Preached by the Rev. Tim Jones on August 11, 2024
When I was in high school I had a summer job that I also kept and worked part time throughout the school year. That was the only way I could pay for gas and insurance on the 1969 Mustang that I had bought and worked so hard fixing up.
And while I was at this job I struck up a friendship with a co-workers because we both liked the same music and movies and practical jokes we played on each other. But there were all these little things every now and then that sort of clued me in to the fact that we each came from very different worlds.
One day he invited me to go out after work with a couple friends. It was him, his girlfriend and another young lady. And we just had a really good time. They were all quirky and funny and again, we liked the same sort of things. And somehow, at the end of the evening, I ended up driving this other young lady home. I remember pulling into her driveway and thinking, “This is the largest house I’ve ever seen in person.” I had only ever seen anything like that on T.V.
And when I walked her to her front door, her father came out to meet us!! I thought, “Oh Gosh, Oh no, I bet he’ll probably think we’ve been on some kind date or something!” —which it wasn’t at all. But you know, we’ve all seen movies and television shows where these protective Dad characters come out and begin to intimidate and grill a young man with a million questions. So I was steeling myself for a really hard time. But he didn’t do that at all. Instead he seemed far more interested in eyeing my car parked in front of his house. And the only thing he asked me was what part of Henderson County I lived in. I remember thinking that’s a very odd thing to ask.
Well, after that evening I kept asking my friend when we could all get together again and hang out because it felt like we had all had a pretty good time together. But whenever I would bring it up he would get this awkward look on face and put me off, or change the subject. I couldn’t seem to get a straight answer out of him.
Eventually he told me that the young lady’s father had forbidden her to be around me. I was horrified. What in the world had I done wrong? How, in the space of 30 seconds of talking with him, could I have so offended him? And I remember my friend finally broke down and was really honest with me. Maybe too honest because It was the type of blunt truthfulness that can only come from adolescence. I remember he had this look of embarrassment on his face as he tried to whisper as he said, “It’s because— you’re poor!”
My first reaction upon hearing this news was, “I am? I’m poor?” I wasn’t angry. I mean I had a really fast car, and by 1980s standards I had managed to outfit it with a pretty impressive sound system. I had worked hard and bought all that stuff on my own, how in the world could I be “poor”? You can see how this could be confusing to a 16 year old, right?
I’m pretty sure that I had only ever pictured the “poor” as living somewhere else in the world where people were starving or in the middle of war, or some kind of natural catastrophe. And up until that point in my life I had assumed the word “poor” only made reference to one’s financial condition. This will show you how naive I was, because until then I had not yet understood that term as a social status. I just thought some people have lots of money and some people have less—- and that was that. And this was the first time I had ever had experience with the word poor being equated with some kind of moral deficiency in others to be avoided.
Standing there in that parking lot with my friend I remember feeling embarrassed, not so much by what he said, but because I could tell that he felt sorry for me. But mostly I was sad, because a door had been closed. I knew it meant I would never get a chance to know those folks. They would never get a chance to know me—because of my Zip Code. Her father did not know anything about me as a person or whether or not I was a good or bad influence. He simply knew one thing: where I was from—and that was all he thought he needed to know.
This was a painful moment of self awareness that did not happen to me until I was 16. But the truth is there are many people in the world and many people in this country, whose whole lives has been marked by an awareness that they’ve always been evaluated and judged by one thing, whatever it is, and that’s all others want to know about them–end of story, it’s settled, enough information—move on.
Now, what that man knew about me wasn’t inaccurate. I did grow up where I grew up, but there was a whole lot more to me than that.
Sometimes what we know isn’t wrong. It just isn’t enough. And that one thing we know— prevents us from knowing anything else. It keeps us from seeing what else is right in front of us.
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear Jesus talking about being the Bread of Life, coming down from heaven, like manna, the gift of daily bread that sustained God’s people in the wilderness.
And instead of trying to go deeper and figure out what he meant by that, or really what it meant for them, we’re told the people started saying, “Hold up, now. Wait a second: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
This actually is a theme that occurs in all four Gospels. Each of the other three Gospels tell how something similar happened when Jesus returned to the village of Nazareth where he grew up. And each Gospel account has a slightly different way of describing how people responded to him.
In Matthew we hear this response: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?”
In Mark we hear essentially the same thing, but instead of calling him the carpenter’s son, they say, “Is not this the Carpenter?” And in Luke’s Gospel we hear, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”
But I love John’s Gospel because it is surely the most Southern of responses to Jesus. Instead of just saying, “We know his parents and his people.” We hear: “We know his Mam-maw and Pawpaw.”—Isn’t this the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know.
All of this was true. No doubt, some of these folks probably had business dealing with a well known builder like Joseph. They knew Joseph’s family and his occupation and even had watched Jesus, as the eldest child in the family grow up and apprentice in the family business before starting this roaming teaching adventure. There’s nothing about any of that which was false, but it stood in the way of them knowing anything else about Jesus. They couldn’t get past the one thing they knew, and it prevented them from being able to receive the blessing that God was trying to offer them.
Isn’t that how prejudice always works? It not only hurts others, but it also actually hurts us when it prevents us from being open to learning and receiving something more than what we know.
The great tragedy of these responses is that they missed Jesus. They missed the gift that God was trying to give them in Jesus.
So, I told you the story of the man who found out one thing about me and decided that was enough, that was all he needed to know, but here’s the thing about that. In doing so, I can easily be guilty of doing the same thing he did. It would be easy to reduce him to the one thing I know about him and judge him by that and write off every other possibility about him forever.
The truth is, surely there was more to him than one moment of prejudice. Who knows where he had been, or what he had been through, but over the years I have thought about him and prayed for him in the hope that maybe he changed and grew—like all of us have to, right?
I mean isn’t that great Christian hope of redemption that we can grow and change and there’s more to our story than being forever stuck in calcified ways of being?
And the point of today’s Gospel reading isn’t so we can sit back and judge the people we hear about for being judgemental. Who knows how many of them later saw something more in him and became followers of Jesus? The point of this story is to help us ask ourselves where and how in our own lives are we letting the one thing we know about someone keep us from knowing anything else? Where and how are our own prejudices robbing us and diminishing us from being able to receive what God is offering to us today?
Because here’s the thing: I can grow. You can grow. We all have the capacity to develop and receive what we possibly couldn’t before. This is today’s good news about the generosity of God.
May God grant us tenders hearts, open hearts, to receive the Bread of Life, which is always just beyond what we know today.