Otherly Love
Mark 12: 28-34
I remember hearing about an incident that happened at Sun Microsystems Corporate. I’m told it was this incident that prompted Sun to offer diversity and cultural sensitivity training to their employees. You see there were a number of Islamic people who were members of the engineering team. Today it is not at all rare to work with people from many different cultural backgrounds. It was not the case when this incident occurred. The story went that one of the non-Islamic employees went to ask one of the Islamic employees a question. The Islamic employee seemed to bark something at the other man, something in his native language that seemed dismissive and maybe even mean. Word spread that the Islamic people were rude and short tempered. Relations between team members were now strained. Until one day when the phrase that had been heard as barking was translated. It turns out that what the Islamic man was saying was something akin to a workplace blessing. Roughly translated, he was saying “allow me a moment please in order to honor you with my fullest attention.”
Well! That changed everything. The two became friends and the team that had separated into us and them was now empowered through understanding. They became a new US. They had achieved “communion.”
A good thing to consider because today is…All Saints Day, a day of holy obligation if you were raised Catholic; a sliver of time in the church year given so we can pause and reflect on the everyday saints in our lives, the people living or past whose lives have made a difference.
Today’s scripture reminds us to love our neighbour in the same way we love our self. That is an interesting twist don’t you think? We do love our self and anyone like our self. We hang out the people we have things in common with. There’s us and there’s them. Same is good. Different is suspicious. I’ve been engrossed this month in a book titled “The Dignity of Difference.” The author is Rabbi Jonathan Saks.
Rabbi Saks writes that “Our focus is [often] on our individual needs at the exclusion of the needs of others.” He says that even our speech divides us. The very process of creating an ‘Us’ involves creating a ‘Them’—the people not like us.”
That makes sense to me. We speak often about the importance of owning our identity and that’s a good thing. Some of us identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, straight, political, not political, older or younger. But in that …Identity does divides us into groups of them.
So how do we live into the power of a communion of all saints when we separate into camps? Or when we separate into groups of right belief and wrong belief?
We live in a world where we are encouraged to tolerate our differences, whether they are differences of language, culture, theology, belief, politics, expression or social class. The list of what separates us is endless. Put five of us in a room and we’ll have six opinions.
And yet I passionately believe that MCC is a place where people celebrate difference. We’ll never really experience full community until we do.
The Christian Church has a bloody history of dividing the world into us and them. Where people other than ourselves were concerned, other was that group of people (or even entire countries) who needed to be conquered, colonized, and civilized so they could become “like us.” What we needed and still need is “otherly love.” The scripture is profound. We lose the potential communion when we privilege hate over love. That is how evil comes into the world. We would never have had a holocaust if Hitler had privileged love over hate. How many saints were lost?
Our own Nathan Black posted an extraordinary comment on Facebook Thursday. When something is posted on Facebook, other people can comment. This drew many comments. He wrote: “If, as gay & lesbian people, we declare (for example) conservatives (to be) our enemy, then we are at war. If we declare conservatives our partners in creating a fair and just society, then we are in community. Our actions, our words, etc., will be consistent with our declaration. And, we will have the results that viewpoint will be a demand for.”
I agree. That is a game changer. Re-naming enemy other as “partner”, changes them from being a “them” to being an “us.” Do you see where I’m going with this?
We fight with each other not for each other.
We wage war when we could be waging reconciliation.
We can talk all day about a communion of saints but until we behave in ways that privilege the “us” in every person—we headed for more of the same.
If you haven’t figured it out until now, I am fascinated by diversity. Seeing diversity in a new way is the topic of my doctoral thesis. Here is my question. Is diversity the world’s challenge or is it evidence of God’s greatest imagination? Does all the difference in the world represent crisis or fulfillment? I believe diversity represents the in breaking of God, in other words I see diversity as how God works in, with and through “us.” From God’s perspective we’re all US. It’s THEO-logical. Because…
If we are created in the image of God, then we are ALL created in the image of God. If we are ALL created in the image of God then the nature of God is diverse. And if the nature of God is diverse then diversity is incarnational. It is how God comes to us and through us. If the nature of diversity is incarnational then it is through our differences that we can each embody God. Knowing this, how could we regard ourselves and one another as anything less than a holy US? This settles it! It is all about us (singular) and all about us (plural).
When God does what God does in the world, God does it through us.
That is why I am passionate about diversity. I see God’s handiwork and intention written all over it; written all over us. It’s that simple and it’s that complicated.
It’s an invitation to try on new ways of being in the world, new ways of utilizing our differences and our voices so we can turn our diversity into a mechanism of human flourishing. Each of us is a saint to someone. Maybe that someone is sitting next to you?
What we have in common, because of God is the ultimate us. What we have in each other is precious, priceless, and powerful.
Amen.