THE INS AND THE OUTS John M. Buchanan
Matthew 15%21-28 TEV Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 13, 1951 Columbus, Ohio

There is no more painful experience than rejection; to be "in" one moment
and "out" the next. It can happen in a variety of ways, . sometimes petty, trivial:
engaging in light, social conversation and suddenly sensing that the person with
whom you are talking is no longer listening, but instead is shifting attention to
a point eight degrees over your right shoulder where souebody more important is
standing. Sometimes it is more serious business: a notice from a university that
you were not admitted, a defeat at the polls, a demotion to second string, being
overlooked for an appointment you particularly wanted. Professional baseball
players often suffer traumatic grief when the team for which they have played for
ten years suddenly trades them, with about as much sentiment as trading in a used
car. At the executive level in business, that dynamic happens with enough frequency
to stimulate a bit of paranoia. One day you're in; the next day you're told you
are no longer needed: thank you, your job is abolished, you're out.

Sometimes rejection happens for reasons beyond the control of the person being
rejected, My young friends this summer, while participating in a Seminar on Peace
at Iona, became quite agitated when they sensed that their views weren't being
taken seriously because of their age. Young people don't like that whenever it
happens and I don't blame them. Those o€ u® on the far side of thirty didn't
like it at all when the radical student revolutionaries of the last decade sug-
gested that we were not to be trusted. The elderly resent, rightfully, rejection
which comes with age. Blacks will no longer passively accept rejection based on
race, Women have been excluded, but no longer.

It is always a threatening, painful experience to be rejected. The second
most frequently stolen book in the New York Public Library system is Emily Post.
The most frequently stolen book is the Bible. Both have to do with rejection and
acceptance. (See Ernest Campbell, Locked in @ Room with Open Doors, p.13).

And sometimes rejection is experienced at a deep level which can only be de-
scribed as theological, Sigmund Freud taught that feelings of guilt and inad-
equacy have their genesis in the infant fear of rejection by parents. An infant
is profoundly influenced, Freud believed, by the fear of losing the parent's
love. Rejection is the constant threat. One of the most helpful insights I ever
encountered was Paul Tournier's suggestion that people have always projected that
psycho-dynamic into their relationship with God, with disastrous results. What a
wilderness, what a wasteland, to go through life thinking that God withholds His
love, acceptance, that our Creator rejects us - His children. If rejection is that
hurtful, and the threat of rejection that powerful, obviously we will work very
hard to avoid it.

The way we protect ourselves is by belonging to a tribe, a community in
which we belong, in which there is no juestion about our acceptability. It's in-
teresting, sometimes amusing, sometimeg embarassing, to dig around in your memory
and identify your various tribes and the ways they provided the safety of accept-~-
ance and a sense of identity for you. Martin A. Marty, University of Chicago
historian and Lutheran theologian, has written a delightful and touching memoir
called "By Way of Response" in which he talks about his formative community and
its importance. His happened to be a Lutheran church in a rural community in
Minnesota, Marty is sharply critical of people who forget the importance of their
tribe. During a speaking engagement at a Roman Catholic university one time,

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“some students cheered a blasphemously furious ex-priest who was scorning Mother
Church." Marty writes, "I asked them why the applause. ‘You'll never understand’,
said one, 'what an identity crisis the Catholic Church gave each one of us.’ I
wondered aloud if they knew how lucky they were ever to have belonged to anything
that was potent enough to give them an identity over which to have a crisis." (p.19).

The tribe gives identity and a place for security and personal acceptance.
The tribe also, by its very nature, is in the business of rejecting outsiders, What
a pity! The very community that tells me who I am, does so by telling me who I am
not, What a profound but healthy shock occurred when the people whites had used
for hundreds of years to define who they were and were not, looked across that
barrier of deep cultural racism so subtle we weren't even aware of it, and said
very simply, "Black is beautiful". Marty comments...'"The legacy of most tribes is
mixed. Four centuries after the Reformation we did still fight battles against the
Pope. But the people of the Pope, who we were taught was the very Antichrist, never
did anything worse than storm down the hill from Guardian Angels School to defeat
the basketball teams of the true visible church on earth." (p.23). The tribe be-
stows a sense of identity and performs the very important social function of insulat-
ing the individual from the threat of rejection.

