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A Sermon for Judson Memorial Church
September 17, 2006
Dominique C. Atchison, Judson Church Community Minister
No Child of God Left Behind
No child of God left behind. It's kind of a heavenly version of that Bush administration policy, "No Child Left Behind": Good catch phrase, questionable policy (but that's another sermon for another day). But I think these words are a good way to sum up the parable of the lost sheep that we read for today. No Child of God Left Behind. Chapter 18 of Matthew, where the parable is found, begins with the disciples asking Jesus who is the greatest in the Kingdom of God. Jesus informs them that "these" (the children) are the greatest because of their humility and innocence. By saying that the children are the greatest, Jesus makes the point that not only should his disciples care for children but they should also aspire to be like them.
And it is from this point that Jesus begins to shape this parable of the lost sheep. These children are like the sheep he describes. If one gets lost, the person tending to them should stop everything to find that one. The shepherd should not simply rely on the fact that there are 99 left. This parable speaks specifically in reference to children. But if we think about it I'm sure that Jesus' parable can also serve as a metaphor for humanity or "the children of God". No child of God left behind. If we think of it this way, this parable is definitely relatable to what has and hasn't happen in the year that has pasted since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
In the days following Hurricane Katrina so many of us sat almost paralyzed watching the images on CNN of people wading waste deep in water, bodies floating where streets used to be, people stranded in attics and on their roofs waving at the voyeuristic press that flew by in their news copters. I watched that same footage over, and over again, as I'm sure many of you did also. One of the most memorable images was that of people sitting outside of the convention center cheering, "We want help, we want help!" At first, the reports would say something about the people and how they were suffering. They interviewed the people and we got the stories of some of the individuals. But after a while we saw the same footage without sound and the news reporter or commentator would say something like, "Is the looting out of control in New Orleans?" Or "Fears about rioting rises in the wake of Hurricane Katrina." I watched as these reports came out of looting and violence and it seemed to me that there was, all of a sudden, more of a focus on the criminalization of these people than their humanity. It seemed as if the media and the government wanted to prove that all New Orleans citizens were criminals in order to somehow justify the way that they were left to die in such awful conditions. This is not to say that crimes did not occur in the wake of Katrina and that there wasn't a criminal element that existed in New Orleans pre-Katrina. But what upset me the most about this tragedy is that the people of New Orleans were judged unworthy of relief and/or justice. Even the other people affected by Katrina in other areas of the Gulf talked about the people of New Orleans that way. When I went down to the effected area this past January, you should have heard the way that the people in more affluent parts of Mississippi talked about the people of New Orleans. "Those people over there in New Orleans are just makin' a big fuss over nothin'. They over there lootin' and carryin' on. They should just appreciate what they got and stop complaining." They said this as they sat in their trailers that FEMA sent to them two months after the storm, next to houses that their insurance will eventually rebuild. They said this about people who, 5 months later (and now over a year later) had no trailer, no house, and no assurance from anyone that they will even have a place to come back to.
Yet I can't just blame the media or the government or the people of Mississippi for this sort of stereotyping. Because how many of us either heard someone say or even said ourselves, "I can't believe this is America," implying if it were not America it would be alright for people to suffer; or if it were people from Haiti or Darfur or wherever we thought those mostly African-American people in the Superdome should have been from, they were supposed to suffer and Americans weren't. It is this sort of moral disaster that transformed a natural disaster like Katrina into an even lager disaster of genocidal proportions.
Many said that Katrina forced America to evaluate the issues of poverty and race and I believe this is definitely true. What many of us tried to ignore screamed for our care and attention on August 29th, 2005. It is our collective classism and racism (and other isms) as a nation that has unfortunately divided our country into groupings of official "haves and have-nots". (The 99 percentile sheep verses the 1 percentile) The haves (the rich, the white, the male, the straight, the American, the Republicans) should live while the have-nots (the poor, the black, Latino, Asian and Native, the female, the LGBT identified, the foreigner or immigrant, the progressive or radical) should die. The haves should have food while the have-nots starve. The haves should live in safety as the have-nots fend for their lives in the midst of violence from their neighbors and police. Our culture says: if you are that one lost sheep you are on your own, expect nothing.
I grew up in and now live in a poor, mostly African American and Latino American neighborhood, yet got almost all of my education in very affluent, predominantly white schools. Therefore, I've spent a lot of time straddling the world of the privileged and not so privileged. I have had the privilege and curse of seeing this "left behind" issue from both sides. On the not-so-privileged side, I see a lot of apathetic people who believe that because they are poor and of color that there isn't much that they can do about their surroundings. Too many believe they must accept living in unsafe neighborhoods, or shop in stores where the people taking their money criminalize them, or send their kids to schools where they don't learn and where a fight can lead to death or a police record.
On the other side, I've gone to school with people who live less than a mile away from these situations and instead of lamenting or doing something about it, they celebrate New York for its diversity because they don't have to care about the problems faced by that person of a different race or class that sits next to them. I constantly hear people say things like, "That shouldn't have happened here, this is a good neighborhood", as if in the so-called "bad" neighborhoods violence and drugs and murder should happen.
This way of thinking plagues us as a nation: both the privileged and the not-so-privileged among us. Far too many of us on both sides of the coin believe in this almost Social Darwinist idea that there are certain people who we shouldn't care about. If they are suffering, if they are dying, if they are poor, it's not something to worry or care about because they were among the official "have-nots" and that's the way it should be.
But the ancient scripture we read today shows us another more comforting paradigm in the Godly realm. I am so glad that God sees each of us as equally precious and equally important regardless of all of the devastating divisions we've created. According to this parable of Jesus, we are so important that if that symbolic one out of 100 is missing, is drowning, is dying, if he or she is without food, without shelter or safety, everything should stop until that one metaphorical sheep is found.
I believe that Jesus was present during the storm and in it's aftermath, but I don't think that it was in the way that the Fred Phelps's of the world might think. I don't believe Jesus or God was there, creating the hurricane, because New Orleans had Gay People and Voodoo. I don't have an explanation for why devastation happens and I don't know if God makes things like this happen to punish us or make us learn lessons or if humanity creates them or is it a mixture of both. I don't know if things just sort of happen and God is there just to love us through it. I don't know. I don't know if we can know. We'll probably be discussing and debating theology, theodicy, and Katrina for years to come. But if I could, just for a second, imagine what Jesus would have said or done in the devastating wake of Hurricane Katrina, I believe Jesus would have gathered George W. Bush, and good ol' "Browny" and the rest of FEMA, the governor of Louisiana, and anyone else in the position to help. And after they were gathered he would have told them an up-dated version of the parable of the lost sheep: He might say something like, "See that you do not look down on any of these children of God. If a leader of a nation finds that the there is a certain section of that population is lost suffering, drowning, displaced, and sent far away from their home, living with no clean water, no schools, no hospitals, wouldn't that leader leave the privileged population on the hill to go to the people who are in need? And when he finds the solution to the people's problems, wouldn't she/he rejoice and feels good that he/she has done good work for those people. In the same way your God in heaven never wants to see any of these people suffer and is not willing to see any of the children of God lost.
Ancient Testimony - Matthew 18:10-14
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