All Saints’, Dorval
September 8, 2024
Peter and me with Adam and his family in Montreal, 2019
On the first day of eighth grade, my friend Dale and I were sitting at a table in our homeroom when a new girl appeared in the doorway.
Dale and I, and our two other close friends, Melanie and Katie, were feeling a bit blue that September, because the fifth member of our group, Anna, had moved to Wisconsin at the end of seventh grade.
As I recall it, Dale and I gave each other the briefest of glances, and then both turned toward the new girl and beckoned her toward our table, where she smiled gratefully at us as she sat down. Her name was Sarah, and she quickly became inseparable from the rest of us.
When I used this story in a sermon in a former parish, I sent Sarah a message (via Facebook chat) asking her permission and inviting her perspective on it. And I remarked to her that this story is not without its complications and its shades of grey. Because the fact is, Dale and I were close to the lowest rung on the eighth grade social ladder. She and I, Melanie and Katie were so closely bonded partly because we helped each other survive the bullying and the ostracism. If Sarah had been interested in maximizing her popularity and social success by middle school standards, she should have steered far, far away from us.
As it happens, Sarah, who had just moved to New Haven from a wealthy suburb further down Connecticut’s “Gold Coast,” had never fit in at school either, and she was thrilled to find a group of friends that accepted her for who she was and who enjoyed being offbeat and bucking the rigid middle school social codes. And perhaps she and Dale and I somehow instinctively recognized that about each other, and it was part of our quick, unspoken communication that morning in homeroom.
I doubt that I’m the only one who finds that this morning’s reading from the letter to James puts me in mind of junior high. Showing up as the new face somewhere and being instantly judged on your appearance and possessions, and assigned to a status based on that first impression – it’s all too familiar to anyone who has experienced life in your average classroom.
And it’s no accident that the dog-eat-dog social system of middle school is most clearly displayed in the lunchroom. Eating together tends to cast social patterns into high relief. Who sits with whom? Who eats with whom? Whose proximity raises one’s perceived status, and whose lowers it?
Some of you can probably feel your blood pressure rising as I talk about this. Even decades after one has escaped from the social straitjacket of grade school, it is still easy to summon the anxiety associated with that relentless pressure to conform.
This instinct to form hierarchies, and to exclude others, is certainly nothing new. But the Christians whom James is writing to were supposed to have gotten over all that. At their sacred meal, they were supposed to be equal, all together as beloved children of Christ, with no distinctions based on arbitrary earthly hierarchies. Men, women, slaves, free, rich, poor, Jew, Gentile – there were (at least theoretically) no distinctions at the holy table.
And James – characteristically – has no mercy on those who are importing the toxic status games of the outside world into the Christian assembly. “Do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” he demands. “For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’, have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?”
And in this regard, when I think back to middle school, my memories are not so warm and self-congratulating. Because although I was always pretty far down the social hierarchy, there were those who were even further down. Particularly Adam, the boy who was so lame (in sense in which we used that word in the 90s) that he still brought his pink teddy bear to school in sixth grade. Even I, who refused to give up my pigtails and corduroy jumpers at the same age, was savvy enough to leave my stuffed animals at home.
The story of me and Dale and Sarah in homeroom is gratifying to recall, because on that occasion I welcomed the stranger. My conscience is not nearly so clear when it comes to Adam. I was, frankly, pretty mean to him – and in ways that I knew perfectly well were wrong, even at the time. I remember gleefully joining in once as a group of kids mocked him and threw pieces of pizza at him (in church youth group, no less!!). And when he called in seventh grade and asked me to go to the movies, I laughed at him before hanging up. (Looking back, that may not have been the wisest decision; I was a sophomore in college before getting another date, while Adam has been married for more than twenty years to a delightful woman who looks like a movie star.)
It’s entirely due to Adam’s kindness and generosity that now that we’re adults, he’s happy to spend time with me; his wife is a French teacher and I’ve met up with them and their kids in Montreal more than once.
So, as a kid, while I may have been willing to welcome the new girl when she looked lost and in need of friends, I didn’t do so well when it came to breaking out of the established patterns of middle-school honor and shame and reaching out to the kid whom I had known as the class dweeb since elementary school. I didn’t resist when I got the chance to pass on some of the nastiness that I absorbed on a regular basis to the only person whose status was low enough to allow that. You would think that being an outcast myself would have enabled me to sympathize with someone who was even more of one, but sadly it doesn’t usually work that way.
Unless we decide to make it work that way.
James tells those with social capital to spare, that when those who have none show up in church, they should treat them just like everyone else. This is not just for the sake of charity. This is so that they will come to see these people as human beings, with stories and feelings and dreams of their own. In order to be motivated to overturn the unjust, oppressive order in which some people have value and others do not, those at the top of the heap need to walk a mile in the shoes of those at the bottom. They have to come to understand, in their guts, what it is like. They have to voluntarily cede power for the sake of change.
So make no mistake: James is not simply offering his listeners social advice about how to make things run smoothly at church, or even how to make the system a little kinder and gentler. He is telling them that they need to ditch the system – that the way things are at church, must spread outside the walls of the building and embrace all of society. He is saying that any system that gives some people high value and some people no value, is a sinful system – and that it’s the job of the people to whom the system ascribes high value, to voluntarily choose to share that value with those who have none.
He is saying that the Kingdom of God could not be less like the middle school lunchroom; that there is no room for bullies there; and that it is the stranger and the outcast who must be especially welcomed, included, fed, and loved.
I hope that those of you sitting in the pews today who have just started school again, will go back to your classrooms and lunchrooms and choose to be kinder than you need to be, especially to the kids who are harmless but uncool. And those of us for whom seventh grade is mercifully decades in the rearview mirror – what can we do, to do the same?
Amen.
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