If you are a fish, you don’t know about the ocean.
What a strange thing to say!
Fish know nothing but the ocean!
Well that is precisely why fish don’t know about the ocean.
This is a little weird, but you get it, right?
There are some things that are invisible, not because they are invisible, but because they are SO visible, that we assume that they are just the way things are, we stop considering, evaluating, or even perceiving them.
What’s an example of this in our lives?
How about asphalt.
We are barely aware of roads. They are just part of our lives that we take for granted. We drive on them to get from place to place. The idea of them not being there is absurd.
But these roads that are so much a part of the texture of our lives, have only been around for a little over 100 years.
Blacktop was created by an inventor named Edward de Smedt who worked at Columbia University. The first sheet of asphalt pavement was laid down on July 29, 1870, on William Street in Newark, New Jersey. Prior to this there were roads, of course, but they were all dirt or, at best, cobble.
Congress began funding roadways through the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. Things picked up from there, as horseless buggies took over and paved roads became more and more crucial to our infrastructure. During the Eisenhower Administration the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 got things going in earnest. As of 2022, some 48,890 miles of highways had been constructed, cross-crossing the continent like a giant spider web.
Fish take the ocean for granted. We take roads for granted. They are part of our lives – so much so, that it is hard to imagine life without them.
But I’m just using roads as an example.
I’m not interested, this morning, in physical realities like oceans and roads.
I’m interested in habits of thinking.
Ideas that are so ingrained in our way of seeing the world, that they are invisible to us.
You might call these ideas reflexes, or assumptions.
We have certain ways of thinking that we follow not because we have taken any time to discern their practical, ethical, or spiritual depth, but rather because it is our cultural habit to think that way.
**
Not long ago, my son Silas and I got on the Lakeshore Limited – an overnight train bound for Chicago. To make the ride more interesting, Cary and I decided to spend the extra money to reserve a berth in the sleeper car.
What fun!
Silas, who has an innate spatial sensibility and a keen eye for elements of design, eagerly investigated all the ingenious ways that our 8 foot by 4 foot berth attended to all of our creaturely needs.
While Silas was delighting in the sneaky way the toilet was hidden under a folding seat, and how the seats we were sitting in were not so much seats, as platforms waiting to be transformed into beds… I, for my part, was secretly feeling a guilty pleasure that was curious and unfamiliar to me.
As I watched all the people clambering from the platform onto the train, I was smugly aware that no matter how many folks got on board, none of those unsavory strangers would have any impact on my comfort.
The extra money we spent made us special.
So this is how it feels to fly first class — to enjoy the tingle of luxury — the complacent ease of knowing that my money protects me from the trials that all those other poor suckers have to endure.
But…
There was a time, I thought – and it wasn’t that long ago – when our society accepted, without question, the idea that it was acceptable to make certain kind of person suffer the discomforts of the back of the bus, or the indignity of having to stand up and give up their seat, and the thing that distinguished this type of person from everyone else was because the color of their skin.
How absurd can you get?
But as absurd as this was, it went on for centuries… and our laws protected it.
Thankfully, we stand on the shoulders of many courageous people (one of whom, Ruby Bridges, is pictured on the cover of today’s bulletin) who made sure that skin color is no longer the way our system decides who sits where.
But it had never occurred to me, before this delicious moment when I watched people dragging their luggage onto the train from the comfort of the sleeper berth, that we still segregate and separate people who travel on trains and planes, it’s just that today, the factor that determines how comfortable a person gets to be – how much value they have in the system – is dictated by a different measure – now it is dictated by how much money a person can afford to spend.
And this, folks, is the ocean that we swim in – the asphalt that we drive on. This is the foundational assertion of capitalism: that the value of a human being can be determined and assigned by the arbitrary measure of a number — the amount of money in their bank account.
The person with the big number has big value.
The person with a small number has small value.
This ridiculous idea is so central to the functioning of our society that we barely notice it.
If you have money in the bank, the bank gives you more money. If you have no money in the bank, the bank charges you a fee.
That peculiar logic is normal for us. We accept it without question.
When a CEO earns 400 times as much as an average employee of the same company, who barely makes a living wage, we think nothing of it.
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?
Well…
If it is…
If it’s true that capitalism gives us the liberty to judge, categorize, and devalue each other based on wealth, then, as a Christian minister, I must point out that this… this habit of thinking that is so pervasive that we hardly even see it … is directly at odds with the foundational assertion of our faith.
