First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Isaiah 11 and Romans 15

“Those Wily Gentiles”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

December 9, 2007

            Mexican poverty is a part of growing up in San Diego.  As a young man I stood in the shanties of illegal aliens, walked the cardboard barrios of Tijuana; I’ve been hit up by chicle selling Mestizos- the little girls carrying their sisters on backs and a small cardboard box of gum which you buy whether you chew gum or not.  San Diego itself also has enough wealth that its absence is conspicuous in places like National City and Imperial Beach.  Yet, given its proximity to the border you also encounter the opposite- the super rich of Mexico.

            In the States we have poverty and wealth, but it is not common to encounter the super rich, nor is it likely to see the way the world appears to them.  As a teen working in a store very close to the border, though, I will never forget the moment a woman came into the store and I saw a whole other world.  She stood a bit back from the counter and when she looked toward me, I wouldn’t say directly at me, I could see in her face a expression like none other I had ever seen.  Looking toward me seemed to be a bit of a burden; it was as if I were a creature that did things; I was closer to dirty livestock that must be fed and tended, but certainly not brought into the house.

            The moment she walked away it was clear to me that in her world I was a peasant, a part of the herding masses that, under the right circumstances, can play a service role, but not much more.  Speaking with others I discovered it had happened to them as well.  It was rare, but certainly memorable.

            This was all just a memory until I reached Jerusalem many years later.  Jerusalem, the old city, is divided into four parts.  On most visits I’ve started in the Muslim quarter.  Here as you walk about it is not uncommon to feel the stare of hatred.  As a Christian you are an infidel; as an American you are the reason for the ongoing state of violence and humiliation; if we didn’t help Israel, then all this mess would have been over long ago.  This is a suppressed feeling as you walk past the rug dealers and trinket sellers; it is a glaring stare when you venture close to the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and it even reached beyond this as I walked through the Dome of the Rock. 

            Unfortunately this is the lesser of the second unfriendly welcomes.  For once you reach the Jewish quarter, you become invisible at best, a kind of defiling presence at worst.  It comes mainly from the ultra-orthodox in their array of intriguing hats and prayer shawls.  For the uninitiated it has a feeling of breaking some sort of rule, doing something wrong, intruding on a very private conversation.  I consider myself a novice now having walked there a few times.  So now it feels like I am what I am: I am goyim.

            In Hebrew the word for Gentile is goyim.  Words like heathen, barbarian, ungodly, wretched, scum come close in English but they don’t quite capture it; even the Greek word in our text, ethnos, is not very revealing.  That’s why in our reading the translators have used the Latin “Gentile” which literally means other kind.  From this root we get the word “genus” or kind.  I like this as it captures the experience of being seen as another kind of being, something . . . well . . . less than human, a kind of creature.

            No one comes up to you in the Jewish quarter and says mean things, they just push past as if they are moving furniture; no ones hurls insults, there is just a look that says so much more than words.

            It’s hard today in our culture to really come close to this.  Racism is an obvious corollary.  But I want to say that we are no longer counting people as 3/5 or equating humans with livestock, both of which we have done.  But I don’t believe this persists.

And it is different from just being mistreated.  We’ve all been treated as less: less smart, less well-to-do, less handsome, less physically capable.  Perhaps there are people who have lived without these moments, but I can’t imagine it.  Being “goyim”, being a Gentile is more than just being seen as less. 

The American culture is ready for inequality.  We know how to deal with people who think too much of themselves and put people down.  Adages like “There is always a bigger fish” or “The bigger they are the harder they fall” are a part of our culture.  We don’t like it when people are too big for their britches, or put on airs.  America always has a bit of the common man, and we pride ourselves on a sense of egalitarian equality.  I’ve heard people say, “We are all just people.”

            Walking the streets of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem such an ideal doesn’t persist.  This isn’t the working ideology.  Goyim are goyim.  They are not just a different culture; they are a different kind of human and for different also read wrong, polluted, infectious.  And now translate it back, you, we, are such creatures.

            So when Paul calls himself the apostle to the Gentiles and argues with the Jews in his churches to let the Gentiles have full membership, we need to imagine something like letting cattle into the house, or letting slaves in the antebellum south sleep in the main house next to the master’s children, being exposed to a communicable disease.  We need to think of being an other kind of being and we are close to what people would have heard when he said, “Gentile.”

            When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans he was really upfront about this.  He started with images of the Gentile and it is a kind of refrain for him, first to you and then to the Gentile.  He is really trying to sell something and it’s a hard sell.  Given how controversial this dream was and how quickly the early church had to leave the synagogue, it is fair to say, Paul didn’t have much success selling the Gentiles. 

It’s hard to truly feel the repulsion his audience would have felt every time he said, “both to you and to the Gentiles.”  In recent years scholars have tried to emphasize the “authority” of Paul over the centuries and the impact his views had.  But the voice of the one speaking here is not the one of authority; the voice writing to the Romans is the radical whose ideas are way, way outside the box.

There is, though, maybe one part of our life together that comes close to this.  I don’t think it is race, religion, or economics.  It’s ideology.  It’s the whole Red State/Blue State; it’s the disdain of what we convey when we say liberal or conservative.  In this part of our life we have developed a culture of disdain and hatred that truly comes close to what is meant by “goyim.”

