Wizards, Aliens, and Strangers
January 23, 2011
Leviticus 19:30-38; Matthew 25:35
So I finally managed to see the most recent Harry Potter flick last week, and thus the warning from Leviticus brought a smile to my face.
Do not seek out wizards, indeed. I paid good money to see the wizards of Hogwartz, and I figure I got my money’s worth, and, perhaps, some insights more important for us than the wizard warning.
“Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them.” I’d guess – though it’s only a guess – that this line from Leviticus is one of the passages that certain conservative Christians use to warn against giving J.K. Rowling any more business. It’s only a guess because that kind of narrow mindedness just ticks me off so I try not to delve too deeply into it. I say, give J.K. her due: she spins a good yarn.
In fact, I’d say more than that, she tells a tale enriched with some of the core values at stake in both of our passages this morning.
From the early days of the series, Rowling’s story gives voice to clear concern for outsiders, for the strangers and aliens. As Professor Dumbledore says in The Goblet of Fire, “You place too much importance … on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”
I suppose it’s all too easy to hear in that single line what certain so-called Christians would fear in such a story. After all, we live in an age when, on the day of his inauguration, the governor of Alabama says it quite clearly:
“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”
In other words, if you’ve not been washed in the purifying blood of the lamb, then you are not my brother or sister. There is so much not to like in that, beginning with the basic civics question of just what office this guy was being inaugurated to last week? Is he the governor of Alabama or theologian in chief? I can’t speak to his governance, but his theology raises all kinds of questions.
Such views, at their worst, reflect a vision of the church as keepers of purity and as guardians of some secret truth revealed only to those worthy of a seat at the table of God’s power. But is that the role of the church? To guard this simple table to keep out the unworthy? That is a theology, but it is not one that the Jesus of Matthew 25 would recognize.
I am always bothered and deeply saddened by the fundamental lack of imagination on display in such comments, whether they come from small-minded politicians or from small-minded wizards.
To be generous to the governor, one could hear in his statement a recognition that followers of Jesus are bound together in a specific, particular way, and thus we are stuck with one another whether we like it or not. In other words, the governor is my brother in Christ whether or not he or I like it, so we are bound together. At our very best – our seldom-achieved very best – the church can be a light to the nation by showing how we can live together in peace and affection, in genuine love, even when we disagree.
Now I’m far from certain that the governor had that in mind, but it doesn’t really matter. Either way, in putting it out there as he did, his statement reflects a profoundly limited theological imagination that we ought to question. For the sake of this morning, I’d argue that it is challenged by the Jesus described in Matthew 25, and, as it turns out, by Professor Dumbledore as well.
Now I didn’t study at Hogwortz Academy, so I’m not conversant with the sacred texts that guided Dumbledore. But I did go to seminary, so I do know the very first thing that we learn about God in our sacred texts. Go back to the first line: in the beginning, when God was creating …. God creates! It’s what God does. It’s who God is. All of scripture points to the relentlessly creative force of the divine who reveals herself to Moses as the one who will be who he will be.
Notice what I did there with gender? God will be who God will be – engendered or beyond gender, spirit, incarnate – God will be who God will be.
As such, God is always about to do a new thing, or is already about doing it. The entirety of scripture attests to this whether it’s freeing the Israelites from Pharaoh or dwelling completely in Jesus, the Christ. God will be who God will be.
Moreover, we learn from the beginning that we are created in the image of this creative God, and therefore we must also be creative.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing us today, as Christians, as citizens, comes in learning again how to be creative, how to think creatively, how to live creatively, how to see the world creatively, how to see one another creatively. The real problem with the governor of Alabama – to pick on his example again – is that he is not creative enough to see strangers as sisters and brothers unless they see Jesus the same way he does.
What’s at stake is who’s in, who’s out, and how we make those distinctions. It was the same for Harry Potter. Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, put it this way early on in the series:
“I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you? They’re just not the same, they’ve never been brought up to know our ways” (from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone).
But seeing others differently is precisely the move that Jesus made. More than that, even, in the famous passage from the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus has the imagination to see strangers as himself, and to insist that his followers treat the least of these – the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners, the outcast, the widows and orphans – as they would treat him.
