September 17, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
But look, we all have serious baggage, the dark kind. We all have prejudices rooted in ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, even profession. They are dark spots in otherwise wonderful people that keep us apart. The point is not to be someone without such baggage, no one is without such baggage. The point is to be open to seeing and feeling the baggage we carry, and to be willing to unload it when the opportunity comes. Indeed, we can unload such baggage.
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SERMONS AT TRINITY
Sunday, September 6, 2009
“Baggage”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
I used to serve a church that was located
on the campus of The Ohio State University
in Columbus, Ohio.
In fact,
it was the only non-university building on the campus.
Everything else had been eaten up
by Immanent Domain
except the church.
Anyway,
one of the local Street People,
of which there were many,
was named, Annie.
Annie had a shopping cart full of papers.
I mean full, as in over-flowing
like a giant mound of ice cream falling off a cone.
Newspapers of every kind,
discarded office papers,
wrappers she found on the street,
paper bags,
signs…
Each piece meticulously flattened out
as smooth as she could get it.
She had Kyphosis,
or the severe bowing of the spine that people call “hunchback,” and driving by Annie,
as she pushed her cart up the street,
you had to wonder how she had the strength to do it.
Anyway,
after a hard rain,
Annie would often us the copious amount of steps
in front of the church
to lay each of her papers out to dry.
The church was U-shaped with three distinct
rectangular buildings forming a courtyard
and on the fourth side, out front,
running the full width of the building,
were two tiers of steps,
each tier about half a dozen steps.
One Saturday afternoon
I pulled up to the Church to get ready for a wedding
and there was Annie with all her papers on the steps.
But that wasn’t nearly as bad as the wedding
when everyone poured our of the church
to discover a naked man
lying on a bench in the courtyard.
You get the picture of Annie:
slowly,
laboriously pushing her grocery cart
full of heaviness around the neighborhood
of the Church.
We are all Annie’s in one way;
we are all Annie’s carrying the heavy freight of personal baggage with us into every situation.
Even right here, even right now.
If you had the eyes to see it,
you would be able to discern the enormous backpack
I have on,
and the messenger bag slung over my right shoulder
while carrying a canvass bag in my left hand.
Why do you think I sweat so much?
And if I had the eyes to see them,
I could see the incredible array of heavy baggage
you all carried with you here,
some of it very fine luggage you bought at Brookstone
as well as the burgeoning brown paper grocery bags
and totes and, I imagine, there’s a garbage bag or two.
What we carry in our invisible baggage
is our life experiences
that program what we expect to see and feel
in every given situation.
In the bulging chaos of the past
we carry presumptions,
pre-suppositions,
prejudices,
and peculiarities
we are not even aware are prejudicial or peculiar.
It’s just our baggage,
and we have been carrying it so long
we don’t even realize how heavy it is.
One of the benefits of a spiritual community ought be
that we discover bits of our baggage and unload it.
Of course that is easier said than done.
And God-forbid
anyone else should try to unload our baggage for us!
One time the Sexton in that Columbus Church
tried to collect Annie’s papers off our steps
because we were about to have a service,
and you never heard such screaming and profanity!
She was drying her papers
and they weren’t dry yet
and she didn’t care whether we wanted to use
the church or not,
no one was going to move her papers
or take her papers
until she decided it was time.
Well, you and I are just like that too.
You and I have stuff in our baggage
that we know we need to get rid of,
and that maybe we are even embarrassed
or ashamed about,
but, by God, no one else is going to unload it but us…
and not until we are doggone ready.
One of the amazing things about the Bible,
it seems to me,
is in addition to having its own baggage,
it also does not try to hide
the embarrassing baggage
that even some of its heroes carry with them.
In today’s reading from Mark,
Jesus’ baggage is unmasked.
You see,
Jesus brought some loaded baggage into his encounter
with the Syro-Phoenician woman.
And I think the lesson we learn
from seeing Jesus embarrassed by his baggage,
is that to love –
whether it is loving our neighbor as ourselves,
or our Self as our neighbor,
or loving our partner, sister, children or even dog –
to love well
is never done without unloading some baggage.
Let me show you what I mean.
But, I’ll warn you,
in order to see it,
you might need to let go of some baggage you received as a child that said Jesus is perfect,
even though Jesus was human,
and no human is perfect.
So Jesus encounters the said woman, where?
Alone in a house.
Even today, in our free and open society,
a well-known public figure, a religious figure no less,
cannot be found alone
in a home with an unrelated woman.
In Jesus’ day the taboo was more powerful
and more dangerous
than you and I can possibly understand.
It violated an untold number
of religious purity laws
as well as the rigid moral caste
of a tightly stratified society.
It was bad all the way around.
Never mind that he went there to escape strangers,
or that he went there to be alone.
Never mind that he went there to get away
from people like her…
people like you and me…
needy people, that is.
Secondly, she is not even Jewish.
She is not Judean.
She is foreign.
She is a Gentile…
like you a me,
dirty in other words.
