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Seeing From Below
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 21, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 1:1-14 Luke 6:12-31
“What is life,” asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but the angle of vision?” The question brings to mind an encounter between Emerson and Thoreau when Thoreau was in jail for refusal to pay a poll tax. From his angle of vision on the outside, Emerson agitates, “Henry, Henry, what are you doing here?” Thoreau mimics back behind bars, “Ralph, Ralph, what are you not doing here?” But I am getting ahead of myself! “A man is measured,” wrote Emerson long before that encounter, “by the angle at which he looks at objects…by what he is thinking of all day.” You could say that we first receive an angle of vision by way of the circumstances of our birth. Born into a family of privilege or of poverty, raised in a household of tension or tenderness, surrounded by elders whose inclinations were anti-intellectual or highly critical or terribly pious, come of age in a society marked by service or selfish gain: we see things through the lens fitted on us by our circumstances. Therefore we grow up seeing things from the perspective of, say, a staunchly Republican father or a first-generation Italian grandmother or a ninth grade English teacher who introduced us to poetry or a soccer coach that really believed in us. That is to say, our initial angle of vision is often formed, for good or ill, by the angle of vision of individuals whose own seeing has led us to look at the world around us and the worth within us from their expansive or narrowly reserved perspective. Some of us may still be exactly who we are because of these peculiar people and circumstances; some of us may be who we are precisely in reaction to them. In either case, we are those whose angle of vision is, in no way, neutral. That said of a Sunday morning, we must confess that we inevitably bring our angle of vision to bear upon our hearing of Scripture. Our take on the characters and the plot, on the meaning of a verse or the implications of a passage cannot help but be colored by our politics and our pocketbooks, our cultural norms and our familial prejudices, our social class and our national identity. In fact, we likely go to Scripture more often in order to confirm our angle of vision or to receive divine sanction for our convictions concerning the things we are thinking of all day than we go to be changed and made new by God’s address. What difference might it make…how would we be changed if instead of reading Scripture seamlessly into our lives, Scripture read us, transformed our angle of vision, redeemed from insignificance the things we think of all day? Take the texts before us. The first tells of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt, a story most of us have been told since we were children. So too did the Hebrew people tell their children, but with a life-altering difference. A thousand years later, the Babylonians would hold God’s people captive again and have them believe, with their ancestor Joseph, that Pharaoh’s angle of vision should be the measure of their days. No, Moses had decreed! “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?’, Moses commanded at the foot of Mt. Sinai, “then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’” It became the story that told them who they were: slaves who have been redeemed by God’s almighty hand. It was the angle of vision that had the power to redeem the darkness in which they inevitably would walk again. Moreover, the memory--that they were slaves in Egypt—sent them forever into Pharaoh’s world as those who saw from below. The perspective would be nothing less than revolutionary! I think of Samantha Gardiner who, when she was in fifth grade in Cherry Hill, read an article about another little girl who made jewelry to free the slaves in Sudan. Now thirteen, Samantha remembers, in a voice that sounds both innocent and wise, “I was just stunned. I had no idea slavery was still alive. I was so taken aback—like I just kept staring at those words: ‘to free the slaves in Sudan.’ I couldn’t get my eyes off these words. I wasn’t really reading them. I was staring at them. I stared into space, a thousand thoughts rushing through my head.” Then Dan Gottlieb asked her “Why? Why were you so upset? Why did you work so hard? [Samantha has raised thousands of dollars to buy Sudanese children out of slavery for $37 a head] What did all this mean to you that you were so outraged?” “I think” she said, “because every Passover we hear about how we were slaves in Egypt.” I almost drove off the road! Samantha had been told the story that told her who she was. Likely an upper-middle class child from New Jersey, she knew her real identity was as a slave in Egypt redeemed by the Lord’s mighty hand. The story read Samantha and so countered every other story told her by today’s Pharaohs—even countered the silence of a privileged society deaf to the cries of its own people enslaved by hunger and homelessness, by disasters unrelieved and by life lived on a nation’s forgotten margins. Moreover, the story has sent Samantha into her world as a child whose angle of vision was from below. She could not get her eyes off the words because she was a slave in Egypt who therefore was incredulous that, in this day and age, only 1000 miles from the fleshpots of her ancestors, children’s lives were still bitter with hard service. Those of you who are reading Scripture day by day this year will soon discover that the angle of vision given God’s people was not easily sustained in the land of Canaan. Time and time again, this people forgot who they were and no longer were read by Scripture; rather they began to read this story, along with the culture’s stories, into their lives. They did this especially, it seems, when their kings were still in power and their armies appeared to be strong. But the day inevitably arrived—a day of judgment according to the story they later would tell themselves in exile—when another king conquered the land they had been promised and led them into exile. Many in exile simply assimilated themselves over the years and settled down to the benefits of Babylonian life, a life in which what you were thinking of all day was mostly yourself. There were others, however, who held on in the darkness because of the light that shines still in this story’s angle of vision. Read the 105th psalm whose beginning we sang as our psalter today. Then imagine the Israelites singing the story to their children and their children’s children while they waited for God to redeem them from captivity, even as God had redeemed their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. Now the God who brought the Israelites out with a mighty hand and redeemed them from the house of slavery is the same God who chose, in the fullness of time, to see the world from below. God in Christ emptied himself, wrote Paul, taking the form of a slave. Those, according to Luke, who simply attempted to read him into what they already were thinking of all day—the religious leaders, the rich young man, the fool and his barns, the elder son—literally looked past him. But in the sight of those invisible to the powers that be—the sick and the lame, the widow and the orphan, the outcast and the sinner, says Luke: in Him they beheld themselves, as if for the first time, from the angle of vision that is God’s redeeming grace. Blessed, says Jesus, are the poor, them that mourn, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. His words read them even as his woes read us! So in another time, when a ruler rose to power and an army appeared to be strong, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected on the experience of Christians in the Confessing Church whose lives had been read—dangerously and fatally read—by Scripture. “There remains an experience of incomparable value,” he writes. “We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at the matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.” How shall we learn this, you and I? What difference might it make…how would we be changed if, instead of reading Scripture seamlessly into our lives, Scripture read us, transformed our angle of vision, redeemed from insignificance the things we think of all day? [Henry, Henry, what are you doing here? Ralph, Ralph, what are you not doing here?] A work camp to Mississippi is a start, but no guarantee. One can go to the poor and homeless and hungry and see them still through the angle of vision given by Pharaoh and return unchanged. But what if these sojourners dared, through this story that reads them and because of this Savior who has redeemed them, to see from below and so really to see in the humanity of the other the face of Jesus Christ? “I thought of another answer” said Samantha before the end of the hour. “I think the real reason I feel really connected to the children in slavery is because six million people died in the Holocaust and those six million people could have done so much. They would have been alive today, and had children and grandchildren. One of them could have found a cure for cancer or the common cold; authors, dentists, they are a loss to this world. I don’t think that should ever happen to anyone again.” That we…come to look with new eyes at the matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible, said Bonhoeffer. What is our life but the angle of vision given us by the God whose almighty hand brought us out of slavery, whose Son became a slave for our freedom from sin, so that through him we might see from below and be changed! Thanks be to God. |