The tongue-in-cheek best seller of the year was The Official Preppy, Handbook
edited by a very enterprising and now very wealthy Lisa Birback. The book describes
how to be "in" in a way that is amusing and always on the periphery of the truth.
The introduction, titled, appropriately, "Initiation" reads, "It is the inalienable
right of every man, woman and child to wear khaki. Looking, acting, and ultimately
being Prep is not restricted to an elite minority lucky enovgh to have an ancestor
or two on the Mayflower. You dor't even have to be a registered Republican. In a
true Democracy everyone can be upper class and live in Connecticut. It's only
fairt" f{p.11).

There are chapters on Proper Pets (Labrador Retrievers have it all over
Poodles), schools, courses, sports, vacations, cars, what to smoke, drink, wear
and how to spend leisure time. It is, according to the handbook, ultimately a
matter of taste and tact. If you have it, you're in, If you learn it, you may
get in. If you don't and/or won't, you're out, £Grever,

Fun, half true, good summer reading. Except for the fact that the reverse
side is rejection; that this and every tribe exists in a sense by defining who
doesn't qualify to get in. There is a sense in which a person who takes Jesus
Christ seriously can never be totally comfortable with that. We may laugh at it,
participate in it, but for people who know a little about Jesus it causes a nagging
twitch in the soul that won't go away.

It is easy for religion to become a tribe, Judaism, as institution, struggled
with it across the centuries. In the very beginning, their identity as God's
people was itself a demarcation line between Israel and the rest of the human race,
The intent was not to be exclusive, but the tension was unceasing. Rituals of
cleanliness, rules about diet and hygiene contributed to the survival of the
nation and the highly developed sense of identity. Conversely, the same cultic
apparatus could be used to categorize those outside as unclean, unacceptable.

Jesus encountered it consistently in His ministry. Almost immediately He got
in trouble by breaking down the barriers His people used for their own sense of
acceptability and their rejection of the rest of the world. Our text this morning,

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for instance, tells about an incident involving a Canaanite woman. She was a
Gentile, unclean, clearly an outsider. She came to Jesus to intercede for a sick
daughter who is described as “possessed by a demon'"', The point of this story,
however, is not demon possession nor miraculous healing, but how Jcsus dealt with
this Gentile, this outsider, It's an interesting incident. Let's look at it.

The woman asked for help and His first response was to do and say nothings.
His disciples, on the other hand, begged Him tO send her away. One has to wonder
what there was about this woman so offensive that they begged Him not to get in-
volved. Was she a threat to their identity because she was an outsider? A-second
time she came and knelt and asked for help. This time, after an aside about the
lost sheep of Israel, He said something that sounds barbaric, "It is not fair to
take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." This was a strong resouree<ul
woman and she kept at it..."even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's
table." We liked that, apparently. He called her a person of great faith, and her
daughter was healed.

Scholars have long pondered the meaning of Jesus' harsh response. [I think He
was being sarcastieally literal about the exclusiveness of religion. I think
people did regard her as a little better than a stray dog. I think He verbalized
the worst, most arrogant, stereotype He could, precisely to hold it up to the
purifying licht of God's love. There is a sense in which the most effective antidote
to the worst racism or sexism is simply to bring it out in the open to expose it to
light and common sense,

We can see, in retrospect that He consistently was expanding the borders of
God's Kingdom: no cozy restrictive club for Him, but the whole human race is in-
volved: no exclusive priesthood but fishermen and housewives and tax collectors and
soldiers and prostitutes,

The early Christian church, in tts best moments, followed Him. It vaulted
the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Roman and Greek, slave and free, male and
female, Its literature is breathtaking in scope and expansiveness. "Let no one
boast..." St, Paul wrote, "all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas
or the world or life of death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you
are Christ's; and Christ is God's." (I Cor. 3:21-23).

