Sharing the Water--November 2, 2022

Sharing the Water--November 2, 2022

"For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." [1 Corinthians 12:13]

Sometimes revolutionary events of grace happen with a subtlety that hides their magnitude.  Sometimes the world changes, and sometimes for good, with quiet clarity rather than bombastic noise.  But don't mistake the unassuming humility of those moments for unimportance--sometimes they bring about seismic shifts underground.

One of those moments, for example, unfolded on a public television show for kids in 1969, when Fred Rogers famously invited his TV neighbor "Officer Clemmons" [played by Francois Clemmons on the show from 1968 on] to cool his feet on a hot day in a kiddie pool together with him.  I can remember seeing that episode, years later of course, in re-runs on our local PBS station, and thinking it was perfectly ordinary and forgettable.  It was hardly entertainment, after all, just watching two grown men roll up their pant-legs and stick their bare feet in a few inches of water and then dry them off with a shared towel.  At first blush to me, that hardly seemed like anything eventful.  And of course, Mr. Rogers had that famously calm demeanor that seemed to lower the collective blood pressure of a generation when they heard his voice.  This child of the 80s didn't realize what a radical thing our neighbor with the sweater vest was doing in that moment on television.  I didn't realize until I was much older what a provocative stand Fred Rogers was taking there, nor what a powerful statement he was making by sharing the water with a Black man--and doing so without making any fuss about or treating it as a scandal. In a time when many public pools were still segregated [in defiance of the official law of the land with the 1964 Civil Rights Act] and there was plenty of unofficial opposition and unspoken bigotry about Black and White people sharing public spaces with equal treatment and status, Fred Rogers just acted as if none of that mattered at all, and he went ahead and asked Officer Clemmons to join him in the pool, and to share his towel.  And Francois Clemmons, for his part, responded with graciousness as well, only pausing to note, "I didn't bring a towel," rather than asking fearfully, "But what will people think?"  It was a moment of powerful impact exactly because both Rogers and Clemmons acted like there was absolutely no reason they shouldn't both share that towel or wading pool for their feet.  And by playing this out in front of children, they were sending a powerful message precisely by the lack of drama in it--this was not something to rile children up, but rather it was exactly the casual tone that sent the unspoken message, "This is normal. This is okay. In fact, this is good."  And of course, that was the whole point--by having this play out subtly and nonchalantly, the hope was that children watching would also see racial integration as normal, acceptable, and good, rather than something to be afraid of or upset over.  And as a teachable moment, that made it brilliant... and radical.

In a lot of ways, reading the apostle Paul is a lot like being the 80s kid watching Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons in the kiddie pool.  We might realize at first blush just how radical Paul's perspective is here, both because of how far removed we are culturally from his world, and also because of just how nonchalantly Paul makes his move here.  We saw yesterday how Paul introduced the imagery of the members of the body, and how each of us individually is a part of a larger whole in the community of Christ.  But it's still easy to take that "body" metaphor and make it into an image of uniformity, that we all have to be identical in a body, like all the cells in a liver are liver cells, or all the cells in a bone are bone cells.  It would have been easy to use that metaphor as an argument for homogeneity in the church--that we should all look, act, speak, and think the same.  And indeed, there were certainly voices in the early church insisting that Christianity was supposed to be ethnically "the same"--they wanted to insist on Jewish custom, practice, and culture as mandatory for all Christians, rather than allowing Gentiles to belong as Gentiles.  And for that matter, those Greek-encultured Christians were likely to think of themselves as superior to Jewish and other non-Greek Christians because they looked down on other cultures as "barbarian" and "uncivilized."  Paul writes this letter within a few years of a pretty significant debate within the early church over whether Gentile Christians would be accepted as Gentiles, and after having to call Saint Peter himself out for practicing a sort of anti-Gentile segregation when certain folks were around. 

