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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC Do
you like to people-watch? Do you
like that particular form of creative story-telling that happens when you see a
person for five seconds and then launch into a fantasy tale of what his or her
life may be like? I do it.
I admit. A certain amount of
compassionate curiosity is actually quite helpful in our line of work. Most of what we make up about a couple on the other
table in the restaurant, assuming they are a couple, the woman at the bus stop,
or the man picking up his dog from doggy daycare—most of it is limited to the
noisy quiet of our brains. For the
most part, we don’t actually let our imagination take on the shape of words,
let alone share it with others. Most
of it fades as quickly as it was formed, sort of like a dream.
Just a tiny bit later, we struggle to remember the images in our mind’s
eye because new encounters have captured our attention. Sometimes, of course, we people-watch with a friend.
You tap your partner in crime on the arm, nod in the direction of the man
at the bar, and, with a sensation of guilty pleasure, you say, “Look at him.
I wonder what his story is.” I did it, on my own this time, at the gate at
Frankfurt airport where I was waiting for my flight back to JFK.
I thought it would be easy to tell the Americans returning home from the
Germans going to see the United States. I
focused on people of my own generation. I
really thought, having lived in both places, I would be ideally suited to tell
one from the other. I was clueless. My only hope were those folks who were still carrying their
passports in hand because they had just been checked by the airline personnel. It was a bit of revelation.
Surely, you’d think that the clichés we have about Americans and
Germans would have enough of a root in reality that we would be able to tell the
two apart. No way.
One gentleman that I had squarely placed in the realm of American
academia, corduroys included, turned out to be from France; and the older German
couple were really from Maine. I take from this experience that the synapses in our
brain, that get all fired up when make up stories about people we have only seen
for a few seconds, are the same synapses that shoot off our preconceived notions
and our premature judgments. None
of us is immune from those. So, by
all means, be creative and be entertained watching people.
Just don’t give what you come up with too much credence. Luke’s account of the Apostles in Jerusalem that we
heard from the book of Acts sounds a bit like the gate at Frankfurt airport.
He makes a big point of listing the many different languages and places
of origin. When I was at seminary
at PSR, Hubert Locke, the Chairman of the Board, preached a sermon and he made a
big point about all the things that Luke didn’t talk about on the occasion of
this first worship of the church. He
writes: This was, after
all, a big event, the very beginning, the first service of the Christian church.
Well, I don’t know about you. There
are so many other things I think I would rather have known about the occasion. What hymns did they sing?
Who gave the invocation? Who
was celebrant for Holy Communion? I
think of all the later doctrinal and denominational feuds Luke could have spared
the church if he had thought to recall and write down whether anyone talked
about transubstantiation or consubstantiation.
How about telling us whether there were any women who participated in the
service? Now, that would have saved
us a lot of time and fretting. Instead,
what Luke gives us is this laundry list of Parthians, Medes, Elamites,
Cappadocians, Mesopotamians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Lybians, Egyptians,
Cretans, and at least another half-dozen nationalities. The church, in its moment of origin, was everything
but a homogenous group. It was a
gathering of strangers who didn’t know how to talk to each other. Some think of diversity as a modern concept.
Some think of diversity as a liberal concept.
The fact is that the church was born into diversity and has struggled
with diversity ever since. Over the
2,000 years that we know of our church, we have come up with a couple of
different strategies to handle diversity. One
strategy is to split up into as many different denominations as there are people
who had opinions about what it means to be a Christian.
The other strategy is to recognize and unite around what we all have in
common. Even if we don’t all
become one denomination, at least we share the sacraments; we share the
communion table; we respect each other’s baptism; we respect each other’s
ordination; we exchange pastors back and forth.
We have been dealing with diversity questions for more than 2,000 years.
With that struggle around diversity in mind, I ask
you, “How does the gift of the Spirit become obvious at Pentecost?”
It becomes obvious in that those who didn’t speak the same language
were yet able to understand each other. It
would be easy if language just meant things like German and English and
French—for that, we now have simultaneous translators at the United
Nations—if you will, were the organizational manifestation of Pentecost.
We speak different languages well within the American English. I served on an Institutional Review Board at a
college. An Institutional Review
Board looks at research that involves human beings—not the Frankenstein-type
research but one that where you might hand out a questionnaire or conduct
interviews. This Board makes sure
that this research is done in a proper, ethically-responsible way. At every meeting, the different disciplines that are
represented clash because of their particular perspectives and their particular
lingo. We frankly don’t
understand one other between the anthropologist and the psychologist and the
philosopher and myself. We don’t
agree on what makes good valid research. You
may have the psychologist who wants to find out people’s values systems.
He suggests that students at the college and students in Ecuador fill out
the same questionnaire that helps determine how much one might believe in things
paranormal. The anthropologist says
the questionnaire doesn’t work in the same way in both places because to you
Friday the 13th is a point of reference but for them it’s not.
The philosopher thinks the
researcher is just lining up people like pigeons.
I try to figure out what the job of the committee is and not dispute over
scientific territory and language. Even within our congregation, we find ourselves
speaking different languages. We
vote for different presidential candidates.
We believe in different approaches to peace in the world.
We have different notions of what justice and fairness means.
We even have a variety of ideas about how God wants us to live our lives. When I listen to the diversity of the church in the
book of Acts, I come to the conclusion that our diversity is neither new nor
bad. But—there is a but—as a
church that believes that the Spirit is at work among us, we are a model for the
kingdom of God. In other words, how
we handle diversity should be a model for society at large—but a model that
reflects God’s spirit and God’s presence. Does this mean we have to become this radically
diverse congregation? No.
Diversity is an attitude before it becomes a demographic.
Let me offer you three thoughts on how we might embrace and cultivate
diversity as a reflection that the spirit of God is truly at work among us.
Those are radically new thoughts but I believe they are relevant to our
time and place. First, we should know, we should agree on, and we
should all together own what the mission of the church is.
How many of you—this is not a test—can recite our Mission Statement
without looking at the back of the bulletin?
I had one hand go up at the 8:00 am service.
At least half of our hands should go up, I feel, with that question
because if we know and own together what our mission is, then we’d have a
reference point for our differences around how to be the church, how to do our
programs, who to call as a leader, what banners to put up or not put up.
It would make it a lot easier to have different opinions about these
things. If we don’t have the
reference point of knowing what the mission of the church is, then every little
conflict seems to threaten our identity. Second, we should continue to create a culture that
allows for differences to be out in the open, rather than kept quiet for the
sake of “peace”. While we
don’t have to artificially try to become this very diverse congregation, we
should also not try to be this one homogenous group people for the sake of
“peace”. We are not a
homogenous group and we are richer because of it. Finally, for each of us, in those moments when you
want to say or I want to say, “I can’t listen to that person.
He or she doesn’t really speak my language.”
Stop and pray for a moment for a little gift of the Holy Spirit, and try
listening again. It is, after all,
Pentecost. Amen. |