In April 2005 a three-year-old girl named Eliza Jane came down with what seemed to be a cold.  Her mother took her to a pediatrician who found nothing serious.  The next week she took the girl to another doctor who thought she might have an ear infection which would clear up without antibiotics.  When Eliza Jane still felt sick a week later, her mother took her to yet another doctor who found fluid in her ear and prescribed antibiotics.

A few days later Eliza Jane’s temperature went up to 101 degrees, she started vomiting and while her mother was on the phone with a doctor, she stopped breathing.  Her mother later told the coroner that her daughter had “crumpled up like a paper doll.”

The doctors who examined Eliza acted as if she were a normal little girl.  In retrospect they should have suspected something far more serious than an ear infection.  In 1992 Eliza Jane’s mother tested positive for HIV.  Unlike the vast majority of people receiving this diagnosis the mother declined to use the antiretroviral medications that have revolutionized medical treatments for AIDS.

In fact, she became a leading activist in a group that dismisses the scientifically upheld view that HIV leads to AIDS.  Her self-published book What If I told you Everything You Thought About AIDS Was Wrong, advises HIV-positive pregnant women to avoid taking the drugs that doctors say reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to a developing fetus.  She also encourages these mothers to breastfeed their babies against the advice of researchers who have found that this passes the virus to children.  Although the mother still doesn’t believe it, the medical examiner ruled that Eliza Jane had died of AIDS.

Today we see an increasing tendency for people to inhabit parallel universes of fact.  Whether we are talking about the Iraq War, healthcare reform, abortion, education, immigration or the economy we as a society are coming to hold increasingly divergent views.

Farhad Manjoo points out that in what he calls our “post-fact society” we are beginning to argue not so much over what we should do but over what is actually happening.  Because of media fragmentation (millions of channels slanted according to the preferences of their viewers) it is possible for us to watch only the news that suits our existing prejudices.  We now can more successfully avoid information that challenges what we think we already know.  In short technological and social changes make us more impervious to the truth.

The book of Proverbs warns us not to “hate knowledge.”  “For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to [wisdom] will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster” (Proverbs 1).

We should also ask what kind of religious wisdom we consciously or unconsciously avoid, or that the current technological and social circumstances make especially hard to hear.  In scripture James compares the tongue to a bridle, a rudder which direct our lives.  He calls it a small fire that sets blazes which end up consuming whole forests (James 1).  The little things we say have huge consequences.  But what we say comes out of what we know.  So how can we know what God is doing and then what can we do to join in on it?

The short simple answer is scripture, prayer, reason, experience and fellowship within the church reveal what God is up to, that is, if we are really serious about listening, if pleasing God becomes our heart’s desire.  Today we face one of the hardest truths about reality and about God.

In an intimate moment with his closest friends Jesus asks, “Who do people say I am” (Mk. 8)?  Jesus doesn’t say this out of insecurity in a “tell me how much you admire me” sort of way.  He knows what people say about him and even what his disciples think.  This conversation is not for his sake but for theirs - and ours.  He tells them what his life reveals about God and how we are called to respond to God.  He speaks about a wisdom that is difficult for us.

We long for reassurance, acceptance, to be whole, comforted, admired and loved.  We long for something more, a kind of perfection that we obviously lack and which draws our hearts to God.  The form of God’s perfection that seems most obvious to us is God’s great power.  God brings into being and sustains all that exists – the galaxies flung out to the farthest ends of the perceivable universe and the ladybug on the altar flowers.

Perhaps it is because we perceive ourselves as unsafe, insecure or weak that we fantasize most often about God’s great power.  Or perhaps this is just a simpler picture of God.  The disciples weren’t too different from us in this.  When Peter describes Jesus as the Messiah, he has in mind a kind of benevolent king who will enforce justice with a mighty army, and finally put things right.  Peter wanted Jesus to put the good guys in control.

Instead Jesus calls into question his very picture of God.  He insists that we know the Son of God through his suffering and the way that the authorities reject him.  The reign of God, the kingdom of God does not enslave people for the sake of some greater good.  It isn’t based on a distinction between the chosen, the pure, us (as defined by our relatives, social class or nation) but it is for everyone (even the prostitutes, collaborators, snitches and criminals).  Furthermore we do not earn God’s favor but receive it as a gift.

In every generation this has been a hard lesson for the church to learn.  Even today we struggle with the radical idea that God’s love is for everyone.  In case Jesus’ instructions to deny yourself and take up your cross seem too abstract, let’s consider an example that everyone can understand from Elementary School.

