Unsettling Tenderness

Acts 10

In my last pastor job before I came to Luther Memorial, I coordinated a young adult international service program through the Lutheran church that was based in Mexico City.  In this position, we lived in Mexico City and we placed young adults in social service agencies for a year of service. We were always on the lookout for new placement sites and over time, we formed relationships with a couple of great shelters for migrants where our volunteers served.  

Given the nature of things around 10-12 years ago, immigration was becoming an increasingly contentious and politicized issue.  The more our young adult volunteers learned about it, the more fired up they became; and their newsletters home to their sponsoring communities began to show it.  Not all the sponsoring congregations shared the same passion for immigration that these young people did.  In some cases, both sides dug their heels in.  

Each winter, Omar and I traveled with the young adults up from Mexico City to the US/Mexico border for a week long retreat.  We stayed in Tucson and spent time on both sides of the border learning about things.  We met with non-profits, churches, and public defenders.  We also met with the DEA and the Border Patrol.  Before meeting with a group we might be quite ideologically different from, and particularly when we went into the actual the border patrol station and detention facility, I would gather my group around me and say, “Look, you may walk into this place with strong opinions, but we are here to learn and we must be open-hearted and respectful.” And they were. (if you know me, you’ll know I was saying this as much to myself as to them).

On one hand, the border patrol agents were what our group expected: they supported the policies and procedures that our young people thought were oppressive.  But what always caught our group off guard was realizing that many of these folks were often profoundly compassionate and had saved more lives of people dying of dehydration than any of the rest of us and that they had all recovered countless bodies in the desert.  

What also caught our group off guard was that these agents were folks with families, making an honest living, coaching sports, going to PTA meetings. One year, I remember, we met with an agent who was single mom who told me, as we walked through the parking lot, that she had a teenage child who was struggling in high school.

Sure, we learned about border policies (and believe me, it was always eye-opining), but it was also a structured encounter with someone with a very different perspective and we would often leave with this unsettling tenderness for the person we had been with. 

Last week, I shared with you the story of the ancient pilgrimage ritual that people would participate in where they would climb the steps to the temple complex in Jerusalem and, after entering the doors, turn to the right and begin to process around the entire temple complex counterclockwise. 

After processing around, folks would then exit close to where they had entered.    Last week, I told you about the twist in the ancient writings: that if you happened to be a person who was suffering: a person who had experienced something awful, someone who was brokenhearted or in pain, you would walk through those same porticos, but instead of turning right with the masses, you would turn to the left and then process. As you walked against the current, people would meet you; and each person who passed would ask, “what happened?” And you would tell them of your worry or your pain and then receive their comfort and specifically, their blessing. 

There is another group mentioned in that text. Another group that must turn to the left with the broken and bereaved, the lost and the lonely, and walk against the current. That was the socially ostracized.  

Our world is so different to the world 2,000 ago.  At the time this Mishna was written, the “ostracized person” was considered to have endangered the community in word or action. They had to physically distance themselves from the rest of the community by 6 feet. Sharon Braus suggests that a contemporary analogy might be a person who is incarcerated here in our society today.

If you can let your imaginations zoom out a little to consider this gap between yourself and some other person who might be on the other side of The Breach: Some of us here in this room have experienced the cracking of our times. Maybe all of us have. we know folks who have different perspectives on science. People who have fractured with family members or friends.  In our congregation here, we have some level of ideological diversity and some occasional irritation with each other around a few things that are political, but we find our forward.  Sometimes, we even talk about it.  

But zooming out to folks who aren’t quite as homogenous we typically are, more and more, as we dig our heels in we see folks with different positions as not only impossible to understand but morally repugnant.

We do not want to bump into each other in the sacred circle.  Let alone bestow any unnecessary blessings…

First, we mark a boundary around how we’re different. Next, folks become ideological foes. Then, folks become existential threats. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, centuries ago, that “It's not hard work to distance yourself from another person. The real work is to draw him close and lift him up.”

In our bible reading from Acts today, you had two people, Peter and Cornelius, who were very different people. Peter was a Jew, from the working class, and observed certain customs and rituals that defined him.  He was a Jesus follower and had been in that room on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit had rushed in like a mighty wind and ignited tongues of fire on the heads of those gathered.

Cornelius was a gentile. He was a man of financial means, a military captain, and a man of great power and wealth. The two men were—by many measures—profoundly different.  

Peter has long standing boundaries that have been internalized since childhood. Yes, there are the dietary laws, customs, purity rituals, But there are also ideological differences.  Peter has experienced the ruling class to be oppressive.  Cornelius, however, has benefited from his status in society.  Though these two men are geographically close, in many ways, Peter and Cornelius are worlds apart and probably each comfortable in their group. On one hand, this isn’t a bad thing. We find meaning together and purpose, and a sense of belonging in our groups. But, the stronger those internal bonds are, the weaker the bonds can be to folks outside of our group.  

In the case of Peter and Cornelius, God steps in and orchestrates this meeting between them.  The bible story doesn’t detail their conversation but something in them certainly shifts and Peter famously realizes and then says that, “God shows no partiality.”  

As the story concludes, the Holy Spirit rushes in again and falls upon Cornelius and all the and the church begins to burst out into the world.  

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In that temple processional ritual, The ancients had a ritualized way of encountering one another that illustrated that we are bound up together.  All the folks entered into that holy temple. Everyone entered at the same gate.  Everyone circled.  And when people encountered each other, even those who ostracized or deemed to be a social hazard, people asked them, “what happened?” And all of them were blessed.

When I stood with my young adults in the parking lot out side of the border patrol station in the blazing Arizona sun, I said to them, “You can have your opinions. You can have your feelings. I’m not asking you to surrender them or even compromise. But we are here to learn. We are safe here and we are here to be curious.”

Many folks have said that curiosity is the birthplace of compassion. Research has shown that our stereotypes about people actually reinforce neural patterns in our brains.  We have these engrained neural paths in our thinking. When you are genuinely curious about a person you may hold a deep stereotype about that is like neurological off-roading in our brain because you are pushing off of those established pathways. Sharon Braus says that we “Need a spiritual rewiring that helps us see one another in our pain, fear, joy, yearning, humanity.”  

Thinking of that ancient pilgrimage circle, one rabbi reflected that “the hearts of the ostracized are blessed so that that he hearts of the community might open to them. So that the community might understand their anguish.”  So that everyone might understand.

This kind of vulnerable, open-hearted engagement is counter instinctual.  We are actually not wired this way. I’m not saying that each adversary is righteous.  But I am saying that we long for healed hearts and a healed world and that means there must be space for all of us. As St. Peter said there, face to face with his foe, Cornelius, “God shows no partiality.” God loves us all.

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Omar and I took groups back to that border station several times over the years we lived in Mexico.  By the time our last year rolled around and I reached out for a meeting for my group, I was told that they were no longer making appointments with community groups. And no, we were no longer welcome to visit the border patrol station.

It is not easy to find this kind of encounter. Maybe it’s easier for you than it is for me. Ideological bubbles are real, though we can challenge our stereotypes. We can also subtly train heart muscles, we can quietly fine-tune our ability to love, through small habits and practices that we repeat. We can train ourselves to see holiness in the random people we encounter in a day. In the grocery store, at the stoplight. We can open ourselves to curiosity and seek to learn about folks who are different from us. 

The rebuilding of our broken world—in fact, the redemption of creation--begins between you and me. Between you and the person bumping into you in the circle. It happens one relationship at a time. And, there is room for all of us.