So for Paul to say, not only "we were all baptized into one body," but to push further and say explicitly that includes "Jews or Greeks, slaves or free" was a deliberate and provocative choice.  And then to double down on that same inclusion by saying, "we were all made to drink of one Spirit" when eating and drinking out of the same vessel was a HUGE social taboo and breaking of rules for the anti-Gentile contingent, well, that was just radical.  But notice how Paul makes his point--he pulls a Fred Rogers.  He just casually mentions that the Spirit has chosen to include both Jewish and Gentile people, the "cultured" Greeks and the "barbarian" outsiders, the lowly enslaved and the higher-status free people, all in one community--and then he describes us as drinking out of the same cup. It's Officer Clemmons in the kiddie pool all over again: it's revolutionary exactly because it is presented so nonchalantly.  It's Paul taking a clear [and yes, still provocative when he wrote it] stand on the issue of including Gentiles without making them pretend they were not Gentile, but doing it with such casual ease that he is saying between the lines, "This is normal.  This is ok.  In fact, this is not just acceptable: this is good."

For Christians who have grown up reading Paul's letters now for almost two millennia, the question of including Gentiles was a non-issue for us.  We have learned from Paul's teaching--not just by what he said, but by the way he said it--that Gentile Christians are to be accepted without being treated as second-class disciples, or being segregated, or being told they need to "try stop being Gentile."  In fact, now the overwhelming majority of Christians in the world trace their ancestry from families and backgrounds outside of Judaism.  That has happened, in large part, because of voices like Paul's who said that including Gentiles was good--and then acting in ways that normalized it.

Sometimes I think we forget how scandalous it was in Paul's day to take the stand he did, and just how artful he was in normalizing the inclusion of the ones deemed unacceptable or second-class by treating the issue as obvious and clear [because to him it was].  And maybe we miss how radical his actions were because he found a way to be subtle and nonchalant about them--in the hopes that all who saw and heard would get the clear message, "Including the Gentiles is not up for debate, and it is not an open question to me--they are included, as they are, and we will treat them with the grace and dignity owed to people who have every right to be here with us at Christ's table."  After all, they had already drunk of the same Spirit--they were already sharing the water, like Fred Rogers and Officer Clemmons.

If we can see just what a genius move Paul makes here, then maybe we will see the tremendous power we have as well in the same kind of small and quiet actions that come from a place of clarity and confidence.  It was because Paul was clear--God has done a new thing and deliberately created a new kind of community where people who used to be deemed unacceptable "outsiders" were now sharing tables with "insiders"--that he could speak and act in ways that let that truth come to the surface.  And by presenting the inclusion of those formerly marginalized people as not only "normal" but actively, positively "good," Paul both took a stand and made it easier for the next generation to do the same.  Fred Rogers made a point of casually sharing a towel for his feet with Officer Clemmons to model for kids watching at home that this wasn't the big deal their racist uncles all thought it was, in the hopes that those kids would grow up and embody a world where Black people were no longer kept out of spaces deemed "White." And while that cause is absolutely still a work-in-progress, part of what taught at least some of a generation of kids to break with the old norms of segregation was seeing people like Mr. Rogers address it so matter-of-factly like it wasn't controversial at all.  By treating it as a non-issue, he modeled for us that we shouldn't make someone's skin color a reason to marginalize them.  We may still struggle with doing that well or consistently [okay, we do still struggle with it] but it was examples like Rogers that pointed us on the right trajectory and made it clear we weren't supposed to see ourselves as "heroes" by sharing our towels or pools--it was just baseline common decency.

So today, we have great power to foster the gospel's revolutionary re-ordering of things--where outsiders are welcomed in, the last are first, and the lowly are lifted up--not by angry shouting, but by the ways we normalize the love that brings us all together and reveals our equality.  When we include people who have often been left out, and do so without pointing back at ourselves like we are heroic for doing it but rather like it is just obviously the way to act, we are normalizing their acceptance.  When we deliberately listen to people whose experience of God is different from our own rather than immediately trying to make them fit our molds, we are acknowledging, like Paul, that people from very different backgrounds and perspectives have been made to drink from the same Spirit.  And when we intentionally [but still subtly] make the choice to welcome folks too long treated as unworthy or unwelcome, we are carrying on Paul's noble [and brilliant] work of normalizing love.  That's how revolutionary change happens and takes root--not with the noise and bluster of a rally or a riot, but with the grace and clarity of sharing the water.

May we embody such Spirit-inspired change among us today.

Lord Jesus, enable us to love in ways that don't look heroic, but take place in the ordinary.