Humble Authority
Luke 7:1-10
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 8, 2009
by Rev. Patricia Pearce
Before I read our Gospel reading today, I would like to just kind of go back over some of the things we've been talking about in recent weeks. We've been looking at how it is that we go about healing the wounds of oppression. And we've looked at the importance of really taking in one another's stories, to opening our hearts and our beings to another person's reality so that we can hear how people have been affected by systems of injustice. This past week, Vic sent me an email, and I printed it out, and I forgot to bring it… but it was a wonderful account of a community in the West Bank in Israel, where there has been a lot of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. And the Palestinian leaders of this community decided to establish a Holocaust museum in their community, which is an astounding thing to do, because they realized that the story of the Jewish people had to be heard. And that is such a wonderful example of the things that we've been looking at these past few weeks: being touched by one another's stories so that we can set about the work of healing those wounds.
Today we're going to be looking at: once we've heard the stories, once we kind of 'get it' about oppression and injustice, then what do we do? What are the actions that those stories compel us to take?
I'm going to be reading from the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. This is a story that I think has a few things to say to us:
"After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he highly valued. The slave was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish leaders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, 'he is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.' And Jesus went with them. But when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to him to say, 'Lord, do not trouble yourself. For I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man of authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to one "Go" and he goes, and to another "Come" and he comes, and to my slave "Do this" and my slave does it.' When Jesus heard this, he was amazed. And turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, 'I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.' When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health."
{prayer}
So I did a Wikipedia study of centurions. I learned that originally they were called centurions because they commanded a legion of 100 people – a century of soldiers. Later, it diminished to 80. But the way that a centurion got to be a centurion was: you had to have a lot of connections. You had to have a lot of letters of recommendation, probably from senators. You had to be plugged-in to the political establishment. And he had to have proven himself in battle, proven himself worthy to prepare these soldiers who would be going into battle. He had to be courageous; he had to fight at the front of his legion when they went into battle. So as I thought about this centurion, I thought, this is interesting. This man, who is so tied in to the imperial structure, so well acquainted with the political powers that be, is in this land with the Jews, and the Jewish leaders themselves advocate for him. They tell Jesus, "He is worthy of having you do this for him because he loves our people."
I see in this centurion an astounding role-reversal. He is there as part of the system of domination, to serve the empire. And yet, in this story, it seems that he has become the servant. He sheds his own power in order to serve the people in this community, and, in this story specifically, in order to serve his slave. Now, we can talk a lot about, OK, he had a slave, which is another piece of evidence that he was very tied-in with this domination paradigm.
When I went to the Greek text, I noticed – this is sort of interesting to me -- the verb, where it says the centurion had a slave whom he "valued highly." I thought, "I wonder what the Greek says about 'valued' – what word is that?" And I discovered that it typically means someone who is esteemed, someone who has a higher position of rank, when it talks about people. But, in the lexicon is says when it talks about slaves or stones, then it has to do with monetary worth. Now I couldn't help but wonder: we've been watching this DVD of "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome" in our Tab.edu classes. And this author talks about chattel slavery in America was much different than slavery in the ancient world. In the ancient world, slaves were never seen as sub-human. In American history, slaves have been seen as sub-human, as property. So when I looked at this Greek word, I thought, this is very interesting that the Greek says that this man – one could see it – this man valued, esteemed, this slave as someone having a higher ranking than he himself. As though he saw something in the essence of this person that made their roles irrelevant. What he saw was the qualities of this human being, and he was willing to do what was required to save the life of this human being.
You see, this guy understood that he had authority and he used that authority to advocate for those in his community. But he didn't confuse his position of authority with a sense of entitlement. And we see that because when Jesus approaches, he says "I'm not worthy to have you come into my house." He did not see that his position gave him any sense of entitlement at all. In fact, he saw himself as less worthy than Jesus. And he understood there are different kinds of power. There's political power, military power, which he enjoyed. But he recognized that Jesus had spiritual power, had spiritual authority.
So what does this teach us? What does this teach us in terms of how we live within our context as people in the wealthiest and – well, that might be debated, whether we are the wealthiest nation anymore. It might be China. Nonetheless, we are in a privileged position in this globe. How do we use the authority that we have within the system, to advocate as allies – not as patrons, but as allies of those who are on the margins of the system?
I think so often we – those of us who are more progressive and liberal – we want to shun our position of authority. We don't want to claim the power that the system gives us. And yet, here we see a man who claimed that power. He not only claimed it, but he leveraged it. He leveraged it for the good of the people who were on the margins of the system. I think this is a challenge to us: to recognize that, because of our place in the social system, we are granted, many of us are granted a particular authority. And I'm speaking now especially to the whites in the room, the white folks in the room. The system that we live in grants us privilege. It's not our own doing. It's because of our connections or whatever. It's because we were born into a particular system that give us privilege. That's just the way it is.
The question then is: what do we do? What do we do in that system? What we don't do is believe that we are entitled to what we have. We don't mistake the injustices of the systems that grant us privilege as having anything to do with our goodness, or our well being, or anything that has to do with us personally. It has to do with an oppressive system. Now, we can either just check-out, and not address any of the stuff that's going on out there because we don't want to be involved. Or we can acknowledge that we have a voice that a lot of people don't have. And we use that position to speak out. We use that position to advocate. We use that position to be allies. Allies.
I'm guessing that many of us might be able to recall a time in our lives when we saw someone in a position of power who did something helpful for someone on the margins, but did it for all the wrong reasons. Did it to look good. Did it out of a sense of "Oh, let me help you." I know, as a woman, I've encountered that. You can sense it. Can't you sense it? It's kind of creepy, and it's very disrespectful. But if we are able to do as the centurion does, to put ourselves at a level where we understand that we are all in this unjust system together, that none of us is any better than anybody else, that we all have our certain types of authority, our certain types of power, our certain gifts, how do we behave in this system in a way that brings out justice, that brings out compassion?
See, it's not enough to take in the stories. It's not enough to have our hearts broken by the tragedies. Those tragedies and those stories compel us to live differently, to help change those stories, so that future generations won't have to keep repeating these same narratives of sorrow and hardship and injustice.
So during our time of silent reflection I would ask each of us – now, OK, I want to give you an image that's been playing around in my head. We often times look at the big picture of the world, the injustices, all the problems, and we become overwhelmed. Do we not? We become overwhelmed with the big picture. Yes. That's because we're not supposed to address the big picture.
Now, everybody knows about computer screens, right? And their – what are the little…pixels, right? A computer screen is made up of a zillion – that's a scientific, I know that number's right. I consulted my techno-guru. A computer screen forms an image out of a zillion pixels. What I want to tell us is we are each responsible for one pixel. Just find your pixel. What is my pixel in this big picture? If I know, as I look at this big picture, "hey, that blue pixel really needs to be green" and I feel passionate about making that blue pixel green, then I live my life bringing a little bit of yellow into that pixel. And if, by the time I die, that little pixel has shifted a little towards the green: well done, good and faithful servant.
We find ourselves in different settings, in different networks of relationships, in different systems. We know what's going wrong in those systems. We can see it. So my question is: during our silent reflection, think about your pixel. That one place where you can make a difference, where you can leverage your position in that network of relationship to bring about a little bit more compassion, a little bit more justice.
Let us be in a time of silent prayer.
© 2009 by Patricia Pearce