It’s a sentiment that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, would understand. “If you want to know what a man is like,” he said, “take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (also from The Goblet of Fire). We are measured best, he seems to suggest, by how we treat the least of these.
I think Jesus would agree with that. Moreover, in the Matthew text, Jesus does not put up any barriers based on belief either. Thus it is up to us, in our creativity, to extend the list of those we ought to treat as if they were Jesus: the foreigners, sexual minorities, the poor be they Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Jew, nonbeliever. Whatever we do to them, the least of these who, Jesus says, “are members of my family,” we do to Jesus.
As followers of Jesus, we like to think we know how we’d treat Jesus. We’d welcome him in, and make sure he had a seat at the table. Well, as followers of Jesus that is how we’re called to treat everyone we meet, wherever and whenever we meet them: at the grocery store, in the office, at school, at the 7-11, on Facebook, in the comments section of our favorite blog, in traffic, in staff meetings with disagreeable colleagues, in the governor’s mansion, at the White House, at the little shack way up at the end of the holler. Moreover, it is how we are called to treat those whom the broader culture teaches us to think of as our enemies.
All of which means, also, that as a follower of Jesus I am called to treat the governor of Alabama just as I would treat Jesus. In other words, it means that we are called to treat those with whom we disagree just as we would treat Jesus.
This does not mean that we are called to agree with them, or to sit by silently when they say harmful or hateful things, but it does mean that we are called to be loving in our response to them, in our opposition to them. All too often, this is where our creativity fails us. All too often, this is when we need a wizard to help us out.
It would be nice, sometimes, to have a magic wand. But out there at the end of our creativity and at the edge of the magical is where we ultimately have to part company with Harry and his friends. We part as friends, entertained, and maybe even a bit inspired by their adventures, and we continue on here in the real world without a wizard.
We have, instead, a God who is creative enough to not need magic. We have a God creative enough to live in and through the life of a carpenter’s kid, and show us through that singular life, what it means to be children of God. We have a God, then, who chooses to work through folks like us – indeed, to work through us to fulfill the Divine vision of a world in which we learn to treat one another as fellow creatures sprung from the mind of the same Creator, as children of the same God, as sisters and brothers. Amen.
Leviticus 19:30-38; Matthew 25:35
So I finally managed to see the most recent Harry Potter flick last week, and thus the warning from Leviticus brought a smile to my face.
Do not seek out wizards, indeed. I paid good money to see the wizards of Hogwartz, and I figure I got my money’s worth, and, perhaps, some insights more important for us than the wizard warning.
“Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them.” I’d guess – though it’s only a guess – that this line from Leviticus is one of the passages that certain conservative Christians use to warn against giving J.K. Rowling any more business. It’s only a guess because that kind of narrow mindedness just ticks me off so I try not to delve too deeply into it. I say, give J.K. her due: she spins a good yarn.
In fact, I’d say more than that, she tells a tale enriched with some of the core values at stake in both of our passages this morning.
From the early days of the series, Rowling’s story gives voice to clear concern for outsiders, for the strangers and aliens. As Professor Dumbledore says in The Goblet of Fire, “You place too much importance … on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”
I suppose it’s all too easy to hear in that single line what certain so-called Christians would fear in such a story. After all, we live in an age when, on the day of his inauguration, the governor of Alabama says it quite clearly:
“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”
In other words, if you’ve not been washed in the purifying blood of the lamb, then you are not my brother or sister. There is so much not to like in that, beginning with the basic civics question of just what office this guy was being inaugurated to last week? Is he the governor of Alabama or theologian in chief? I can’t speak to his governance, but his theology raises all kinds of questions.
Such views, at their worst, reflect a vision of the church as keepers of purity and as guardians of some secret truth revealed only to those worthy of a seat at the table of God’s power. But is that the role of the church? To guard this simple table to keep out the unworthy? That is a theology, but it is not one that the Jesus of Matthew 25 would recognize.
I am always bothered and deeply saddened by the fundamental lack of imagination on display in such comments, whether they come from small-minded politicians or from small-minded wizards.
To be generous to the governor, one could hear in his statement a recognition that followers of Jesus are bound together in a specific, particular way, and thus we are stuck with one another whether we like it or not. In other words, the governor is my brother in Christ whether or not he or I like it, so we are bound together. At our very best – our seldom-achieved very best – the church can be a light to the nation by showing how we can live together in peace and affection, in genuine love, even when we disagree.