Dirty Gentile – it is a redundancy.
She was the source of ritual impurity:
don’t touch
don’t speak
don’t acknowledge someone like her.
If we listen carefully,
we can almost hear Jesus thinking,
“Dirty, filthy, Gentile, pig-eating woman,
interrupting my quite time,
risking my reputation, begging for special treatment…”
Well, who here has never had such angry,
resentful thoughts
about the person ahead of us in traffic?
Or about the Annie’s of this world
who will not budge in their idiosyncratic craziness
to make way for our business as usual?
Who here has never been in a hurry at the grocery
and gotten behind the wrong cashier
or the wrong customer,
and didn’t have to bat away
some pretty disgusting internal snarling?
Yeah, Jesus had baggage alright.
It is not just that he is grumpy from being put out
by the Syro-Phoenician,
He’s put out by a woman!
A woman,
a Gentile woman
a low-life Gentile woman…
Yeah, he’s got baggage.
“Get in line, lady!” he might as well have said.
But look, we all have serious baggage,
the dark kind.
We all have prejudices rooted in
ethnicity,
race,
gender,
sexuality,
age,
nationality,
even profession.
They are dark spots in otherwise wonderful people
that keep us apart.
The point is not to be someone without such baggage,
no one is without such baggage.
The point is to be open to seeing and feeling
the baggage we carry,
and to be willing to unload it
when the opportunity comes.
Indeed, we can unload such baggage.
We can,
we can unload prejudices and presumptions;
but we shouldn’t kid ourselves,
there will always be some more
of a different nature
that we are carrying.
Anyway,
the darkness in Jesus,
the ethnic bigotry and misogyny
that was part of his baggage,
endangered the love-your-neighbor ethic
he was trying to spread.
So the darkness in Jesus,
his own neediness for space and nourishment
as well as his ethnic and religious prejudice,
endangered the love between him
and the nameless woman with a ill daughter.
But she would not budge
any more than Annie would budge.
That Lebanese Woman’s love for her daughter
was steel in her spine,
and she had more dignity
and more guts
than Jesus has bigotry.
She challenges him –
rubs his own baggage in his face
where he can smell it up close
and gag.
Is he going to remain seated in his own squalid waste:
the ethnic bigotry he had inherited,
the misogyny he didn’t even recognize,
the temper born of unmet needs driving his judgments?
Or, is he going to unload some of his baggage?
Was he going to take that opportunity,
stinging as it was,
to unpack one of his suitcases
and move on a little lighter and wiser than before?
Jesus, being Jesus,
sees precisely what she is holding up.
Being human
he must have felt defensive
and embarrassed
and ashamed
and angry with himself,
and tempted to point that anger away from himself
and back toward her…
but he doesn’t.
He takes a deep breath.
He takes a step back.
He wiggles a little distance for himself
to gather up the considerable resources he has
within himself for just such a moment as this,
and he swallows hard.
Yep.
“I got baggage,” he admits to himself.
He may even have spent some time later on,
trying to figure out where that baggage came from
and how he could help others to see it as well.
But before he even understands it all,
he acknowledges it
and changes course
right there on the spot.
In fact, the last line of this story
that is not in the Worship Guide today,
tells us that he changed course
and went home by way of Gentile territory –
an unusual route for a righteous rabbi.
He must have taken some time
to interact with a lot more Gentiles,
and to work with his prejudices
and unload them
by filling his baggage with new experiences
of people he came to love,
and see as like him in every way
as much as they may be different from him
in some ways.
That is how we unload baggage,
by replacing it with new experiences
that teach us something different.
That is how straight parents
suddenly become advocates for their Gay or Lesbian children.
That’s a how black and white teenager
fall in love with one another.
That is how Salvadorans or Iraqis
can learn to love even an American.
That is how the chasm of class can melt away
between people who have learned to trust one another.
Whatever the boundary,
whatever the baggage,
whatever the prejudice,
whatever the bigotry…
it gets unloaded when new experiences replace them.
You see,
that is the big fallacy among wealthy, educated
Americans who imagine that Education alone
can change the world.
If education alone could change things,
then there wouldn’t be such a horrendous
drug, alcohol or STD problem.
Big, liberal, progressive ideas are important,
but it is experience that transforms.
As long as we are segregated by whatever thing separates us –
gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion –
we will have the heavy burden of our baggage.
We need the encounters,
the touch and feel and sight of one another,
to learn that Muslims and Jews,
Homosexuals and Heterosexuals,
Evangelicals and Progressives,
Hispanics and African-Americans,
Caucasians and Asians
are just folks like us
in most every way that matters.
Then, and only then,
can we begin to understand and appreciate
our differences.
We do not even have to like the differences between us
in order to love one another and unload our baggage.
Well…all of that is right there in that little story in Mark.
Of course we may not have seen it before
because we carry with us
a lot of baggage about Jesus,
that keeps us from seeing him
and hearing him
and knowing him.
It’s good stuff.
I hope it helped us unload a piece of paper or two this morning. Amen.
