Choosing Sides
Psalm 124
Good morning. This week Pastor Paul and I gave an internet radio interview to “The Show So Gay.com.” We were asked several good questions. Whenever I participate in an interview like this I find my spirit and my call is renewed. Each time I hear the unique call of queer people of faith articulated out loud, even if I’m one of the people talking, I’m reminded that we have witnessed so many injustices around us that we can become numb. It can be painful to notice all the cumulative things that contribute to injustice. Often it’s the little things that can pile up on us; the words we choose and the things we let pass without challenge, like when someone makes a disparaging remark about us.
PP2There is an expression that if you try to put a frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out! But if you put that same frog into comfortably warm water and increase the temperature one degree and a time, you can kill the frog. Injustice is still lethal to our spirits and our lives, even if it’s perpetrated in small, little by little doses. You cannot be a little bit pregnant and there cannot be just a little injustice. Pregnant is pregnant and injustice is injustice.
Our scripture today got me thinking about small injustices with larger implications. The psalmist is giving thanks for bringing Israel out of captivity. What makes Judaism significant in the global context is that it was the world’s first monotheism-the belief in just one God. Judaism gave rise not only to its own faith but also to the environment from which Christianity and Islam both emerged. Prior to the Israel’s captivity people believed God’s were “national.” Israel had one God, Egypt had another God. They felt abandoned because now they thought they were under kind the jurisdiction of somebody else’s God. As a result they had to rethink their faith and they came to the realization of one God of all people. They brought their rich history with them as God accompanied them out of bondage. They gave thanks that God had been with them, or as the Psalmist wrote it, “one their side.”
From that understanding God can be on everybody’s side. I wish it were that simple. People do read the bible without this layered understanding, the result of which has led to a belief that wars are God’s idea, and that God picks one group over another, leads one group out of captivity and leaves another for dead. Culture wars exist partly because people are still fighting over whose side God is on. It makes you wonder how many wars have been waged because we still think our God can beat up your God.
What is that line from the film “For the bible tells me so?” It’s ok to read the bible like a fifth grader, IF you’re in fifth grade.
The ripple effects are frightening with any form of literalism without reason. It continues to affect us today. Thinking about this I remembered a news piece I heard. It was a miraculous and tragic story of mistaken identity. Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak, were students at an evangelical college in Indiana when they were both in a car crash that claimed multiple lives. The accident scene was a chaotic mess so the one survivor was identified as being Laura. Only after five weeks, when she emerged from a coma, did they realize that the survivor was not Laura-it was Whitney! But for those five weeks the parents that sat vigil over their daughter were actually standing vigil over someone else’s daughter. Her injuries were so bad, they simply didn’t recognize her. Making it even worse, Whitney’s parents held a funeral for the girl they thought was their daughter, only to learn that the young woman they buried was Laura.
Many months later, the Today Show brought both families to New York to talk about what happened and how they’re making sense of it. The families have become close, each of them grateful for the love and care shown for their respective daughters. When Matt Lauer turned to Whitney who today is healthy and completely recovered, he asked for her reaction. I remember stopping to hear her answer. This is a girl with a headstone that had her name on it. What would she say? She proceeded to tell thousands of viewers that she was grateful that God had delivered her; grateful God has spared her life, kept her alive, grateful that she was chosen to live.
Most likely the audience rejoiced with her saying yes, and amen. Most likely they gave no thought to the implications of her words. Even more disturbing was that she said this in front of the parents whose daughter, according to this theo-logic had not been saved by God!
I cringed, my jaw dropped and my spirit gasped. Wait! THIS can’t be theo-logical can it?
Does it follow that if God delivered Whitney it means that God DID NOT deliver Laura. Does it mean that if God spares the one, God intentionally did not spare the other? To believe that God picks and chooses infers that God picks and chooses. I do not believe this to be true. Do you?
It’s perfect that the story and even the book written later by these two families, is titled “Mistaken Identity”. But the mistaken identity is God’s, not Whitney or even Laura. Is God a God who privileges one group over another group? Do you believe that in God’s world, some bodies matter and some bodies do not? If we believe that then apparently we expect that God does choose sides, deciding who is lovable and worth saving and who is unlovable and therefore expendable. People just die. God doesn’t take them.
Isn’t this what many DO believe? Here’s an example. The news out of Thailand this week was amazing. Researchers have identified what could become the world’s first HIV vaccine! I can be thrilled at the possibility and I can also be angry. When HIV first appeared you better believe that some bodies were expendable and that some bodies were being punished, getting what they deserved because the public policy did NOTHING about HIV; did nothing because we weren’t worth doing SOMETHING for! How many people have died because a belief?
In one way God does choose. God made all of us a chosen people. The gift of knowing that God’s love is inclusive and not exclusive is why MCC exists. Just as a mother delivers her child, lovingly nurturing and growing him or her, our God delivers, nurtures and unconditionally loves each of us.
Any of us could sense that we are being chosen to be God’s hands to someone else. We are delivered and we are deliverers.
We cannot discharge our responsibility for justice, peace and healing simply by handing solutions back to God. We are cooperative partners with the God in this world of ours. Keeping the story of the psalm before us is one way to address this balance. Keeping the vision before us of a God who delivers all people is essential as we address the problems with which we are faced in this world.
So let us choose words and actions that liberate, that lift, that love. When we hear words that don’t liberate and see actions that oppress, may we speak truth and call them out. Let that sure knowledge that God loves you give you peace, give you strength and out of that, may you take your place in helping others to know the same.
Amen.