Judging the Cover of the Book

I am not an incredibly keen observer of people, but I do enjoy the occasional people-watching.  Some like to gaze at the harried travelers who hustle with their bags down the claustrophobia inducing corridors of airports.  People carrying baggage, physical and otherwise, pressing close to those going to different destinations.  Sometimes when I’m in a place with lots of people, I try to see each person as their story, to see what emanates from the lines around their eyes, the ease of their smiles or the accoutrements with which they adorn themselves. 

Once, while sitting on a bus, I noticed a woman in her sixties sitting by herself wistfully staring out the window.  In my mind I tried to write her story – darker skin, she looked like she was from the Indian sub-continent, perhaps she’d been in an arranged marriage to an Indian gentleman who, wanting to escape the overcrowding of his home country, moved his family to Australia.  She wore little jewelry; only a band of gold on her finger and small pearl earrings; her clothes bespoke comfort and usefulness.  Probably her husband was a businessman and her children, a boy and girl, lived comfortable married lives and this woman spent her days looking after her grandchildren.

How wrong I was.

I sat next to her and before I could even begin to ask her about her story, she was asking me mine.  The crow’s feet around her eyes deepened as she, it seemed, had already began to decipher my story. 

“I know you,” she said before I even claimed the seat in front of her. 

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said with a smile, “Do you hang out in the Lockyer Valley quite often.”

She smiled.  “If I knew where the Lockyer Valley was, I suppose that would be true.  No,” she continued, “you have the face of a person I met just recently.”

“Where was that?” I asked.

Her eyes darted outside and then to her lap.  “At the psych ward in the hospital.”

Laughter escaped my lips. 

“I knew that it wasn’t you, but just last week,” she said, “I was going to work – I am a social worker at the hospital – and this man sat on the seat next to me.  He told me fantastic stories of travel and adventure.  He was a very nice man; had a beard just like yours – no accent, though.  Anyway, as we reached the hospital, I stood up and so did he.  Little did I know that he was going to enter the same ward to which I was going.”  Her head tilted sideways trying to see if I indeed was going to follow her to the hospital.

“So, I remind you of him.”

“You could be twins,” she said and pointed to my face.

“I already have two of those,” I said and began to tell my story.

On our ride through the twisted streets of Brisbane, I got to know everything about this woman: her marriage to a man from Zimbabwe.  Both of her sons were born in Africa and they left only when the country began to descend into Mugabe’s thirteenth circle of hell.  I learned that her husband had died not long before and she was supporting herself by helping at the hospital.  One of her sons was successful and living at home with her; the other son was, what she said, ‘chalk and cheese’, meaning that he was the exact opposite of his brother - a drifter bouncing from job to job playing guitar with whatever band would have him.

I learned almost everything about her that I could in a twenty minute bus ride except her name, that is.

Amazingly, you never really know a person until you start with a name.  We are all claimed by a name, the word that labels us, defines us as part of a family.  A name gives us an identity and placement in a world of discord and the person that speaks that name is conscious of who we are and where we’ve been.

I was wrong about this woman’s story – everything that I tried to construct for her  was a judgment of preconceptions that I had learned and inherited from my own cultural background.

We do the same thing as we ‘people-watch’ Biblical characters.  When I read the calling of Matthew, or, in Mark’s second chapter, Levi, we are given a little information which allows us to read the cover of the book. 

Once again, Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them.  As he walked along, he saw Levi, son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax collector’s booth…

 

Mark 2:13,14a

 

I already know that this person will eventually end up being Matthew – he who was a tax collector (from his own people) and ultimately became a disciple who followed Jesus.  End of story, close the back cover, that’s all I need to know because that’s all I’ve ever known.  When I look at this brief introduction to Levi, it doesn’t startle me like it would have first century minds.  We don’t have a correlating job description in the 21^st century that helps us to see what kind of disdain that a tax collector received.  Certainly there are jokes about those that pass the bar exam; sometimes we roll our eyes at the antics of politicians, but a tax collector was, in the view of his contemporaries, an outcast and a traitor, often a thief.  To imagine that Jesus would choose a tax collector right after the four fishing brothers is paramount to producing ridicule.  I read these two short verses and I see the end of the story, one that I have filled in by a cursory reading of the Bible, but the true story of Matthew is one of a man who, perhaps, like many of his tax collecting brethren, was treated contemptuously day after day.  Perhaps he had become immune to taunts of those had to visit his booth.  Gradually, as those barbs sunk deeper and deeper snagging on the walls of his heart in turn creating a benumbed man intent on creating a world of financial despair for those that had ruined him emotionally.  Vengeance is incredibly enticing to those who are in pain.