What, you ask, is the foundational assertion of our faith?
Well, in my estimation, the foundational assertion of our faith can be found in the story of creation, as it is expressed in chapter 1 verse 27 of the book of Genesis.
God created humankind in God’s own image,
in the image of God, God created them;
male and female God created them.
Not every Christian will agree with me, but my faith tells me this – that the foundational assertion of our faith is an insistence that every human being shares a divine inheritance.
That each of us is a child of God.
That we are created “in God’s Image”
And here is the challenging part. It’s not just some of us.
It would be SO much easier if we could just say that it is true only of Americans, or Americans with a certain amount of wealth, or Americans of a certain racial background.
But no. That is not what God insists.
God insists that we were all made in God’s image.
All of us.
This is another way of saying that, when we are given life we are made sacred.
It is not easy to live according to this foundational assertion. I would say that it is almost impossible.
To live according to this belief, is to live without prejudices. To endeavor, at all times, to refrain from passing judgment on our neighbors. To seek to offer love and compassion not only to our family members, but also our neighbors and even our enemies.
To live this way might cause us to stall the very functioning of our global economy. This religious truth is not practical. In order to work, our global economy depends upon an underclass of people who are treated, not as sacred, but as cogs in a machine …
People who are willing to be treated like second class citizens…
People who are willing to be underpaid as they take care of our elders, pick vegetables in the field, wash dishes in the restaurants, stack shipping containers, climb the girders on construction sites, mine for coal, and yes, pave our roads.
There are countless millions of people all around the world who are suffering lives of toil and hardship so that we can enjoy the luxuries that we take for granted.
But the worst thing is not just that we benefit from their toil.
The worst thing is that capitalism belittles them along the way – telling them – telling us – that we are only as valuable as the amount of money we have in the bank.
This, need I say it, is directly at odds with our religious tradition that insists that we are all children of God – that we are all equally sacred.
**
But, I’ve been talking about all this as though it’s an American problem… as though placing value on other people is peculiar to capitalism.
I think capitalism is particularly adept at creating and benefiting from this habit of thinking, but judging by today’s story from the gospel of Mark, this problem leaned on people 2 millennia ago too. And if we follow the gist of this story, we must reluctantly admit that even Jesus was subject to this flawed way of treating some people with more value than others.
When a gentile woman – a woman of Syrophoenician origin, asked Jesus to help heal her daughter, Jesus tried to send her away, saying:
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Christ’s rather mean hearted words were intended to dismiss the Syrophoenician woman. Since she was not one of the children of Israel, he would be wasting his effort if he helped her. She was not a child. She was, in this way of thinking, a dog.
The woman corrects Jesus:
“Sir,” she says “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
She might have said to him: “Sir, I am not a dog. I too am a child. A child of God.”
And Jesus, to his credit, hears the woman. He hears, he learns, and he acts accordingly:
“For saying that,” he says “you may go–the demon has left your daughter.”
The lesson that is told in this story in narrative form, is told in the book of James, (this morning’s second reading) in a direct way.
James tells us, in no uncertain terms, that no matter how entrenched our prejudices may be, God does not share them.
Indeed, James suggests that poverty – the very condition that we consider the greatest indignity – is, in fact, closer to God than the state of wealth.
This is an inversion of the assumptions that guide our lives.
**
I have preached several times on the story about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman and the point that I have inevitably landed on, is the surprising fact that, in this story, Jesus is taught a lesson.
Usually Jesus teaches us a lesson. But in this story, it is he who must learn.
Our response to this reality should not be to judge Jesus.
Rather, we can observe how Jesus learns – how Jesus is transformed.
To be transformed, Jesus must show humility.
When Jesus is corrected, in this story, he moves from a limited human vision of the world (a vision that is rooted in prejudice), to a Divine vision of the world.
When Jesus shows humility, he moves from human prejudice to divine compassion.
We, as people of faith, are called upon to do the same – to shift our foundational assertion from human prejudice to divine compassion. Our faith instructs us not to place value judgments on people, but to see them as inherently sacred, and treat them accordingly.
But this is no simple matter. How is it to be done?
And Jesus signals to us, through his weakness, that the path to this change is through humility.
To walk humbly with God.
This is a deep and meaningful lesson for all of us – a lesson that we can learn from a mistake Jesus made, freely admitted, and corrected.
Let us follow his example.
Amen