What a stain in human histcry when Christian people have forgotten the ex-
pansiveness and open-armed acceptance of their Lord. llow sad that we have in the
past bertn our conversations with other religions, not with the acceptance of Jesus,
but the reverse: the assumption that our truth is the whole truth and that failure
to adopt it consigns one eternally to hell, Is there a more arrogant proposition
than that? Martin Marty addresses the traditional Christian approach to Evangelism
with unflinching integrity. He writes: "We were working with an image of God that
itself remained tribalist. God was a predator who sent us out to prey on others,
Though the divine is boundless, we were in a boundary-building profession in the
name of God." (op.cit., p. 54).

The business of Christian religion is to raise the ceiling and expand the
walls and let light in, In society, our business is to cultivate divine discomfort
and perhaps guilt with tribaliam that rejects human beings on any basis - color,
religion, age, sex: to oppose sometimes and at other times to laugh at the silliness
of exclusive tribal tradition. In church, followers of Jesus will cultivate relent-
less discomfort at rituals and customs that shut out, restrict, excommunicate,

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consign to hell, outsiders who happen to be different and to answer the theological
arrogance of those who are certain they know the names on the guest list at the
heavenly banquet and they're on it and you aren't with the gracious patience they
have yet to encounter in religion.

It requires conversion, which sometimes means merely bringing to the surface
the truth we have always known but have kept buried, hidden even, from outselves.
My guess is that even in the middle of working very hard to be accepted by others,
we are plagued by the nagging possibility that once we're in, we'll still feel out.
My guess is that everyone who ever read I'm OK, You're OK knew that you don't feel
"OK" about yourself because someone tells you that you should. My guess is that no
one ever became his or her own best friend because they read a book or were told
that it is possible. My guess, refined through experience, is that we know that
the acceptance we want and need is not available, ultimately, through relationships
with others. Conversion may begin for us when we face that: when we acknowledge
that social acceptability is not salvation.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is radical. It proclaims a truth so fundamental
and so clear that it gets lost, particularly in the institutional and cultural
trappings of the church, It is that in Jesus Christ God has reached over the wall
between the divine and the human: that the gap is closed: that God is vulnerable and
accessible and that ‘1 Jesus Christ He loves and accepts and that people have the
incredible privilege of living their lives in that love and acceptance. Christianity,
at its best, is about grace. It is about a Canaanite woman accepted and her
daughter restored across an ancient wall of racial and religious exclusiveness. It
is about a homesick and lonely son, returning and met on the road and embraced
before he can get his fumbling confession out. At its best Christianity is about
grace - about men and women who are being set free by Jesus Christ from the silly
games of tribalism, to live life as God wants it to be lived.

A group of us experienced something of that this summer when we arrived on
the remote Island of Iona, off the western coast of Scotland. We were tired,
physically and emotionally, and anxious about where we were. The first evening we
worshipped in the Abbey, built in the 13th century, on a spot where Irish monks
came in the 6th century. I was moved to recall that they had come because they
were exiles - and the community they built would therefore be an accepting, wel-
coming home for all. Something about grace happened to us as we sang to the
ancient Irish tune...

"Lord of all kindliness,
Lord of all grace,

Your hands swift to welcome,

Your arms to embrace..."

"Christian faith," Paul Tillich used to say, "is the act of accepting the
fact.that you are accepted by God," That little formula is more complicated
than it sounds. But it does convey the good news. The good news is that God
loves us - just as we are. He has made the outs "ins"; the rejected are
accepted, He is there at our waking and working and homing and sleeping. And
His peace will be the.e - at the end of the day.

Amen,