Vivian Paley won a MacArthur Genius grant for her pioneering work in early childhood education.  She also taught as a kindergarten and preschool teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (founded by John Dewey).  Paley noticed that beginning in kindergarten some children have the power to limit the social experiences of their classmates.  This “ruling class” determines who is acceptable and who will be rejected.

Paley points out that while hitting and name-calling have long been forbidden by teachers in our schools, a kind of “hidden curriculum” has taken over.  It arises out of an even more damaging practice that is allowed.  She said that she began to really notice this when she realized how many times she heard children say, “No!”  “No, you have to go away.”  “No, we’re not playing with you.”

Paley felt morally compelled to address this so she tried an experiment.  She proposed to her kindergarten class that they institute a rule – “you can’t say, you can’t play.”  The kids greeted her proposal with disbelief and distrust.  They worried that it was against human nature and that this would somehow spoil their play.

To get more feedback about her idea Paley then visited all the other classes in grades 1 through 5.  She asked them if this rule was fair and if it would work.  These older kids said it might work with kindergarten kids.  But they pointed out that by the time kids got to be their advanced age they were already too mean.  These kids felt nostalgia for when they were younger and nicer.

So Paley went back to her class and talked about how it feels to be left out.  Only four of the twenty-five children in the class found the rule at all appealing, and they were the most ostracized ones.  Lisa, one of the popular girls, said that if you can’t leave someone out, how can you have friends?  “[W]hat’s the whole point of playing?”  Just in the same way people feel sad by being left out, she said that she felt sad by having to include people she didn’t want to play with.  Her classmate Angelo quietly said, “People like me.”  The class silently acknowledged the truth of this.

It only took one week for the rule to feel like it had always been in place.  The class no longer had outcasts.  As Lisa grew up and ran into her old teacher Mrs. Paley in the halls she would always ask, “how is the rule doing?”  She would then give an example of how she was currently trying to abide by it in her own life.  The last time Paley saw her she confided, “it’s still pretty hard but I know I can do it.”

That is what the gospel is all about.  It means knowing that God will judge us based on how we take risks for the sake of love.  It means depending on God, trusting God because his power is exceeded only by his love for us.  Jesus became a new kind of Messiah, he put himself between us and death, so that we could live like this.  That world which we share with Lisa is what we have to give up in return for our life as we deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus (Mk. 8).

Let’s talk about two quick and obvious examples of this, in church and society.

In our recent conversation about communion Mary Mason came up with some characteristically wonderful insights.  She was talking about how deeply she cares about the Episcopal traditions that many of us grew up with.  She loves the dignity and solemnity and familiarity of the liturgy - but at the same time she points out how these can be huge barriers to people.  When we talk together about how we can be a welcoming church we need to see the often subtle ways that we say “you can’t play.”  The vision process will challenge us to continue to be the church for the people who haven’t arrived yet and how our church campus can be more accessible to people with disabilities.

Right now our society struggles with Lisa’s issue on the largest possible scale.  On Thursday night President Obama reminded us that thirty million Americans can not get health coverage and that “[w]e are the only advanced democracy on Earth… that allows such hardships for millions of its people.”  Some of you love the president’s plan; others hate it.  But as people of prayer and action, I implore you to work toward some resolution of this crisis.  We don’t have to say to thirty million Americans that they can’t share in our good health, that they can’t play with the rest of us.  We may be afraid of the alternative, but we can trust the resources and sustaining power that God gives to us.

We began by talking about how our modern situation leads to increasingly divergent pictures of reality.  This makes it even harder for us to understand the truth of Christ’s message.  The picture of the messiah as a suffering servant rather than a conquering king comes only a little more easily to us than it did to Jesus’ first disciples.

We are not so different than children at school and their nostalgia for what they could have been if they had not already become so corrupted by the world.  Indeed if we had to depend only on ourselves we would be in trouble.

But God’s mercy is never ending.  God’s love is utterly reliable.  God delights in new things.  We go into the world not only with Christ’s knowledge about God, but with his power to transform it.

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Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 2-4.

Vivian Gussin Paley, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).  Also listen to, “The Cruelty of Children,” This American Life Episode #27 (especially the last twenty minutes.

The word “ostracize” comes from the Greek word for shell or pottery shard (ostrakon) upon which people used to vote to banish people from the city for five to ten years.

Text of Obama’s Health Care Speech to Congress, published 9 September 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/us/politics/10obama.text.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

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© Malcolm C. Young, 2009Proverbs 1:20-33

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