What Causes Exclusion?

The Rev. Denise Giardina
Sunday, April 25, 2010

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

IN THE NAME OF GOD, CREATOR, REDEEMER, INSPIRER

On the bulletin board outside my office at school, I have posted several cartoons from the New Yorker magazine. My favorite shows a man walking down a street outside a house. On the front porch of the house is a dog. The dog is grinning broadly, wagging his tail, and holding up a sign. The sign says “Jesus Loves You.” On the fence in front of the house is another sign. It reads “Beware of Dog.”

Most of us have, at some time in our lives, probably met a person who was a lot like that dog. My own memory comes from the time when I was working the worst job I have had in my life – operating room clerk at CAMC Memorial back in the 1970s. Among other problems, I was cooped up nonstop with a fellow operating room clerk who was a fundamentalist Christian, and bound and determined to save me. She invited me to revivals, she begged over and over that I attend an upcoming crusade led by the national evangelist Jack van Impe; she implored me to examine the state of my soul and give myself to Christ. Learning that I was a new Episcopalian did not, as you will likely guess, cause her to cease. It was like a red flag waved in front of a bull. Nothing helped until at last, at wit’s end, I said I’d go to church with her if she’d come to church with me. She was cold and silent from that point on.

What is it about Christians that causes us to exclude? A few weeks ago we witnessed that attitude in the most extreme form any of us are likely to encounter. It seems to me that the folks from Westboro Baptist Church are, by their own reckoning, the only people who are going to be in heaven. That will give them lots of room to spread out. We can shake our heads and laugh at the absurdity. And yet that practice of exclusion has infected Christianity for a long time – for all 2,000 years of our faith’s existence we have been excluding people. We can even see this in today’s Gospel.

Let me say first of all that John is in many ways my favorite gospel. As I said in a recent sermon, I consider John to be the most powerful writer in the Bible. The opening of John’s gospel is matchless. And yet throughout John are troubling references to “the Jews.” After the crucifixion, the disciples hid themselves away for fear of “the Jews.” Never mind that the disciples were themselves Jews. Somehow “the Jews” have been made “the Other.” Today’s Gospel comes from John’s 10th chapter, and in my New Revised Standard Version, it is subtitled “Jesus is rejected by The Jews”. “The Jews” challenged Jesus, they did not listen to him or believe him, and a few verses later they picked up rocks to stone him. Jesus escaped “the Jews.” But wait. Wasn’t Jesus a Jew?

You may have noticed that when I read the Gospel today, I substituted another phrase for “the Jews”—I used “people” instead. I have done this before when similar passages were assigned. The anti-Semitism in John is something I have long been aware of, and sensitive to, and troubled by. I have tried to understand the historical context. John knew nothing of the persecution of the Jews that would unfold in subsequent centuries; what John was concerned about was writing from a time when Gentiles as well as Jews were being welcomed as new Christians. And that Christian community was trying to redefine itself as something new, something distinct from Judaism, and to become a new community. I understand the growing pains of a new movement. But I also realize that these passages were quoted centuries later to justify pogroms against Jews throughout Europe. They were quoted to justify the expulsion of Jews from many nations, including England and Spain. Quoted to justify isolation in ghettos, discrimination in all facets of society. Quoted to justify the Holocaust.

I confess to a new, more personal interest in this subject. For Christmas I gave myself a present – enrollment in the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society. That involved sending off for a DNA kit to explore my maternal ancestry. I twice swabbed the inside of my cheek over a period of two days, clapped the swabs in tubes of some sort of liquid, and mailed them off. The purpose of the Genographic Project is not to identify recent genealogy, the sort that you would find when researching the past three or four centuries in an archive somewhere. The point is to use DNA to identify what is called your “deep genealogy,” from beyond your fairly recent past.

I sent away my DNA because my maternal grandmother had seemed to me rather dark-skinned and exotic. I thought I might have common ancestry with Native Americans perhaps, or even African-Americans. And I had a vague knowledge that my maternal grandfather’s family had come from some part of Germany. But that was all.

What I learned from National Geographic was to me a stunner – my predominant maternal DNA is from what is called Haplogroup K, and that haplogroup is largely Ashkenazi Jewish from central and Eastern Europe. My first impulse was to contact several of my colleagues at West Virginia State who are Jewish, and say “Hey, bro!” I joked about a sudden craving for gefilte fish. But my more serious thoughts have been to contemplate what this means for my ancestry on the one hand, and my current faith proclamation on the other.

I try to imagine my ancestors, Jews living in a place of pogroms and ghettos, and at some point converting to Christianity before moving to the New World. I try to imagine what that was like, and whether they felt bad about it. I try to imagine the people they left behind, and the circumstances they left behind. It is difficult to absorb it all.

This morning’s lessons also include Revelation, the most misused book of the Bible. Revelation has been the basis for the “Left Behind” series of novels. The Left Behind books are not so much talked about in the press these days. And yet a check of Amazon.com shows the tenth anniversary edition of the first book is ranked around 20,000 in sales, which is not too shabby. I assure you I have not read the Left Behind books; life is too short and there are too many good books for that. So my information about them is based on reviews I have read. It seems that the series accepts the interpretation of Revelation by many fundamentalist Christians – that the Jews have once again been established in Israel as a prelude to the Second Coming of Christ, that in the end times many Jews will convert to Christianity and those who don’t will be destroyed, sunk into a fiery pit. A sort of selective Holocaust, so to speak.

I prefer the actual book of Revelation, as represented by today’s lesson. A great multitude gathers – not just a select few but a great multitude – to greet Christ the Lamb. They come from every nation, every tribe, every people, every language. They have come out of a great ordeal – and what human being has not come out of a great ordeal? The multitude worships God crying “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” And they are promised that they will find the “springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Let me end by pointing out what is NOT held up here for our praise or our worship or our source of hope. No nations. No cultures. No organizations. No Tea Party movement, no ACLU. No narrow strictures or codes of conduct. No churches. No popes. No bishops. No clergy. No rules. Rather, the suffering Lamb who is God, suffering people, love, comfort, and life. And no one is excluded. No one is left behind. Period.