First or Last
Luke 14:1-14; Proverbs 25:6-7
August 28, 2016
Fans
of a certain genre of silly comedy films may recall the wisdom of “famed NASCAR
winner, Ricky Bobby,” who said, “if you ain’t first, you’re last.” He lived his
fast and fictional life according to that pearl of wisdom bequeathed him by his
equally fast-living father. Right up to the point, that is, when Reece Bobby
pulled the rug out from beneath his son saying, “oh, hell, Ricky, I was high
when I said that.”
Sorting
out first from last has been a human pattern, or, perhaps better, a human
obsession since our earliest primate ancestor climbed down out of the tree,
turned back, and said, “check it out, losers: I’m the first!”
We’ve
been engaged in the struggle ever since, and, alas, we turn far too often to
the kind of wisdom satirized by the Bobby clan in Talladega Nights.
The
line worked in the movie because it hits pretty close to home. Far too often,
too many of us way too easily divide the world into winners and losers,
neglecting the deeper truth that any such dividing line runs first and foremost
directly through the center of our own psyche. That is to say, we believe that
we know what winning is and what losing is because we know what it feels like
to land on either side of that great divide.
It
is not enough, however, to question what it feels like to fall on either side
of the line. Jesus insists that we must interrogate the line itself. For, you
see, the line itself marks out not only the hierarchy of winner over loser, the
line marks hierarchy itself. That is what’s at stake here, for Jesus
understands quite clearly that all hierarchy is violence, and that all violence
reinscribes the lines by which we mark and measure hierarchies.
Let’s
take just a couple of examples, but not just any examples, for the ones I have
in mind are foundational to American culture and to our understanding of
ourselves within that culture. The two examples of hierarchy I have in mind –
race and gender – should be called thoroughly into question by any careful
reading of the gospels.
Most
of us are raised to believe that race and gender are not, in fact, hierarchies,
but are, instead, categories, and, what’s more, we are raised to believe that
race and gender are naturally occurring categories. If it accomplished nothing
else, the exercise we engaged in worship last month at the very least
demonstrated that we are perfectly capable of re-writing the racial scripts
that we have been raised to read. If we accept what we have been raised to
believe, then we accept, to whatever degree our more-or-less liberal-mindedness
allows, the various privileges, attributes, and limitations assigned by culture
and history.
That
is to say, when we imagine the scene that Jesus’ parable calls to mind, we
understand without thinking about it who it is that gets to sit at the head
table. Of course that table is reserved for men only, and, of course, those men
will be white. It is only natural that it should be so. Right?
But
in turning the tables on this seating arrangement, Jesus calls into question
not only the power dynamics of his own context, but, at a deeper level, the
fundamental categories upon which the power dynamics rest in the first place.
When
we investigate those categories – race and gender – we find that not only are
they social constructs, but, indeed, they are categories invented to support
the hierarchies of white over non-white and male over non-male. That is to say,
gender is a result of patriarchy, not the other way around. Likewise, racism is
not a result of race but, rather, race is a result of racism.
As
Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the
World and Me:
[R]ace
is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people”
has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of
hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair, the notion that these factors can
correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are
indelible – this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been
brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.[1]
It
would be perfectly accurate to say much the same thing about gender except that
patriarchy is no new idea, and it has been used as the organizing principle of
most human societies for thousands of years.
As
my friend and UCC clergy colleague Amber Henry Neuroth posted the other day on
Facebook:
Equality
sounds like a nice idea until you realize that we are all swimming in a culture
that sees socialized masculine traits as ‘qualified.’ Women in professional
roles are expected to possess all these masculine traits but in a way that
doesn’t threaten their male colleagues. We women often soft pedal our brilliant
ideas or apologize for coming across too strong. We are taught to be tough in
order to compete, but also to take care of men emotionally. We are always in a
no-win situation and cannot be seen (or even see ourselves) for who we really
are.
To
argue about whether racism or patriarchy is primary – not in terms of time and
history but in terms of power and effect – would be to engage in precisely the
kind of legalism that Jesus so adroitly picks apart when he asks about the
propriety of healing on the Sabbath. The particular disease is not the point;
healing is the point. The date is not the point; healing is the point.
The
time is not the point, for now is the time. Now is the time to turn the tables.
Now is the time to deconstruct the hierarchies humans have built upon the backs
of those enslaved under the dictates of constructs of race and gender.
Now
is the time to see, clearly, that beneath the stumbling blocks of such
constructed hierarchies there stand real, live, fully formed human beings
yearning to be seen as God sees us: the beloved, welcome to the best seats at
the great banquet.
It
is way too easy to believe that the world divides simply into binaries that
sort us into winners and losers, to believe that if you’re not first then you
are destined to be last. But Jesus insists that the truth in God’s eyes is
this: those who spend their lives striving to claw their way to the top of
socially constructed hierarchies are missing the point entirely. For the first
shall be last, and the last first in the Beloved Community. May we strive and
struggle for this. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:17 AM
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