A Sermon for Judson Memorial Church
February 11, 2007
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Dangerous Home
Part of me wanted to get up today and declare that it was I who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's child - just to join the crowd, but also to make the obvious point. She is a part of me; I am a part of her. She is us and we are she. I just couldn't be that mean even if it might get a good laugh. Her life and death was hardly her own. She reminds me ever so much of all that sexism has opposed. The self-loathing. The beauty, which was so much for others that she didn't even know it about herself. The starving. The letting others use her. The not eating. The diet pills. So much of her person was invaded by so many, including me and you and our distortions of humanity. She does give me a way in to my topic - which is that there is no such thing as a person. Each other, our times, and our intimates all positively and negatively invade us. Usually the invasion is negative, but I imagine a world where we work together to help each other be well.
Thanks to David Gonzalez for taking us to other worlds today, worlds that don't show up on Expedia or even on Wikipedia. These are the worlds of the nobodies and the homeless, the people whom God may love especially but most of us in this room don't even see. They are not others. They are us. Pogo was the first theologian of relatedness. Today I want to lay out a few lights in the desert and show a way forward.
We have been following Joseph for weeks now. We have seen him happy and special, put into a pit by his own brothers, fathering a whole new generation, and today we see him distributing the corn as a rich man. Did this text have to show up in the very week where the study comes out about how good immigrants are at corn and new businesses? That study shows that new immigrants are a powerful nation-wide economic engine. Did this text also have to appear when the price on becoming legal is about to double? It now costs $350 to file your papers and to become legal. The government wants to double the price. That is a very strange way of doing business. But it also goes to another dimension of the fiction of person: if I have papers, am I more of a person than someone who doesn't?
My brief message today is for those of us who didn't have to pay for our papers. It is a series of conjectures about who God is in a world where some have to buy and others just receive citizenship, where women who can have anything they want are miserable. These conjectures deal with the deceptive nature of our autonomy and our citizenship; we act like we belong when really it is luck and grace that allow us to be here. I want to become philosophical and theological and take the raw detail of what we just heard in David's poems and stories into a much larger realm - but I think that realm is the source of the trouble.
We live in a dangerous home when we think that we are individual persons, with rights that originate there. We do have rights, but they originate in a larger home, beyond nation and beyond individual merit. That home is a shelter, not a danger.
Proposition one: There is no such thing as a person. In the Latin, persona is something we wear to show who we are. In the Greek, prosopon - the derivative of persona - the meaning is a mask. Individualism is a set-up for declaring some people legal and others illegal, some things good and other things bad. Instead, what a person is, and individuals are, is relatedness. Relatedness is the constitutive dimension of human, not person.
Proposition two: God is also relatedness. God is presence, energy flow, utterance, and flux. God is not other, but in; not above, but through. God is with us, as we say at Christmas, in Jesus.
Proposition three: Neither God nor human is singular; both are interactive, energetic, connection. Indeed neither man nor woman, foreigner or native, legal or illegal, is any more a person than any other of them, once we get rid of the interesting deception of the individual and see it as the mask it is.
Consider Conspirando, a women's environmental organization in Santiago - "Those who breathe together." Their breakthrough thought: the Planet is the great lung of life. We breathe with it. Gustavo Gutierrez said it another incarnational way: there is no hierarchy of sacred and profane. All is sacred. All is profane. There is no outside.
In addition to there being no person, there is no outside. Watch out for the Cartesians: I think, therefore I am. No way. Instead, we are part of a greater whole and the whole is also a part of us. Polyphonic, multi-colored, multi-voiced wholeness: that is the nature of humanity. In that broader, breathing, moving picture, individuals are finally safe to wear masks and have personas and be persons. Otherwise we are dead and devastated, and we go on to deal death and devastation to each other and the planet.
A new ad says it all: a single good-looking man stands facing the camera, with a train behind him, heading towards him, and says, "What global warming?" He dodges his individual person out of the way of the oncoming train and then we watch it run over his daughter, eight years old, standing there right behind him.
The most dangerous home of all is living a fiction and a lie. We can do better.
Relatedness as the constitutive dimension of humanity attends to the child as well as the self. Both are saved.
What a piece of work is person? And what a fiction. Amen.
This sermon is part of "The Spiritual Experience of Immigration" series, seen through the eyes of Joseph, one of the first immigrants.
Ancient Testimony:
1. BORN INTO A PLACE AND HOME
In Genesis 30: 22 - 24, Joseph is born the son of Rachel and Jacob.
2. BORN INTO A WELCOMING FAMILY AND IDENTITY
In Genesis 37: 3, Joseph is given a coat of many colors.
3. DISRUPTION: THE OLD HOME DISAPPEARS
In Genesis 37: 18 -36 Joseph is sold into Egypt by his brothers.
4. THE NEW HOME HAS DANGERS
Joseph sells corn to his brothers.
5. THE IMMIGRANT MAKES HIM OR HERSELF USEFUL.
In Genesis 41: 1 - 36 and 37 - 50 Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dreams and becomes an Administrator of Egypt.
6. THE FAMILY REUNITES IN A NEW LAND
In Genesis 42 - 45, Joseph's brothers come to him for food.
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