Genesis 45:1-28
Matthew 15:10-28
Luke 4:21-30
What offends
you? What do you get upset about and
defensive about and irate about?
Now, a more important
question: Does it help to take offense?
Do problems get solved?
Injustices corrected by our becoming offended?
In the face of
injustices, sometimes it feels like there are only two responses. The first is to get angry. And the second is to turn that anger inwards and
to just accept the pain and injustices that come our way, often accompanied by
a sense of helplessness or even hopelessness. Anger often involves lashing out. And one or both of these responses may
include walking away, leaving the situation that has offended us. Sometimes anger can make a difference. Sometimes speaking out the truth in anger,
like Jesus did as he flipped over the tables of the money changers in the
temple, will make a difference, affect change, challenge and overcome
injustices. We don’t know the results of
Jesus’ actions on that day, but we do know that the story of his turning those
tables continues to inform us, educate us, make a difference in how Christians
understand their church buildings and what they can and should be used for. But other times anger does not actually make
things better. When anger is not
accompanied by something productive,
like ideas about how to change things, a direction for ways in which something
might be done differently, or an offer of help for ways in which something
could be done differently, then it tends to also be simply destructive.
For those of you who read my blog, you know that this
week started in a very unpleasant way for Aislynn and I. I was driving Aislynn to school Monday
morning when a ridiculously large truck started riding my bumper. When I finally pulled over because he was
scaring me, he drove as close as he could to my car, nicking the mirror even,
to express his outrage, and then slowed to a crawl when I got behind him. When he came to a stop sign, he refused for
several minutes to drive through.
Clearly he was expressing his anger at me about something, but I’ll be
honest and tell you that, first, I don’t know what he was angry about! I was driving behind someone else and it was
impossible for me to go any faster, if that was the problem. I know I didn’t cut him off since I was in
the same lane the entire time.
Secondly, this behavior did
nothing of good. It only succeeded in
scaring myself and my young daughter, upsetting me for most of the day actually,
and causing worry (since once I was behind him, I saw that he was dropping off
a kid at the same school I was) that I would run into him again the next day
(which, in fact, I did… so now I’m anxious about driving Aislynn to school at
all).
We see this same rage
behavior in the Luke story today. They
didn’t like what Jesus said about it being challenging to bring healing and
help to those in one’s own town. They
didn’t like it and they responded by driving Jesus out of town, which meant
that there really was absolutely no way, now, that he could help them.
Our responses of
rage, of yelling, of doing damage: these hurt people, hurt relationships, cause
a lack of trust and a lack of honesty from those we are engaging who then
become afraid of speaking their minds or being present in any kind of real way
in the world.
And that other option of just accepting perceived
injustices? Of walking away? That’s frankly not very effective either. Walking away doesn’t make things better. And as Christians we are called to do something
about real injustices and to change the pain or cruelty that we experience or
witness. When the injustices aren’t
real, when the slights that offend us aren’t genuine, it does even less good to
rage or walk away because we never have the opportunity to learn when our
assumptions are wrong.
This morning Upworthy posted a story about a man who was
offended by another man. The offended
man was taking a class and every time he approached his seat, this other man’s
stuff was on the seat. As soon as the
other man saw him, he would say, “oh, you are here” and move his stuff, but, as
the offended man said it, “He knew I would be there every day, so why didn’t he
just keep his stuff off of my seat?!”
Then one day he was late for class.
And as he walked in, he saw that someone else was trying to sit in his seat and that the man who offended him by putting his stuff there said to this
other person, “I’m sorry, this seat is saved for my good friend!” and then
moved his things when he saw the author of the article walk up. His offense had kept him from understanding
that the man’s stuff was there as a way to save him his seat.
What I would like to
propose today is that there is at least one other way to deal with injustices,
both personal and communal. Today’s
first scripture reading was the end of the story of Joseph. To recap the larger story: Joseph was not
very popular with his brothers. He was
favored by his father, which led to his brothers not liking him very much at
all. But he also chose to share with his
brothers that he had had dreams of them bowing down to him. This, too, failed to make him a very popular
member of the family. So the brothers
threw him in a pit and then sold him as a slave to Ishmaelite traders, telling
their father he had been killed. This
was an amazing injustice that lead Joseph into slavery, and then into
prison. Eventually he ended up as
Pharaoh’s helper – in charge of Egypt’s land.