There is a Christmas movie about this.  This totally blew me away.  But I have to say it is a brilliant move.  Because Christmas, like no other time, is when we are compelled to gather with people we wouldn’t otherwise, when we have to eat with people for whom we may maintain a healthy contempt, or just find ourselves way outside our comfort zone. 

The movie is called The Family Stone and even though it is about our political differences, I am not sure in the end if it has a political agenda.  Certainly it caricatures the crazy, wing nut liberal without any moral standards whose life styles will ruin us in a kind of Sodom of moral chaos just as it caricatures the wooden, fascist, close-mindedness that will foster a regime of oppression.  But it lets both of them kind of be what they are. 

The tension of the story is the perfect son who has brought home a blueblood, uptight Hamptons Republican he intends to marry to meet his parents and siblings who are the embodiment of all things NPR.  The movie is masterful in how well they create this unrelenting, awkward tension between the prospective fiancé, Meredith, and the very blunt mother, Sybil, who says in no uncertain terms she is not giving her mother’s wedding ring to that woman. 

The precarious situation all falls apart over dinner Christmas Eve.  Part of the cast is a brother who is deaf and gay and in long term relationship with a man who happens to be black.  They are hoping to adopt a child.  A question is asked concerning what race they hope the child will be and they answer correctly, we just want to love a child we don’t care about the color of skin.

Meredith jumps in and asks if they are concerned about the issue of nurture versus nature.  What unfolds is a series of exchanges each one more awkward than the next.  Ultimately she flees the table after heated words are exchanged.  Meredith feels she is just being sensitive and the Stone family feels she is reducing people they love to less than human.  Yet, as they story unfolds it becomes clear that the Stone family had seen her in just that way.  Not because she was a woman, or the color of her skin, or her status in life: they saw her as other because of what they assumed about her politics, her ideas, her definitions.  They saw her as a kind of person to be hated.

Now this is a Christmas movie so it needs to work out.  And I want to say this is why I bought a copy of it, because they did work it out.  Kathy has asked me not to reveal the ending, suggesting the unfolding is lovely and to spoil it would be wrong.  Suffice it to say though, it occurs when one of the Stone family members sees Meredith as a good person, even someone to be loved.  That it is not her would-be fiancé is a twist in the plot.  It is one of the brothers who turns to her and says, “Meredith, you have a freak flag, you just don’t fly it.”  Which translated means, “you’re a good person, but you don’t know who you are, so you can’t be true to yourself.”

When Paul is writing to the church at Rome and making these sweeping claims about the Gentiles, he is in essence saying, the people you hate, people you feel very justified in hating, they are good people, they are people for whom Christ has come to save and we need to tell them that.  And that was really not a popular idea.  Remember, Paul is selling, but few are buying.  Paul says in his letters we are all one and that includes the Gentiles. But what it should say after that is, “and the people scoffed.” 

As is sometimes the case, none of this may not apply to you as an individual.  This whole notion of holding people in disdain may not be the case, but just in case, you have a member of your extended family for whom the idea of saying, “you’re a good person” (without reservation or caveat) would be tough, keep this passage in mind as you gather for the holidays. 

There are people we feel justified not liking, even maintaining disdain.  In fact we might just feel it is our duty to not like them.  (Okay.)  Now here is a radical thought: what if you’re not the first, but what if you stop doing that?  What if you just stop that.  You’re not a prophet.  Be an image of love not disdain.  This might sound challenging, but it’s not.  We just convince ourselves it is.

I have one more thought.  This one I think is much more difficult so you might want to start with a wily brother-in-law or a daughter-in-law who is less than what we had hoped for.  The challenging one is to stop the culture of hate; to step outside of the way we are hurling insults at each others way of thinking, way of voting, way of looking at life.  I’ve come to believe: everyone has a freak flag; we’re just not that great at flying it.

Advent is supposed to be a time where the world is changed.  My Advent dream is that we would behold a vision.  And the vision is this: those closet communists who would ruin our economy with their entitlements and equal opportunity to burn the flag and take God out of the pledge are just as good as the anti-abortion, bible thumpers who want to oppress everybody.  They are just as good; they are all sinners in the hand of God, pilgrims struggling along the path.  Red and blue: both people we need to love, not just endure or tolerate, but love.  Makes you stop for a moment doesn’t it?  Some of you are saying, wait a minute.  And that is hate. 

If we love them are we not affirming them?  We can gussy it up and call it common sense or being right, but when you ridicule and disdain and treat people as other, as something more than just less, but a different breed, a kind of infection that must be stopped, that is hate.  That is what Paul was trying to confront with saying “and the Gentiles”.  We are in “and the Gentiles”; for us and them.  And he didn’t make a lot of friends with this message, this gospel.

Changing a culture is not an easy call.  I know that.  That is why I said, start with a member of your own family who has not earned your respect, who has been less than what you want, and treat them as a beloved.  Break past the thinly veiled contempt and just love ‘em.  Then, move on.  Go further.  When you speak of the other group or side, whatever that happens to be, don’t use hateful language, don’t speak with disdain.  Don’t do it.  We are living in a culture that feels very justified in hating people who do not agree with us.  You are the church and you need to be different, to be a light unto the Gentiles as it were. 

Advent is not a time to play small.  Listen to all the disdain that parades as opinion and be other.  Be other than those who feel right in hate.  Then we are a light shining, calling. I believe in you.  You can do it.  Amen.