Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 19 September 15, 2013
Luke 15:1-10
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." 3So he told them this parable: 4"Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' 7Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8"Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' 10Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
A very friendly waitress at my favorite restaurant stopped by my table this week to ask me about the President's speech on Syria. I realized too late that she was just being polite and that she had stopped listening before I finished my first sentence.
There is no short explanation of what is afoot in this part of the Arab world. Syria shares borders with Israel, and Arab neighbors: Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon and their more complicated non-Arab neighbor to the north, Turkey. Syria has chemical weapons because Israel has nuclear weapons. Syria has held this dangerous card in their military hand to give them something to offset that nuclear threat.
But the existence of Israel in an unfriendly neighborhood is not the only thing that twists internal relationships in the region. I'm not a historian so I'm going to hit this pretty fast before I say more than I know, but none of the modern boundaries in the Middle East developed naturally.
When Great Britain ruled the former Turkish Empire, they intentionally divided up the countries we know in the Middle East so that there is not a remnant of a Ottoman Empire, a Kurdish nation, a Persian nation, a specifically Sunni or Sh'ia nation. Syria was a part of the Ottoman Empire until after WW I and only became a self-governing nation in 1946. It has never enjoyed majority rule or anything that anyone here would call "democracy."
The Brits made sure that these larger populations that might have united and defied the west were sufficiently divided up in ways that make them fight with each other for national self-control rather than giving us any serious competition. It is a plan that might have worked if we had not stolen some symbolically treasured real estate on the Mediterranean coast to establish a Jewish homeland and if we had discovered our vast domestic supplies of natural gas before we created these insanely wealthy crude oil states.
Syria is about 60% Sunni's and it is they who are understandably making up the opposition to Assad's government. But there are significant populations of Kurds, Christians and a couple of minority Muslim sects you would likely have never heard of.
The Assad government comes from a minority that is less than 1/5th of Syria's population, an off-brand of Sh'ias called the Alawites. If you are still with me, you are already way ahead of my young waitress at Touch.
There were similar divisions inside of Iraq that played no small role in why Saddam Hussein's government was as violent as it was. When we took over the nation we found out that we couldn't rule them without violence either. We talk about Afghanistan being "tribal" and that keeps us from being able to have a meaningful central government there but it seems to me that you could say more or less the same for Syria and many other Middle Eastern states.
Our own nation has more than just a historical taste of this kind of strained diversity. Cowboys and Indians didn't play well together and we resolved that issue primarily by killing off almost all of the Indians. Blacks and Whites were not natural neighbors and even a hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, we still find ways to keep blacks and whites from learning how to live together peacefully.
I'm not going to go too far down this path but let me give you one example: Our nation still maintains that growing, owning, selling or using marijuana is illegal. Ironically, the use of marijuana is one of the few things that you can say is very nearly equal between blacks and whites..... there are about the same number of white marijuana smokers as there are black users.
However, when you look at arrest and incarceration records, a black marijuana user is four times more likely to be arrested and jailed than is a white person. That is not an accident of history.... It may be largely unconscious on the part of our law enforcement and judicial system but if we ever act like the feuding between the Sunnis and the Alawites of Syria looks absurd then we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves, with more than a century to get this stuff figured out, why is it that keeping blacks poor and in prison appears to be the best alternative that we have come up with to open civil war?
When I entered the ministry 35 years ago, even liberal churches were still debating whether women could speak in church services and if they did, could they wear a pants suit while doing it? Real integration, outside of the school system, was nowhere to be seen. If there were illegal immigrants in the nation they were not seen in churches and they were not mentioned in pulpits.
Nervously, white churches helped to start Hispanic ministries, Korean churches and Chinese ministries but were not much interested in genuine integration. The more insidious problem for modern mainstream churches was the dawning realization that they all had a minority group hiding among their pews whom they couldn't identify just by looking. For twenty years the church was sharply divided between their gay and straight members.
The white protestant mainstream has tried every imaginable means of addressing this division. As Winston Churchill once said of us, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possible option." We tried denying their existence. We tried converting them.
We even tried the Hispanic/Korean/Chinese thing and tried to start separate congregations for gay Christians but they just kept showing up in every flavor of church choir and even in the pulpits of some of the most radically anti-gay churches in the country. We are no longer shocked when conservative evangelical preachers who have ranted against homosexuality for years are found in same sex affairs.
One by one, our ancient prejudices have been shown to be rooted in irrational fear and far from providing meaningful protections, these prejudices have a laundry list of human suffering to their credit, from causing wars and domestic violence to unjust incarcerations, even to unemployment and suicide.
From a distance of years we can feel regret for African slavery, the slaughter of the American Indians, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, for segregated schools, gender discrimination and discrimination against the gay community. One of the things we have discovered in America is that the more diverse our communities, universities and businesses become, the more interesting, productive, inventive, safe and even profitable they can become.
What lies ahead is for us to be able to do with religion what we have begun to do with race, gender, orientation and language. Americans as well as Russians have reason to fear chemical weapons passing into the hands of Islamic radicals. Ironically, western European powers, the USA and Russia all fear how either nuclear or chemical weapons might be used in the hands of extremists..... of course, the question none of us seem to want to consider is just exactly why these people hate us so much..... and no, it is not because of our "freedom."
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Over the centuries, empires rise and empires fall. There are instances of ethnic cleanings, expulsions, immigration and migration, enslavement, and exploitation of every kind. The western domination of the politics and economy of the Middle East is a fresh memory for them and something we have been blissfully unaware of since gasoline was 20 cents a gallon.
They are not crazy. They are not just religious lunatics bent on blowing up the world. But still, it comes down to a choice of whether you want to look for reasons to be angry or if you want to look for ways to survive together on a very small planet.
Our scripture lesson today began with this sentence from Luke: "All of the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him." And that was followed by, "And the religious professionals were complaining, 'this guy keeps company with our enemies.'"
Two thousand years later, we are still talking about Jesus because he was somehow able to attract people to him who might naturally have tried to avoid a religious teacher at all costs.
He was able, in the midst of a violently divided, religiously prejudiced, puritanical, homophobic, racist, society to sit down and break bread with the people no self-respecting Jew would have talked with.
How did he do that?
I'm not sure that I'm the person who can say for sure how he did it but I know what he didn't do..... he didn't tell them why they were bad people. He didn't try to explain to them why he and his family were the good guys and they were all the bad guys. He didn't recount the sad tale of Jewish persecution or try to get the tax collectors to give up their jobs or tell the prostitutes that they were going to hell.
Even though what they were doing was immoral and bad for the society. Still, he didn't launch a limited missile strike in their neighborhood because, well, what kind of idiot would do that if he were trying to get people to get along with one another?
