“Just as I have loved you, you also should
love one another.” (John 13:34)
The other day I found myself in the Burger
King in the Philadelphia Mills parking lot. I’d been in my church office down
the street all day, handled some stuff, taught my Confirmation class, and I had
an hour to kill before Praise Team rehearsal. I also had a coupon for a small
bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a soda for three bucks. Now you can’t beat that
with a stick, can you?
So I’m standing in line at the Burger King
and I start to feel kind of weird and out of place. Most of the staff and most
of the customers were African American. Everybody was polite enough, waiting
their turn in line, but I was struck with the uncommon feeling that I was now a
minority. I looked at the other patrons and realized how very little I knew or
understood about them. There were, of course, some white folks in the place
too, but even they made me feel somewhat estranged. They were the kind of
people one meets in Northeast Philly—hard-living, working-class guys who keep
their ball caps on while they eat. A woman got in line next to me. She was dressed
in a sweat suit, about 40 lbs. overweight, reeking of cigarette smoke, and “tatted-up”
with more ink than the press room at the Philadelphia
Inquirer. A young mom came in, obviously irritated with her two blubbering
toddlers, and making no effort to hide her displeasure.
And there I was, a middle-class, suburban
white boy with two masters degrees suddenly recognizing what an awful snob I
was. Truth be told, if I were to follow any of these Burger King patrons to their jobs, I’d be as useless to them as
a Speedo in a blizzard. I may be an okay theologian, but I have no practical
skills whatsoever. I have very little experience working with my hands, dealing
with the public, or managing children. If this Burger King were suddenly lifted
up by a tornado, dropped on a deserted island, and we all had to band together for
survival, I would be the most expendable person there.
And what the Holy Spirit told me in that
moment was, “Look around, Griff. You’re called to love these people. You don’t have to understand them, and they don’t
have to understand you. But you have to love them.”
In the Gospel lesson this Sunday (John
13:31-35), Jesus exhorts his followers to love as he has loved them. This
exhortation comes right after he’s washed their feet on the night of his betrayal.
That was a pretty important lesson in love. Jesus—the teacher—did the work of a
slave or a child for his disciples. With that action, he tore apart the barrier
of class and position. Real, honest love can’t know distinction of persons.
Just to make sure we got the point, the
folks who cooked up the Revised Common Lectionary yoked this Gospel reading with
a passage from Acts (Acts 11:1-18) in which Peter gets a divine message to
spread the Good News to uncircumcised gentiles. “The Spirit told me to go with
them, and not to make distinction between them and us,” he says in verse 12.
Unfortunately, making distinctions is
something we sinful humans are particularly adroit at doing. We keep hearing in
the news about the division here in the United States—the gap between rich and
poor, gender inequality, racial division, and (topping the list) political
polarization.
So okay. We all know this is wrong, but I wonder
if we only know it in a theoretical sense. I don’t think any one of us is going
to go out and change the world this week, but I’d like to propose a little
exercise. Here it is: Go to the mall this week. Or to a fast food place. Sit in
the waiting room at your doctor’s office. Ride the bus to work. Go grocery
shopping. Look around at the faces you see. Really look at people. Then remind yourself that you are a Christian, and
that you are called to love and serve these strangers.
(But try not to creep them out when you’re
doing it.)
Let me know how it makes you feel, okay?
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