Sermon -- Pride Sunday, June 21 , 2020
/Galatians 3:26-29x
By: Rev. Gene Dyszlewski
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul is telling us that a person’s essential worth and value are intrinsic to their being human and cannot be measured by physical features or social status. Of necessity, as physical being I have a body but the actual characteristics of that body are random occurrences of no relevance to my essential value and worth as a human being.
Doesn’t matter if I am tall or short, male or female or somewhere in between. Of necessity, I have been born into a family but it is unimportant if that was a privileged Roman family or a Greek family or a Jewish family or an American family.
While the physical and social characteristics allow us to distinguish one person from another, on a genetic level all humans are 99.9% alike. Less than one-tenth of one percent of my genetic material is unique to me. While these randomly occurring differences help us to tell each other apart, we sometimes misuse them to make judgments about each other’s worth and value as human beings. Paul was clearly arguing against this.
Difference, a ubiquitous quality of humanity is in itself a neutral, neither good nor bad. However, dealing with difference is perhaps the greatest moral challenge or our time. It is actually more a case of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Members of my family are different but those differences are something I am familiar with. I have a tendency to consider what I a familiar with as normal. The problem with that is if I become familiar with something that is objectively harmful, I may see it as normal because of familiarity.
An example of this is someone who grows up in a family with domestic violence. They will often expect violence to be a normative part of life. While it may be shocking to hear that violence can be normalized by people because of their childhood experience, there is ample evidence in the behavioral science literature to document this phenomenon. Truth is we all create a framework for our lives that comes from our lived experience.
Our worldview or life framework is a necessary and useful tool for going through life. It helps me get through the day with ease and safety. I recognize that the coffee, the cornflakes and the milk are safe to eat for breakfast; I don’t have the slightest concern. Could you imagine how exhausting it would be if we had to question every thing we encounter every day, It is often said that we humans are creatures of habit. Absolutely! It is what allows us to go through the day efficiently.
So, think of our beliefs as thought habits. Many of our beliefs become so familiar that they sink into our subconscious to such a degree that we don’t notice them or even bother to question them. They become the foundational assumptions, the underlying framework of our interpretation of the world. They become the horizon of our worldview. The problem is that my assumptions are grounded in experiences, thoughts and behaviors that have also provided me with some inaccurate information. Thus, I am relying on mistaken beliefs.
There is another limitation that I have to consider. My primitive reaction to difference is baked in. We have to keep in mind that we are creatures of evolution. While we have been around as a species for over 240 thousand years, we have a rudimentary alert system to the unfamiliar that was a survival mechanism for our prehistoric days. It apparently was quite effective for our ancestors but we no longer live in caves. Nevertheless, when I encounter something or someone who is different in an unfamiliar way, I get anxious.
Over the thousands of years civilization happened. Civilization is the ability for humans to live in community in harmony. This does not mean homogenized culture, wherein everything is the same. I means living with difference. It means being able to exchange the fear of threat with curiosity when encountering difference. Even further it means looking for the gift that people who are different have to offer to enrich our lives and the life of the community.
So, if many of the assumptions I have about the world are so engrained that I may not even notice them, and if having an alert reaction to difference is hardwired into my brain, what do I do? Well, we are not determined by either our assumptions about life and we are not determined by biology. The biological alert response is a vestigial evolutionary reaction. If you go out into the backyard and you see a sabertooth tiger lurking among the day lilies, feel free to panic. Otherwise, chill.
This alert reaction is generally not as useful in a modern civilized society. Brain scientists tell us that we are more likely to respond with compassion to people who are like us and we respond less compassionately to people who are different. This was confirmed in laboratory studies that included people of different races. It is also found to be true in laboratory studies of how Red Sox fans react to Yankee fans and the other way around. How useful is that? Fortunately, there is a lot of research literature that confirms that we can change this. We are not determined by biology.
So, what do I do about this. First, I can accept with humility that I have mistaken beliefs…not I may have but I definitely have mistaken beliefs. What I am familiar with is not the objective norm for all humanity. In addition, I tend to oversimplify everything. In a world where things generally occur on a continuum, I make things binary. For example, race is not simply a matter of black or white. There are many shades of color and many people with mixed parentage. In the first place race is not a biologically defined category.
There are a number of accidental characteristics of humanity that occur on a spectrum. Gender is not binary. It occurs on a continuum of male to female with gradations in between. Sexual orientation occurs on a continuum.
In today’s world we are exposed to new things, especially new things about people, quite frequently. We don’t have to understand it all; nor do we have to agree with the myriad of differences in the human community. You don’t have to like the Yankees to treat their fans kindly. I think the religious response to living with difference, especially living with others who are different is tolerance.
To further my point I would like to use an illustration, literally the character from Chinese script for tolerance. Chinese calligraphy is pictographic rather than phonetic. I like the pictorial message in the character for tolerance.
This is a water metaphor. The dots at the top portion of the graphic represent water. The bottom feature is a river gorge with the mouth of the river at the lower end and the cap could be seen as a damn. Clearly the damn is porous because water seeps through.
I would just like to point out that water in the East is symbolic of compassion. In this character compassion is unrestrained by the damn or the limiting conceptual framework of the person. My interpretation is the conceptual structure may be maintained but tolerance is a compassion driven response to another person, without judgment. I don’t have to agree or rethink my world to respond respectfully and compassionately to someone. We don’t have to think alike to love alike.