Now I’m far from certain that the governor had that in mind, but it doesn’t really matter. Either way, in putting it out there as he did, his statement reflects a profoundly limited theological imagination that we ought to question. For the sake of this morning, I’d argue that it is challenged by the Jesus described in Matthew 25, and, as it turns out, by Professor Dumbledore as well.
Now I didn’t study at Hogwortz Academy, so I’m not conversant with the sacred texts that guided Dumbledore. But I did go to seminary, so I do know the very first thing that we learn about God in our sacred texts. Go back to the first line: in the beginning, when God was creating …. God creates! It’s what God does. It’s who God is. All of scripture points to the relentlessly creative force of the divine who reveals herself to Moses as the one who will be who he will be.
Notice what I did there with gender? God will be who God will be – engendered or beyond gender, spirit, incarnate – God will be who God will be.
As such, God is always about to do a new thing, or is already about doing it. The entirety of scripture attests to this whether it’s freeing the Israelites from Pharaoh or dwelling completely in Jesus, the Christ. God will be who God will be.
Moreover, we learn from the beginning that we are created in the image of this creative God, and therefore we must also be creative.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing us today, as Christians, as citizens, comes in learning again how to be creative, how to think creatively, how to live creatively, how to see the world creatively, how to see one another creatively. The real problem with the governor of Alabama – to pick on his example again – is that he is not creative enough to see strangers as sisters and brothers unless they see Jesus the same way he does.
What’s at stake is who’s in, who’s out, and how we make those distinctions. It was the same for Harry Potter. Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, put it this way early on in the series:
“I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you? They’re just not the same, they’ve never been brought up to know our ways” (from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone).
But seeing others differently is precisely the move that Jesus made. More than that, even, in the famous passage from the 25th chapter of Matthew, Jesus has the imagination to see strangers as himself, and to insist that his followers treat the least of these – the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners, the outcast, the widows and orphans – as they would treat him.
It’s a sentiment that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, would understand. “If you want to know what a man is like,” he said, “take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (also from The Goblet of Fire). We are measured best, he seems to suggest, by how we treat the least of these.
I think Jesus would agree with that. Moreover, in the Matthew text, Jesus does not put up any barriers based on belief either. Thus it is up to us, in our creativity, to extend the list of those we ought to treat as if they were Jesus: the foreigners, sexual minorities, the poor be they Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Jew, nonbeliever. Whatever we do to them, the least of these who, Jesus says, “are members of my family,” we do to Jesus.
As followers of Jesus, we like to think we know how we’d treat Jesus. We’d welcome him in, and make sure he had a seat at the table. Well, as followers of Jesus that is how we’re called to treat everyone we meet, wherever and whenever we meet them: at the grocery store, in the office, at school, at the 7-11, on Facebook, in the comments section of our favorite blog, in traffic, in staff meetings with disagreeable colleagues, in the governor’s mansion, at the White House, at the little shack way up at the end of the holler. Moreover, it is how we are called to treat those whom the broader culture teaches us to think of as our enemies.
All of which means, also, that as a follower of Jesus I am called to treat the governor of Alabama just as I would treat Jesus. In other words, it means that we are called to treat those with whom we disagree just as we would treat Jesus.
This does not mean that we are called to agree with them, or to sit by silently when they say harmful or hateful things, but it does mean that we are called to be loving in our response to them, in our opposition to them. All too often, this is where our creativity fails us. All too often, this is when we need a wizard to help us out.
It would be nice, sometimes, to have a magic wand. But out there at the end of our creativity and at the edge of the magical is where we ultimately have to part company with Harry and his friends. We part as friends, entertained, and maybe even a bit inspired by their adventures, and we continue on here in the real world without a wizard.
We have, instead, a God who is creative enough to not need magic. We have a God creative enough to live in and through the life of a carpenter’s kid, and show us through that singular life, what it means to be children of God. We have a God, then, who chooses to work through folks like us – indeed, to work through us to fulfill the Divine vision of a world in which we learn to treat one another as fellow creatures sprung from the mind of the same Creator, as children of the same God, as sisters and brothers. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
12:10 PM
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