The Rev. Patricia Templeton
Epiphany 5B
February 8, 2009
St. Dunstan's

Readings

From Chauvinism to Paul

I started out the week reading the Gospel lesson for today and immediately found myself amused.

Here’s the situation. Last week we heard Jesus make his public teaching debut in the synagogue at Capernaum. He also performs his first public healing – casting a demon out of a man.

The crowd in the synagogue is impressed. In fact, scripture describes them as both astounded and amazed at Jesus’ teaching and authority.

So we can imagine that when Jesus leaves the synagogue with the four disciples he has called so far – Simon and Andrew and James and John – that they are in a pretty good mood. They’re ready to relax a little, talk about how the day has gone, unwind over a glass of wine and a good meal.

It’s the Sabbath, which means what few market stalls or open-air restaurants there might have been in Capernaum in those days were closed. So Simon invites the gang over to his house for dinner, noting that his mother-in-law, who lives with him, is a great cook.

Now remember, there’s no calling ahead to warn the women that he is bringing the guys over for a meal. They just show up, unannounced and hungry.

But when they get to Simon’s house there is a problem. His mother-in-law, the one in charge of running the domestic affairs of the household, is ill – very ill, in bed with a fever.

“I can take care of this,” Jesus says to his new friends.

He goes to the bedroom, takes Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand, and lifts her up. And she is healed; the fever is instantly gone.

That’s wonderful. But here comes the amusing and annoying part – as it says in the reading, “Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

The poor woman doesn’t get a cup of tea, a chance to rest, a few minutes to sit by the fire and relax. She gets up from her sickbed and immediately goes to work – serving the men who have showed up at her house.

Now I realize I am putting 21 st century sensibilities on a first century story. But really, the chauvinism in the Gospel was enough to make me go seek solace from Paul, who is not exactly known in our times as a paragon of feminist ideals.

Many excerpts from Paul’s writings make me roll my eyes, but this time his advice to the young Christian church in Corinth on how best to proclaim the gospel of Christ seems especially appropriate for our times.

“To the Jews, I became as a Jew, to win Jews,” Paul says. “To those under the law, I became as one under the law…To those outside the law I became as one outside the law…To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak.

“I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel.”

What Paul is saying in a rather convoluted way is that the best way to proclaim the gospel is to meet people where they are, and then to model the love of Christ to them.

It seems to me that we live in an age – both in our national life and in our religious life – when Paul’s advice has gone largely unheeded.

Paul’s advice struck home to me recently as I re-read The Ugly American, a novel based in the 1950s in a fictional country in Southeast Asia. The towns and characters in the novel have been made up, but the events are all true.

The Ugly American is a searing indictment of Americans abroad – diplomats, businessmen and military personnel who make no effort to learn local languages or customs, who arrogantly assume that the American way is the only way, and who look down on the “natives” of the countries they are in as ignorant and unimportant.

A half-century after its original publication, The Ugly American still stands as a warning against the often lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance.

That combination can be as lethal in religion as it is in foreign policy. We often seem to be living in the age of the “ugly Christian.”

The same attitudes apply – an arrogant belief that Christianity is the only way to God, an ignorance about other faiths, a black and white view of morality, and a dehumanizing of people who are different.

We can probably all think of examples of “ugly Christians.” I still shudder when I remember the stories of Cambodians who survived the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge by escaping to refugee camps in Thailand.

There many of them were greeted by Christian relief workers, who frequently told them the reason their country had suffered such atrocities was because it was not a Christian nation.

Ugly Christians are no strangers to our own soil, too, of course. Last fall, Joe and I left a town festival in Sandy Springs in disgust because a group called “Jews for Jesus” had several booths there, aggressively handing out literature and asking people if they had been saved.

One of our own teenagers told me the next day that she had been at the festival with a Jewish friend, who had been told by the proselytizers that he would be condemned to hell if he did not convert to Christianity.

It seems at times as if it is the ugly Americans and ugly Christians who get the most press, but blessedly they do not speak for all of us.

The most moving story in The Ugly American is about an American couple, an engineer named Homer and his wife Emma, who live in the remote village of Chang Dong. They do their best to learn the language and to lives as their hosts do.

Emma soon notices that all the older people in the village are bent over, and walk as if their backs hurt all the time.

“That’s the natural thing that happens to older people,” she is told, but this answer does not satisfy her.

So she watches and soon realizes that the elderly people in the village, those who are too old to work in the rice fields, all have the jobs of sweeping – their homes, the paths leading from their homes to the road, and finally the road itself.

They use brooms made of palm fronds, with handles only two feet long – handles that require them to bend over when they sweep.

When Emma asks why they use these brooms, the reply is that this is how brooms have always been made, and that even if wood for longer handles were available it would be too expensive to use.

On a drive in the country, Emma notices a reed growing along the road similar to the reeds her villagers use to make brooms. But this reed has a stalk that is five feet long. She quickly stops and digs up some of the reeds, then plants them outside her home.

One day Emma cuts one of the reeds, binds its fronds and begins to sweep outside her home. “Look, she sweeps with her back straight,” a neighbor says. “I have never seen such a thing.”

Over the next few days, crowds gather to watch Emma sweep. Finally, an elderly man asks where he, too, might get such a broom. Soon a group goes to gather enough reeds to grow for the entire village.

Four years later, when Emma is back in the United States, she receives a letter from the headman of Chang Dong.

“I am writing to thank you for a thing you did for the old people of Chang Dong,” the letter says. “For many centuries, we had always had old people with bent backs in this village. We had always thought that this was part of growing old, and it was one of the reasons we dreaded old age.

“But with your long-handled brooms you showed us a new way to sweep. It is a small thing, but it has changed the lives of our old people.

“You will be happy to know that now there are few bent backs in the village of Chang Dong. Today the backs of our old people are straight and firm. No longer are their bodies painful.

“That is a small thing, I know, but for our people it is an important thing.

“I know that you are not of our religion, but perhaps you will be pleased to know that on the outskirts of the village we have constructed a shrine in your memory.

“It is a simple affair; at the foot of the altar are these words: ‘In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people.’ And in front of the shrine there is a stack of the old short reeds which we used to use.”

Emma is the antithesis of the ugly American. The strategy she uses to help the people in a remote Southeast Asian village are not unlike the advice Paul gives on how to proclaim the gospel.

Who do you think is a better witness for Christ – the relief workers who tell people they have suffered unimaginable atrocities because they don’t worship Jesus, or the doctors and nurses from Catholic Charities who ran the refugee camp’s clinic, motivated by their faith to be there, but offering Christ’s healing presence without condemnation or judgment to all who needed it?

Who do you think teenagers are more likely to listen to – someone who tries to scare them into faith with threats of everlasting hell, or someone who takes the time to get to know them, and models for them a faith of compassion and acceptance?

Scripture says of the Church in its earliest days: “Look at those Christians, how they love one another.” Today I am afraid a more likely observation is, “Look at those Christians, how they condemn everyone.”

St. Francis of Assisi had an antidote to the ugly Christian, one that still serves as a useful model for us today.

Readings

Isaiah 40:21-31

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

Mark 1:26-39

Jesus left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

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