But not before a great deal of suffering had taken place. How did he feel towards his brothers? How did he handle all that had been done to
him? How did he treat those who had
almost killed him and sent him to a life they knew would be horrible? When they came to him begging for food, not
recognizing him, what did he do? Here
was the perfect opportunity to get his revenge, to act out in anger and revenge. He could have turned them away. He could have announced, “as you did to me,
so I do to you” and refuse to give them food.
He could have locked them up, or sold them as slaves. And truthfully, he didn’t let them off
easy. He wanted to be sure they had
changed. But once he had seen that their
hearts had changed, that they were no longer the young men who had done this
terrible thing to him, he forgave them and acted towards them with grace and
love, providing food during the famine, rescuing those who had wanted him dead,
providing for these his torturers for years – caring even for those who had
hurt him so badly, recognizing and remembering that in the end the path they
forced him down, while not an easy one, ended in new opportunities and life for
all of them.
In the Matthew
passage for today we are given two examples of ways to respond to things we
don’t like. We first have the
Pharisees. They were offended by what
Jesus said and they reacted with offense.
They reacted by being angry, by pulling away, by plotting his
destruction, and in the end by having him put to death. In contrast we have the Canaanite woman who
asks for help for her daughter. Even
though Jesus first ignores her and then insults her, she, in great contrast to
the Pharisees, does NOT choose to act out of offense or anger. Instead she acts with gentle, non-attacking,
straight-forward persuasion. She does
not get angry. But neither does she
crumple, give up, or walk away. Instead
she offers a different perspective. The
Pharisees became offended but nothing came of that reaction of offense except,
in the end, the crucifixion of an innocent man.
They did not get Jesus’ attention by acting offended. And they certainly didn’t persuade him to
change his tactics or change his mission or his approach or anything. Jesus’ response when his disciples mentioned
the Pharisees offense was to tell the disciples to leave them alone. “The blind are leading the blind,” he said.
Their offense came to nothing except anger and pain for themselves, and
dismissal by Jesus. But in contrast, the
woman who chose to not act with offense, the woman who instead gently but
persistently chose not to leave, not to act in anger, not to get mad nor to
just accept what came her way and in helplessness to walk away, the woman who
instead showed up and asked for what she wanted with determination but again
without becoming angry – this woman, this
woman got what she wanted, challenged Jesus and changed his approach to her and
to all the other gentiles who followed in the gospels.
How do we respond
when people offend us? Do we pick up our
toys and go home? Do we feel helpless
and hopeless? Do we act out in
anger? Or can we choose this other way,
speaking our truth in peace, with determination but also without attacking,
without rancor, perhaps with humor and with the simple but powerful act of
being present?
I read in the news that
a high school student in Tennessee was suspended for saying “bless you” to
another kid when he sneezed. Apparently
the teacher was offended by this and considered it an infringement on the
separation of church and state. While I
personally believe very strongly in a separation of church and state, the
purpose of that separation is to allow each person to practice and live out their
own faith, whatever they may be. To
suspend a person for an act of kindness that originated from their faith (and
that’s assuming that it wasn’t just a flippant automatic response, which is
also a possibility), is to fail to understand the purpose and reasoning behind
a separation of church and state. It is,
instead to impose on an individual rules about where and how they can express
their faith, the exact opposite of what the separation was intended to do. Putting my strong opinions about this aside,
a teacher’s offense at an act of kindness will no doubt have lasting negative effects
on those around her. Already, the
community has become more divided around this issue. Instead of people talking to each other,
listening to each other and growing in that listening, people are entrenching
in their own opinions and acting out with anger, with aggression, with
attacking, accusing, hurtful words. An
act of kindness has become the center of a controversy that has turned people
bitter, angry, has made enemies out of friends and created a stubbornness and
unwillingness to hear each other that will be hard to overcome. I wonder what would have happened if, instead
of suspending the girl, the teacher had used the moment to open a conversation
about separation of church and state, what that means, how that should be lived,
the history of that policy, and where it has taken us now. People might still have disagreed, but if the
conversation were set in an atmosphere of exploration, people might have learned
and grown from it.
When I was in college I lived in a Christian co-op with 19 other students
in what was the campus ministry center.
Living in this center involved a commitment to participate each week in
one of the regular programs of the campus ministry center. It also involved committing to attending a
weekly potluck and each week one of us put on a program for the others to
consider some aspect of faith or living out that faith. The community I lived in was very diverse,
ethnically and in every other way. And
while we were supposed to be committed to growing together as a community and
as a body of faith, there were divisions.
