The Hurts Between Us

The Hurts Between Us--October 25, 2016

"But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one both through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it." [Ephesians 2:13-16]

A funny thing happened to me on the way to meet my son for the first time.  Well, not so much a "funny" thing as an awful, horrible, painful thing. 

My wife and I had a drive of about an hour and a half to a Children and Youth Services office to meet an 18-month old who had been in foster care from birth, and after about an hour on the road, we stopped at a gas station-convenience-McDonald's rest stop--nerves and excitement and a sense of the unknown have a way of making coffee go right through you.  As I walked into the bathroom down the back hallway of this rest stop, I didn't pay much attention at all to the man who was leaving as I was entering.  In the split second that I saw him, I noticed a figure of average height, dressed appropriately for the weather--a coat that suited the February weather.  He was African-American, with close-cut hair, and other than that, I can't recall anything else that stood out about him.  As I say, he was walking out of the restroom, efficiently and politely, as I was walking in.  Other than the inescapable weirdness of the moment when you are walking into a public restroom and someone else is throwing their used paper towels in the trash can which has been set in the wall at a spot that is perilously close to the doorway, it was an entirely unmemorable interaction.

Well, anyway, I'm walking into the restroom, and as I pass the sinks and the one or two other occupants of the men's room, fixing their hair in the mirror or heading to a stall or whatever, there is someone there washing his hands--someone whose forebears probably came from the same geography in northern Europe that mine did, probably. And once the door has shut behind me, he looks at me with a nod back at the doorway and says something like, "Now it feels better in here."

I looked back in stunned silence.  I wasn't sure what was happening--and whether I was really hearing what I thought I was hearing.  "Now it feels better in here?"  Now that someone whose skin is a different color has left the room, now it feels better to you?  Are you serious?  My mind looked for any other possible interpretation to what he was saying, because, I thought, there had to be something else I was missing.  And why was I the lucky one to get hit with this awful observation? Was he talking to me?  Seriously?  What about me made this total stranger assume that I would share his opinion? What about me gave the unspoken impression that I shared his disregard for the man who had just left the bathroom as I was coming in?  The sheer casualness of his bigotry stunned me--it was all said with a smile, like he was doing the world a favor to make his little observation.

I don't know what else I should have done in that moment, but as truly disoriented as I was, I just walked past the man and didn't even acknowledge what he said.  Some part of my brain was still scrambling for any way to make sense of what had just been said to me, and whether there was any other possible way to hear what he had said, or any other missing piece of the context that would make what this stranger at the sink said not be horrifying.  I could find none.  By the time I turned back to look at the counter of sinks, he was already gone, and I had no idea at the moment what I could have said to him--I have been a preacher long enough to have limited expectations regarding the persuasive power of my words, even from a pulpit, and this was a public bathroom.

I walked into that restroom excited and nervous and hopeful to meet my son, my son whose hands and face and arms and legs and skin are the beautiful color of sassafras wood, and in the midst of all the hopeful possibilities in front of me, here I was confronted by an ugly moment of racism made uglier because it was so casual and said with a smile.  That was hardly the first time I had ever experienced someone saying something awful about another group of people--but that day, in that moment, it hit me in a whole new way.  Sheltered white kids from suburbia learn that "prejudice is bad" in school in an abstract way, but here in a conversation out of nowhere, all of a sudden there was this voice that not only wallowed in demeaning someone else, but assumed that I was a part of it, too. 

I walked out of the bathroom shaking.  This was the world--this is the world--in which I was going to raise my son. This is the world in which he lives, even if he does not know it or understand it yet at five years old now.  He has met all sorts of wonderful people, and there are many, many people who have shown nothing but kindness and love to him.  And for all he knows right now, that is all there are in the world.  There will come days, I know, when he will have to learn otherwise.  There will come days when he learns, whether from history class or from some else's smiling bigotry, that there are strands of casual hatred woven into our common life together, and that often the people who display it most clearly do not recognize it is there inside them.  Often the people who are convinced there is no racism in the world are the ones who have simply been drinking it in small doses all their lives, like someone trying to build up a tolerance for arsenic, that they no longer recognize the taste of poison on their tongues.  And often, sheltered kids from suburbia are convinced that nobody really says or things such awful things about another group of people, just because of the color of their skin, or the way they dress, they way they speak, or the land their parents came from--no, surely not... those things were all "fixed" decades ago, right?  We wish to believe that overt, smiling racism went extinct long ago... and then like a coelacanth you find it waiting for you, alive and well, and grinning with an ugly, heart-breaking grin.

