And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers which stood afar off. And they lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” And when he saw them, he said unto them, “Go show yourselves unto the priests.” And it came to pass, as they went, they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answered, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give to glory to God, save this foreigner.” Luke 17: 12-18

On this Thanksgiving Day, this gospel, from the book of Luke, was read at my Church’s Mass. It struck me, on this particular day, as to how it spoke to the mean-spiritedness that pervades American society in so many ways.

While all of us (even native Americans) are the descendants of people who traveled to this continent, of late there has been resurgence of efforts to shut out those who seek to come here today. Yet who is more thankful to be an American than those who have sacrificed all to come here? I think of the undocumented worker from Central America fleeing poverty, the Sudanese refuge fleeing the genocide of Darfur, the gay man escaping from the capital punishment that is his fate in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, and I can think of no one who is more thankful to be in America today than they are. Like the Samaritan – a foreigner – who was the only one who was truly grateful for the gift of salvation, these folk are the ones who are truly thankful this day.

Yet so-called “Christians” and “patriotic Americans” seek to exclude these foreigners now, to deny them the very things which drew our ancestors to America — economic opportunity, freedom from oppression, the right to live their lives as they choose. On this Thanksgiving Day, these “Christians” and “patriotic Americans” should give thanks that, when their ancestors sought to come to America, the narrow-minded people of that time failed in their quest to exclude them. But that level of self-awareness is beyond those people, who are all too like the nine lepers who, once healed, went on their way with nary a thanks for their blessings and seemingly no sense of how lucky they have been.
The gospel of the Lord.

Kevin Says... | 2 Comments »

You see all kinds of cool things on the New York City subways.  Once I sat next to an empty seat – empty that is, but for the puddle of blood that filled it (why did I sit there? Well, there were only two empty seats, and you didn’t think I’d take the one with the blood in it, did you?)  Last Friday, I saw a man shaving on the train.  Not with an electric razor, either: with a straight razor, with no shaving cream.  Now that’s a real man.

This morning, I sat opposite a woman who had a canvas bag that said PRAISE THE LORD!  in big letters.  She was reading and I was curious to see what such a publicly devout person was reading so, being a good New Yorker, I leaned over to see what the title of her book was.  On the spine, it read: The DaVinci Code.

I was struck by the contrast: here was a woman who seemed to be one of profound, presumably fundamentalist faith, yet she was reading a book that that suggested her Savior was married and had kids.  Yet she seemed totally fine with it (quite engrossed actually).  Her faith was not threatened at all.  And I thought: You go, girl.

I couldn’t help but think of a conversation I’d had last Friday with a young man from a fundamentalist family, who told me his church had banned them all from seeing Brokeback Mountain.  I found this odd: if their faith was so strong, could one movie really undo it?  If sitting in the dark for two hours could demolish your faith, how strong was it in the first place?

To protect themselves against such threat, the Southern Baptists Convention in my home state of North Carolina voted last week to not only excommunicate gay people but to also expel any congregation that welcomed gay people.  I wrote an op-ed about this for the Charlotte Observer (“Baptists again side with cause of exclusion: How long before N.C.’s Southern Baptists apologize this time?” http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/16050821.htm) in which I pointed out the eerie similarity between this act and the founding act of our denomination, i.e. the separation of the Southern Baptist Convention from mainstream American Baptists in the 1840’s as Southern Baptists wanted to keep their slaves and needed to avoid the taint of Northern abolitionists who also belonged to the Baptist Church (an act which they apologized for in 1996, oh, about a century and a half after it mattered).  History repeats itself, as Marx once said: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

So what’s behind the farce in North Carolina?  In my opinion, a lack of faith.  People secure in their faith, like my friend with her PRAISE THE LORD! bag, aren’t threatened by others with different views.  They may in fact be curious to understand them, knowing that associating with people who hold other beliefs (or watching movies depicting them) isn’t going to do any damage to their own.  They don’t operate out of a place of fear, as the N.C. Southern Baptist Convention does.  They are secure in their faith and thus aren’t run by their fears.  The N.C. Baptists simply showed how weak their faith is by their act of exclusion last week.  How pathetic.

Kevin Says... | No Comments »