There were smaller groupings of friends within the community. One week, the woman leading the conversation
was a white woman who had felt excluded by the rest of the community. She led a program in which we were all
invited to pick someone we didn’t know well and try to get to know them
better. I don’t remember all the ins and
outs of this conversation. But I do
remember that about a year later, one of my friends, a Latino man, shared with
me that the people of color within our community had felt the presentation was
racist and excluded them. I was shocked
because they had said nothing at the time.
They had left the community at the end of the year, found housing
elsewhere without ever explaining why they left, without ever telling the woman that they were angry or hurt or upset. I asked Mike why this group had never voiced
their feelings. And he told me “we,
people of color, know that it is not our job to have to educate white people
on their racism.” Well, they are
right. As people of color, it is not
their job to educate the rest of us on our bad behavior. Women don’t have the job of educating men on their sexism. Poor people don’t have the job of educating wealthy people about their privilege. People with disabilities don’t have the job of
educating those who don’t. It is not the
job of people who might have experienced any kind of injustice to educate those
who perpetrated it. Education should be done by other people who have those privileges.
However, as Christians, as people of faith, it is our
job to act with love towards all people.
It is not an act of love to walk away from a situation without talking to people who may be unknowingly doing harm. It is not an act of love to refuse to engage
one another, even our enemies in open and honest conversation. Scott Peck defines love as “working towards
the highest spiritual growth for the other”.
It does not work towards the others’ highest spiritual growth to walk
away. It does not work toward the
others’ highest spiritual growth to hide behind feeling “offended”. We are called to move beyond that. To instead find peaceful, humorous, loving
but truthful ways to be present and honest and real with one another.
I will admit I do not
always find this easy. Not at all. I remember several years ago when Jasmyn
received a 75% on her assignment the first day of class which was to have her
parent sign her syllabus, a syllabus I did in fact sign, I found myself quickly
moved towards feeling offended. This was
my assignment. Had I spelled my name
wrong? Why did I get a 75% on signing
her syllabus? But my decision to be
offended started me off on the wrong foot with Jasmyn’s teacher. Instead of being present, again using humor,
or simply asking if there had been a mistake, I approached it with my bristles
out. This served no one. Least of all Jasmyn.
There are so many
things we could be offended by on a daily basis. So many.
That person wasted our time by refusing to use their turn signal. That person snarled rather than smiling. That person failed to invite everyone to
their party. That person wrote something
that could have applied to us. That
person failed to remember that someone was gifted in a particular way and to
include them in a project. That person
gave an excuse that we know was an untruth.
Well, again, we can find things to cause us offense daily. And when we fail to speak up, sometimes those
little things start to add up until we are so offended we explode or leave. Hanging on to our grievances isn’t the
solution. But reacting with anger or
walking away are not usually productive options either.
We see this more and
more in our culture, in our community.
The divisions between world-views and thinking is expanding in this
country and becoming more volatile, more violent, and more permanently
damaging. We have stopped being able to
hear each other or communicate in ways that bring learning, growth and
understanding. Instead we attack what we
don’t agree with and end up increasing the divisions, entrenching in our own
worldviews without possibility of growth or change, and tearing families and
other relationships apart in the process.
So what do we do when
we are feeling offended? Well, first I
think taking a deep breath is always a good start. Remembering the Canaanite woman, remembering
Joseph, remembering how others responded without a sense of righteous outrage
when they could easily have done otherwise, remembering our call to forgive,
remembering our call to love even our enemies, remembering that we can do a lot
more good and spread a lot more love by choosing something other than
offense. All of this can help. But the bottom line is that it takes
practice. And looking at the good models
we have in some people helps.
Ben Weir is one of my
truest heroes. He was one of the Lebanon
hostages in 1985. He was held for 16
months and suffered cruelly. He was also
a friend. And truly one of the kindest,
gentlest spirits I have ever met. I
remember one time when I was with him he was confronted by an angry attacking
young man – “what kind of God do you believe in anyway? You went over there as a MISSIONARY to try to
convert people to a hurtful religion and you were punished because of it. You got what you deserved.” And Ben’s gentle, quiet, but listening
response… “I’m sorry that you are feeling angry. For me, my faith got me through that
time. But I understand that can be hard
for folk going through hard times. I
would be happy to listen any time to what you have experienced.” I never once heard him snap or respond in
anger. And even after his cruel
treatment, he remained one of the world’s most respected advocates and workers
for peace in the Middle East. His
gentleness permeates everything about him.
And through his actions he modelled for me, as for many, a person I
would like to be: one who chooses a different way - who listens - who loves - who
sees. He also shows up, no matter what
injustice or offense is aimed his way.
My prayer for all of
us is to find that kind of peace, that kind of wisdom, that kind of LOVE. Amen.
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