by Fr. Bill Garrison
Please note that the following sermon text was provided prior to the audio recording. The two versions may differ substantially.
John 17:6-19
Jesus prayed for his disciples, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.”
Normally in this space I have a joke. This week I have a story that fits so well with our theme for the day, which is seeing people in three dimensions rather than two. I hope you don’t mind.
A few months ago, I mentioned to Reverend Carole that I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. I had seen the movie a few times but never read the book. She graciously loaned me her copy and it sat on my bedside table for a few months while I read other books. Finally, I picked it up and began reading. I finished it a few days ago.
It's probably the best book I have ever read. I had watched the movie several times previously and I was impressed how closely the book and the movie matched. But I was also aware how the character study in the book seemed much deeper than the movie. Gregory Peck never stops being himself. Atticus Finch comes alive in ways all his own in the book.
I was enthralled with the people in the book and I gazed with open mouth wonder at how Atticus was willing and able to see them in ways that allowed him to understand their humanity and care about them. He saw them as human beings underneath their veneers.
For me one scene is especially meaningful. Tom Robinson has been moved to the city jail and Atticus is sitting in front of the jail under one light in the dark to protect him from what he knows is coming, a lynch mob. It’s a small town and Atticus’ children walk down to find out where he is and they find him sitting in front of the jail. They remain in hiding because they know if he sees them, he will make them go home. Presently four vehicles show up and several men get out and approach Atticus. Their intentions are clear. They have come to take his client and lynch him. And so, the standoff begins.
It is at this point that Atticus’ eight-year-old daughter, Scout, runs up to the jail, into this terribly dangerous situation and begins to talk with one of the men threatening Atticus and his client. As things were about to boil over, with people about to get hurt, here is what she had to say. I have edited a little bit for time’s sake.
“Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”
The man did not hear me, it seemed.
“Hey. Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment getting’ along?
Mr. Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked is thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen flat.
“Don’t you remember me. Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.
“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy ain’t he? Ain’t he sir?
Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me after all.
“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. “He’s a good boy, “I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”
Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr. Cunningham displayed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.
“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. ……. their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ mouth, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes met and he shut it.
Atticus said nothing. I look around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.
“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady”, he said.
Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going boys.”
As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone.
Three pages later Atticus explains what happened, why they left.
“A mob is always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was a part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. …….. So, it took at an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses, didn’t it?”
This little girl had found their humanity and brought them back to themselves. They had been two-dimensional as a mob. She brought out their third dimension, their humanity. In that moment they were changed.
We spend a lot of time studying scripture. Every Sunday we read three passages from the Bible and read or listen to a psalm sung. I believe that most of the time we see the Biblical characters in a two-dimensional way. Their humanity is missing. They are like pictures hanging on a wall. They were heroes or cowards. They were holy or they were evil. They were smart or stupid. They were followers of Jesus or they rejected him.
Probably none of these ways of understanding ancient people are true. You see they all were people. They lived and loved. The had children. They worked. They studied. They hoped to make lives for themselves.
So, recognizing this we understand then that the Pharisees worked for a living and raised families. The Sadducees tried to keep life in the Temple moving along and went home to their families. The Scribes advised others regarding very practical things, visited friends, and loved their children too.
If, as Christians, we are sincere in our quest to understand Jesus Christ, we must also seek to understand those he encountered. What made them tick? What were their lives like? Why did they do the things they did? What were they afraid of? What were they willing to fight for and why? I know for myself answering these questions has had a profound influence on my scriptural thinking.
As I think about life today, I realize this issue of seeing people in two dimensions persists. We see many if not most of the people in our society and the world in two-dimensional terms. They too are good or evil, stupid or smart, right or wrong, holy or not.
I hope we can remember that these characterizations are not true either. They weren’t true in Harper Lee’s story or in Biblical understandings and they aren’t true now. We would be wise to remember other people are not as we think about them. They have families. They love their children. They are smarter than we give them credit for being. And, as I have said before everyone is more interesting than we think and is having a tougher time than we know.
If we listened to the gospel reading a bit ago, we took important information from it. God loves us. We are important to God. God created the folks in the first century and God created everyone in this century. And we are not all that dissimilar. Like them we don’t agree with each other more often than any of us are comfortable with. But the good news is that we can ask each other questions. We can exchange ideas. We can try to understand what the other side is saying.
We don’t have to see people in two-dimensions, as pictures hanging on a wall. We can recognize their humanity and see them in three-dimensions. And when we recognize the humanity in other people, we can’t unsee it. And as a result, our relationship with them is forever changed.