We create background stories for all sorts of people we encounter.  Usually it is by physical appearance or, in other words, believing we have read a whole book by reading the jacket.  I don’t know how many times I have put down a really interesting book after reading the two hundred word synopsis and then looked at the photo of the author.  For some reason, my brain decides whether a book will be interesting by how well the author sits for his or her jacket photo, steepled fingers looking far off into the sunset.

I hate those photos.

How many times do we see others on the street, or better yet, those who come to our churches, like jackets from hard cover books?  If, in the first moments we meet them, we do not connect with them from hearing their story or even connect with them by their looks, often we have assumed they have nothing to offer us (or worse yet, the church). 

When I was a youth director in Arizona, I remember one Sunday a young man arrived at our worship services.  Decked out in hiking shoes, backpack slung over one shoulder, long red hair unkempt, he stood at the back of the church watching over the proceedings with amused interest.  He stayed for the whole morning, taking in the hymns that proclaimed we were to stand up, stand up for Jesus, we were to reach out to the whole world sharing his love, and then the disconnect hit me as I watched him from the front of the church: not one person talked to him before, between or after the services.

I approached him after the second service.  His backpack was on the ground by his feet, his arms were crossed.  The congregation had to file out past him in order to get to the doughnuts and coffee.  Perhaps a few nodded at him, but he certainly made no effort to engage anyone first.  His jacket spoke of a young man who was wandering his way through life, but I was to find out his story was much different.

It has been many years since this episode happened, but I still remember when I invited this young man to my apartment to have lunch with us.  I expected him to decline and I guiltily guess that I wanted him too.  Just one more thing in a busy day, but he instantly accepted my offer and before I could pack my things into my office, James was asking me questions like, “How did you get involved in a church like this?  Did I find it boring?  Is there a point to singing the songs that they did when they don’t really change anything?  What’s the point of dressing up for church when you dress everyone down with your eyes?”

Usually I’m the one asking questions so I was overwhelmed with trying to sort through what he was asking.  Obviously, James was very intelligent and I wanted to ask him why he was homeless, why he would waste an intellect like his by backpacking across the desert.  But that was my predilection to judgment surfacing.  James, when his story erupted from him, was a young man born to wander, like one of the roaming prophets of early Israel’s time.  His parents had been missionaries and when he was old enough, he left home to hitchhike the southwestern deserts attending churches and speaking out against the hypocrisy of contemporary Christianity.  His questions to me were startling in their simplicity, but they are questions we normally don’t even ponder, but moreso, James’ prophetic word to the church is:

Do not judge the value of a person by how well he or she fits into the inorganic spaces of the church building.  The true church, the Body of Christ, has empty places which can only be filled by people who are every day normal.  Regardless of vocation or location, homeless or helpless, each person has a distinctive place in the kingdom.  One of my favorite passages that I wish the Body of Christ would pay more attention to, which would help it transition from graceless to grace-full, is…

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” and the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”  On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable, we treat with special honor.  And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment.  But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.  If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

1 Corinthians 12:2-26

 

Imagine if Levi was treated with more honor because he had to do the undesirable task of retrieving taxes for a corrupt government.  Imagine if he was treated with compassion and made to feel indispensable, how would that have changed his life?  Imagine each one of us on the journey of life treating all people we meet, especially those who are pushed to the very margins of the page of the book of life, with respect and admiration – how would this planet be different?  Those who have been blessed greatly already need nothing else.  They don’t need special recognition; they don’t’ need banquets thrown in their honor; they don’t need extravagant gifts lavished upon them because their names have carried them far.  But those who are the have nots… Imagine how life would be different.

The haves, the ones who had already received special recognition were indignant when they found out that Jesus was socializing with sinners and tax collectors, lepers and those deemed unclean by the freshly scrubbed.  When the teachers of the law saw him sitting and (gasp) eating with ‘sinners’ and tax collectors they asked his disciples (notice, they don’t ask Jesus himself, but the uneducated fishermen who really have no idea what they signed up for) “Why does he eat with these people?”

But Jesus responds as he always does standing up for those who have fallen, standing for and in place of those who spiritual legs have collapsed in the earthquake that is their life, “It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” 

He comes to call, to speak their names, to know their stories but asking questions, eating with them, hearing their stories and call them to a different life.  He is less concerned for those who have hardened their shells with piety than those whose souls are pliable and willing to look for anything that will give them comfort.