That episode of only, what, five minutes, in a rest stop was, I am well aware, nothing compared to the actual violence that has been done in human history between one group of people against another.  I don't pretend it was historic... except to me.  It was one of those moments in which I realized there is no escaping the reality that we humans keep inventing ways--and rehashing the old ways--to divide ourselves up along lines, and then to decree that we're all gonna hate the people on the other side of the line.  We have done it from the beginning, practically, and we have kept doing it all along.  As much as I wish I could protect my son and my daughter from a world that keeps doing that, and as much as I wish I could inoculate them from the sickness, it will be around them as they grow up, and as they become good, fine, solid adults.  I start to wonder, too, about myself--why was I ok with that latent smiling racism before it was MY kids I pictured?  When it's anybody's kids, is it ever ok? When it's any mother's son, any father's daughter, is it OK to demean them? 

I walked out of that bathroom shaking and shaken, because I am still slowly coming to realize that I have spent a lot of my life comfortably insulated from the reality of other people being looked down on, hated, demeaned, and excluded, and I haven't thought it was a problem, because it wasn't being said to me.  That always made bigotry seem like a dodo--an awkward and ugly bird of the past, but which was all but gone except in history books, museums, and re-runs of All in the Family.  But now there is no ignoring it--we humans have a way of dividing ourselves up and cutting each other down, not just along lines of skin color, but with gender and sex and tax bracket and language and culture and faith.  And we are so good at it that it is like second nature--we don't even know we are doing it when we are doing it, so we can do it with a smile while we are washing our hands.

In the midst of that reality--that painful, difficult reality--there are these words from the New Testament that speak of a different kind of hope.  It is not the head-in-the-sand approach that ignores our human tendency to draw lines between us and scorn the ones on the wrong side of the line.  And it is not a simple, "Well just try harder and we'll fix it by sheer will power," either--that is just as naïve.  The hope we are given from Scripture is Christ--who absorbs our hatred from all sides and makes us one.  The hope from the New Testament is not that with one more after-school special on TV we can make ourselves all be nice and kind to everybody, or that we can imagine ourselves color-blind.  The hope from the New Testament, rather, is a new kind of human community, a new way of being human altogether, in which, as Paul says to the Galatians, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer free or slave, there is no longer male and female."  There is, in other words, the hope that the wounds and gashes between us can be healed--even if some part of us had been wishing to ignore that we were sick in the first place.

Now you know the beginning of the story of the day I met my son.  The middle of the story is, of course, both still unknown and plenty troubling--there are still going to be plenty of encounters with the kind of proud hate that smiles while it demeans.  And I am going to mess up plenty trying to raise children to live in that world, just like I am messing up being someone who tries to love people rightly.  The middle of the story is still fraught with potential for heartache.

But we know the end of the story already.  We have been promised that God will not leave us divided forever, but has already made us into one new humanity in Christ Jesus, even if we don't all know it yet. We have been promised that the old enmity will at last be worn away.  We have been promised that subtle bigotry and smiling hatred don't get the last word--God does.  And God in Christ has brought us all together in him.  Christ says we are one humanity, no matter what other lines we keep drawing.   

On the day I met my son, I learned just how much I need that promise from Jesus.  And when we say, as we have been doing all month here, that "grace heals the world," at least part of what God has promised is not to leave us hating each other with cruelly casual smiles, but rather to make us each into new creations.

I need that hope today.  We all do.

Lord Jesus, pull down every last wall we keep putting up between us and others, and give us the courage to live now like it has already been done.  Teach us to love like you.