Our parish is so small that it was a risk for us to plan on
inviting even 5 or 6 children to a complex camp like this one. We had to raise
money with a silent auction at Bluegrass and Burgoo, and that was a lot of
stress for many of you. We had to cook and serve two meals each day at our
camp; we had to have transportation for field trips; we had to plan lessons
almost from scratch; we had to figure out logistics; we had to displace two
important groups in our parish to have room in the Fellowship Hall. And yet ….
I saw nothing but peace and unity this week at Reading Camp. I saw older
parishioners and teens and even some out-of-town family members who joined us,
working together with huge smiles on their faces. I saw a public school working
hand in hand with a Christian church for the good of the community. I saw
compassion. I saw healing. I saw the Body of Christ. Will this Reading Camp change
the East End? No. Will this Reading Camp “grow our church?” No, I doubt that we
will get any new members from it. But, by allowing us to reach out in Christ’s
Name, to proclaim the Life and Healing that Christ offers to us all, it brought
us one step closer to becoming “citizens with the saints” and “members of the
household of God,” a dwelling place in Christ. That is the kind of growth that every
parish needs more of, even the big ones. Giving of ourselves as Christ’s Body
is not easy, but it is the only way to peace and unity within. It is the only
way to combat the insidious divisions among us and the only way to transform the
world with light and life, not darkness and death.
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