The Stranger in Our Midst Part One

Part One

Building An Inclusive Church Conference

 
Minneapolis, Minnesota -- April 17, 1999

Matthew 25:31-46

Last Sunday and Monday evenings, one of the major television networks played Kevin Costner's movie version of Wyatt Earp. To help the viewer understand this man's adult behavior of intense loyalty to family and hostile distrust of everyone else, we were shown scenes from his childhood. His father passionately taught the children: “Nothing counts so much as blood. All the rest are strangers.”  Most of us seem to know that without being intentionally taught it. There are few things we naturally fear more than the unfamiliar. It is a fear so universal we have a name for it: Xenophobia -- the fear of the foreign. It comes from the same Greek word from which we get the word strange. It refers to everything outside the boundaries of the circles within which we are familiar.

The Strangers

Think of the way we view strangers in our midst. Are we not defensive about them and do we not work to protect ourselves from them? The warnings we give one another range all the way from Stella Bensen’s advise, Call no man foe, but never love a stranger; through our parent’s persistent counsel, never speak to strangers; to the policy of our police forces which urge us to report the presence of strangers. It may be a linguistic coincidence that stranger rhymes with danger, but our natural fear of the foreign and our social conditioning against those we don’t know, both tie them tightly together.

With such warnings in our ears, our primary line of defense is exclusion. By keeping ourselves separate we feel more secure. So we remove ourselves as far as possible from those who are different from us in ways either great or small. The poor are separated from those with enough; the sick from the healthy; the old from the young; ethnic minorities from the ethnic majority; prisoners from the free; and the weak from the strong. On and on the descriptions of our separations could go. But the point is the same: if others are different from me they are bad or wrong or unworthy, so they must be excluded from participation in my life and society.

But surely, some would say, that description is no longer true in our society. We live in a generation that affirms diversity, that values human differences, that celebrates multicultural experiences. Inclusion rather than exclusion is the buzzword today, at least among those who are politically and religiously enlightened. While it is true that in places like Yugoslavia there still may be remnants of the exclusive spirit that marked the way past generations dealt with strangers, we are for the most part beyond it. Things are getting better all the time. Just this past week the State of Alabama began the process of repealing its Constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. Since South Carolina removed its similar ban last February, there will soon be no State in these United States that legally forbids people of different races to love one another. There really are no strangers among us anymore. We are becoming just one big happy family.

Are we? Or, does there still remain one class of people who continue to experience exclusion right there in the middle of our newborn inclusiveness?

Robert Dawidoff, Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University, thinks there is. He calls this group of people the Last Outcasts. The Washington Post thinks so, too. A recent Post article headline identifies One Area where Americans Still Draw a Line on Acceptability.  Based on a national survey conducted jointly by the Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, the article asserts that Americans have radically adjusted their moral sensibility in the last 30 years, reserving judgment on people and lifestyles they once readily condemned. A majority now finds divorce, sex before marriage, interracial relationship and single motherhood acceptable. But one group whose behavior remains firmly outside the bounds of acceptability for a majority of Americans is homosexuals.

In a recent opinion sampling, Alan Wolfe of Boston University found that middle class Americans no longer believe that Jews, Muslims or atheists are inherently less worthy than Christians. But he notes one exception to what he calls America’s persistent and ubiquitous nonjudgmentalism. He says, most Americans I spoke to were not prepared to accept homosexuality.

Do we need studies and surveys to tell us that? Any homosexual person you meet, who has not been totally successful in hiding the reality of his or her sexual orientation, can tell you experiences of exclusion that heterosexual people frankly find hard to believe. Here is the way that experience is described by an anonymous high school student in Massachusetts, as reported in the Winter 1999 issue of Open Hands.

“Nobody tells Latino kids in the high school that nobody cares if they’re Hispanic so long as they keep it to themselves. Jewish kids aren’t told that they’re sinners and they could change into Christians if they wanted to. People don’t tell black kids they should put up with racism because they’ve come so far from when they were slaves. They don’t have to defend why there is a black history month, or why people want black studies included in the curriculum. People don’t say, That’s so Korean! when they mean something is stupid or weird. People don’t tell disabled kids that the community isn’t ready to defend their equal rights and inclusion yet. You never hear anyone argue that breast cancer is God’s way of killing off women, or that it’s a good thing. If a teacher hears anyone use a slang insult for a Chinese kid, they jump on it. When foreign exchange students ask teachers about dating in school, they aren’t sent to see a guidance counselor.

“But every day in the high school, I hear its okay if I’m gay so long as I stay in the closet, and that I‘m an abomination against God, that I can change if I want to, and that people like me shouldn’t be taught about in school. I’m told that I should be satisfied because our school is far better than it used to be, and that I shouldn’t push for my equal rights and inclusion because the community isn’t ready yet. I hear, That’s so Gay!, all the time, and I hear that AIDS is my punishment for being who I am, and I hear the world faggot all the time. It’s hard not walk around angry all the time.”

If Americans are serious about building an inclusive society (and the last time I looked that was the American Dream), we are going to need a lot of people to lead the rest across this last frontier of fear in response to people who are different. If Christians are serious about building an inclusive Church (and putting those two words side by side is redundant in the Bible I read), we have a special challenge to face. For the fact to be confessed is that Christians have been largely responsible for the inability of people in this country to accept these last outcasts. As the Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey showed, Most Americans who find homosexuality unacceptable say they object on religious grounds.

Do we need surveys to tell us that? Last week, Nancy Hanson sent me a copy of her recent book, From Pain to Joy -- Inspiring Words for Hope and Healing. She’s a Midwestern Norwegian who was transplanted to Hawaii and is now planning to enter Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley to prepare for a second career in the ordained ministry. As a new comer to the Bay Area, she spent last Easter Sunday in the Castro District of San Francisco, the heart of the gay/lesbian community there, giving away free copies of her book to anyone willing to receive it. While there, she saw a tee shirt displaying the slogan: Jesus hates me, this I know, for the Christians tell me so.

Paul W. Egertson, Ph.D

An advocate whose eldest son is gay, he chose to participate in the ordination of a lesbian pastor in Minnesota in 2001, eight years before his denomination officially opened its doors to gay and lesbian clergy in committed relationships. In the storm of controversy that followed the ordination, Egertson resigned at the request of denominational leaders a month before his term would have expired. After the resignation, the synod assembly named his as Bishop Emeritus. People speak highly of his courage, advocacy and leadership as a pastor and teacher.