I ran across this strange story years ago about two men who worked together in a warehouse. At noon they sat on the dock to eat their lunch and every day Joe would open his lunchbox, take out a sandwich, and look to see what kind it was. If it was peanut butter, he would throw it away in disgust. If it wasn’t peanut butter, he would eat it. After years of watching this ritual, his co-worker Ed, asked one day, "Joe, how long have you been married?"
"Twelve years," Joe said.
"You've been married twelve years, and your wife still doesn't know you don't like peanut butter?"
"You leave my wife out of this.” Joe said, “I make my sandwiches myself."
I know it seems foolish unless, of course, you have tried to lose weight or quit smoking or drinking, but what is important is that Joe accepts responsibility for his own behavior. There are some Biblical mandates that we dismiss as cultural practices without divine basis, for example women not being allowed to speak in church or having to have their heads covered. Other Biblical mandates seem to come from “the living and enduring word of God,” to use Peter’s words.
Two thousand years ago, Peter accused a crowd of people assembled in Jerusalem of having Jesus killed. They weren’t the people who sat in the courts and passed judgement or drove nails in Jesus' hands and feet. Their religious and political leaders were responsible for making the decision and employing or ordering others to carry it out. Any American would have said, as we frequently see on bumper stickers, “Don’t blame I me. I didn’t vote for him.”
But, these Hebrew people believed that every individual’s action or inaction impacted the rest of the community; as well as their ancestors and their descendants. To their way of thinking, if Jesus was innocent, they were guilty of the death of an innocent man. Their only question of Peter was, "What should we do?"
We don’t usually assume responsibility for the behavior of anyone but ourselves. President Clinton’s sexual immorality had nothing to do with us, unless it is somehow connected with the fact that sex is the predominant entertainment on the media and used to sell virtually everything we buy; neither of which would be so if we actually practiced the morality to which we give lip service. I do not want to accept responsibility for President Bush’s decisions which have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. I began opposing a violent response the day after 9/11, but the only thing which may be more dominant than sex in the entertainment industry, news shows included, is violence. Perhaps we should be taking ownership of these actions of our leaders and asking, what should we do.
This is Native American Awareness Sunday. We have included prayers and songs from Native Americans who share our faith. The awareness we are hoping for is of the contributions and the continued hardships of the people that our ancestors attacked and drove off the land they occupied land because our ancestors wanted it. We didn’t exterminate them, but we put them on reservations, largely on land we deemed useless and made treaties we have frequently ignored. Our history is full of cruelty and injustice. What should we do?
It seems that we are still in no mood to correct past wrongs. In September of last year, the United Nations passed a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, emphasizing their rights to maintain and strengthen their institutions, cultures and traditions; as well as their right to self-determination. The Declaration was approved by 143 countries and rejected by four; the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.1
The disciple Peter put into context the tragic and barbaric strategy that had been cooked up in the boardrooms of his day. He told the good people of Jerusalem about what Jesus of Nazareth, his old best friend, meant to him. He told them about the deep, human goodness of the man Jesus, about the way he had resurrected lives, the way he had helped people see the priceless treasure inside themselves and each other. "He was the bravest, kindest, most truthful brother we ever had," he told them. "And you know that I am telling you the truth; for you yourselves saw what this man did."
But then, he added, "Knowing the kind of man he was, you killed him. You used the hands of those outside the law (gentiles)." But you are murderers," But Peter told them, “God raised him up..." The one you killed God has vindicated. God has stood beside the one you rejected.
Precisely because we have come to think of Jesus’ resurrection as God’s “YES” to the life he lived, we tend to forget that it was also God's "NO!" to what ended his life. The resurrection was God's indictment of the kind of human attitudes and behaviors that brought about his death, as well as God’s acquittal of those who serve. We need to take ownership of our collective behavior and then we can do what Peter told them to do; “Repent.” God will never tolerate, never condone - the inhuman things we do to one another. But God will never forget our acts of love and mercy, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said in accepting the Nobel Peace prize in 1964. Not believing that the arms race and violence were inevitable, he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”2
Our justification of death as any kind of an answer starts with the rejection or dehumanization of people because we think they are different or their sins are different than our own. But like the disciples walking to Emmaus, we need to learn to recognize Jesus in others. It can be in someone that you least suspect. The members of a church volunteered to fix up one of those broken down boarded-up homes with weeds growing high in the yard. Broken wine and beer bottles could be seen on the corner. The house was home to a young Hispanic mother and her two small children.
The shinglers had reached the chimney. They knew it needed metal flashing around its base, but they had no idea how to do it. While they were trying to figure out what to do, the guy working on the rotted bathroom floor was cutting new flooring at the table saw outside. Two men were watching him and when he finished his cut, they stumbled over to him, obviously drunk.
When they asked if they could get a job, he explained that they were all volunteers just trying to help this family. They understood, so he turned back to the saw, but when he looked up again, one of the fellows was heading up the ladder to the roof. He was about to call him back down, but then pictured him turning and falling off the ladder, so he let him go.
At the end of the day, he heard one of the roofers saying, "You wouldn't have believed it! We were working on the roof and knew we had to put flashing around the chimney, but none of us knew what to do. Just then we realized there was a drunk guy standing on the roof with us. Said he was looking for work, but we explained that we were all working for nothing. He stood there a moment and looked at the chimney and said, 'Seems like you are having a bit of a problem.' We told him we didn’t know what to do next, and he said, 'Well I am a professional roofer, maybe I can help.'"
He did. This drunk professional out-of-work roofer flashed the chimney and then explained how to finish and cap the roof. Once he was satisfied that we knew how to finish the job, he turned around and we all watched as he cautiously climbed down. Then he carefully ambled down the street and disappeared around the corner. 3
1. Haider Rizvi, “RIGHTS: Native Peoples Score Historic Political Victory,” UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 (IPS), http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39258.
2. From Martin Luther King, Jr.s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Dec. 10, 1964 in Oslo, Norway, in James Walters, “Wilderness Training for Dreamers,” Focus, Spring, 2008, p. 25.
3. Contributed via the Desperate Preacher’s Site from Nail-Bender in NC