The Old Blue Couch

The world is a dangerous place. I spend a lot of my time in a realm that is generally safe. The world of books and fantasy movies. The world of Christians discussing things like the Bible. The most dangerous thing that I do on a regular basis is get behind the wheel of my car. Not because I drive dangerously… because other people do. So when it comes to fear, I don’t encounter it as much as I know a lot of people do. At least not the gut wrenching fight or flight kind of fear. My pulse doesn’t get really elevated, my palms don’t get sweaty very often. But here’s the thing about fear… Just because I’m not experiencing immediate symptoms doesn’t mean that I’m not operating from a place of fear. It just means that I have learned how to navigate my fears and cope with them in a different way than fighting or running away. Sometimes that can be a good thing, a healthy thing. However, sometimes it’s not. Especially when our own fears create behavior that is detrimental to society and to people with whom we are meant to bear Christian witness.

When I was a little guy we lived in a town not too far outside of the city. It was a fine place to live by all of my standards. It was a pretty basic lower middle class type of place. We lived in a row home just about a block off of the main drag in town. And when you walked up our front steps and walked in the front door, you could take a look to the right and see them sitting right there. Our couches. Nice blue couches that my parents had just bought, both positioned so that you could see the old wooden console TV with ease. It was on those couches that I watched many a Disney movie for the first time. Where my mom nursed my baby sister. We watched the first episodes of The Simpsons, The X-Files. It’s where I watched news reports of the invasion of Kuwait, and saw footage of tanks rolling into the Middle East. I watched that old show “America’s Most Wanted.” Sitting on those couches was where a man in a box taught me to be afraid… of people.

Specifically I was afraid of murderers. But what I have learned by looking back is that I was afraid of more than just murderers that the FBI was looking for and asking for help looking for on TV. I was afraid of people who might be murderers in my own town. What I unconsciously learned was that people who looked or acted different than me might be the bad guys.

And here’s the thing, this isn’t just a problem facing 6 year olds who are watching TV shows they most definitely are not old enough to be watching. Fear of the “other,” whoever the other might be, is a problem as old as time. So while for us in a 2020 context the other might be someone of a different race, a different religion, the police, members of the LGBTQ community, or even our neighbor who has (in our opinion) ugly campaign signs in their front yard, there has almost always been a fear of the other in the world. Ever since Cain his brother Abel because he was afraid God loved him more we have seen this issue. Unfortunately, for a long long time, the Bible has been used to reinforce racism and others focused phobias because it is misunderstood.

The Old Testament has a lot of passages about other nations being enemies and strict commands from God for Israelites not intermarry with the surrounding nations. While all of these commands were given in order to prevent Israel from wandering from God, somehow over generations the message got mistranslated and taught wrong. Years of exile and 400 years of political upheaval in what was once the nation of Israel left Jews with a new teaching about their Greek and Roman neighbors. They were enemies. The occupation. They were referred to as dogs, sinners, unclean. This mindset was reinforced by the teachings of the very legalistic Pharisees. And then one day, a new teacher came along.

Loving Enemies

This new guy was, you guessed it, Jesus. And Jesus went up on to a mountain, much like when Moses had climbed a mountain to receive the original law from God in the Exodus story. And on that mountain Jesus began to teach about that very same law, what it meant, and how to apply it. And so this is how he begins this section of teaching:

The New International Version Chapter 5

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor z and hate your enemy.’

The New International Version Chapter 5

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor z and hate your enemy.’

Matthew 5:43 NIV

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

Now Jesus is calling out a popular teaching in the synagogue that was a half truth. ‘Love your neighbor” comes from “love your neighbor as yourself.” Hate you enemy does not come from the Hebrew Scriptures. So he says I know that you’ve been hearing this your whole life, but I’ve got something new. So he goes on:

Matthew 5:44 NIV

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

Now to us that sounds more like the kind of teaching we are accustomed to. We might not like it, but we at least know that this is the kind of upside-down irrational stuff that Jesus said. But maybe when you hear this you have the same question as probably everyone that was there on that day was asking… Why? So Jesus goes on...

Matthew 5:45–48 NIV

that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Now I think that it is important to clarify a couple of things. To Jesus’s Jewish audience, the term neighbor was reserved for people who were from their community. They could very well live next to someone whom they did not consider their neighbor. Essentially Jewish people were their neighbors, and everyone else was not. And an enemy is anyone with whom there is any level of hostility. As I said earlier, these groups- Jews and Greeks had levels of natural enmity between them. During the period of time between the Old and New Testaments the Jews fought bitterly with their Greek oppressors. The Greeks had desecrated the temple, which caused a Jewish revolt which is commemorated each year with the festival of Hanukkah.

So Jesus is saying hey, those other people, those non-Jewish people, the Occupation - if you want to truly be the “children of God” that you claim to be, you’re gonna have to pray for them. Because God gives to them as well. They benefit from the sun and rain and are given to provide them with life. He’s saying be better. Be better than the tax collectors and the Pagans that you are so quick to hold a grudge against. He saying if you spent your time caring for the “other” among you, you might not have as much time to fear them.

The fear that Jesus’s audience had towards non-jewish people has the same general DNA as our fears today. So while we might not be Jews hating on Greeks, we have our own “enemies.” People who don’t look like, act like, or think like we do. And I’ll be honest, this is something that is hard to even admit to ourselves, let alone to get out into the open air about. But here are the 3 basic assumptions that create our fear of the other.

“Fear of the Other” DNA

The other is dangerous.

The other will create scarcity in my life.

The other should become like me.

So lets dig into these a little more.

The Other is Dangerous

First of all, lets get this straight… sometimes this is true. But it’s not because someone is different than us. We all have the capability of being dangerous. But we are conditioned by the news, TV, and movies to believe that race rather than circumstances is what makes someone dangerous.

You see my family growing up had a dirty little secret. Draped over the back of the loveseat of those old blue couches you would always find a festive blanket. My mom would change it out depending on the season and the style of decor she was going for. For years I thought it was just a way of being fancy. And it was, but you see those fancy throw blankets covered up something.

One night, while my mom and my sister and I were out of town visiting family, my then step-father woke up in the middle of the night. And when he looked out the window he saw a black man standing on the corner across the street from our home. What went through his mind I can only speculate. But he retrieved his handgun, and went down into the living room, expecting to do God knows what. However, at some point he tripped and the gun went off. He shot the couch. And those blankets for years covered the bullet hole.

I think at the core of the incident was fear, fear that was informed by racism. Fear that could have gotten someone hurt. And I think that this is the same kind of fear that Jewish folks live in. The Greeks hadn’t proven themselves to be very neighborly in the past. And although the Romans were in charge now and pretty much let them have their own culture, the Jewish way of life was being threatened. Laws about purity were harder and harder to follow. Rome governed with a heavy hand. The king they had placed in charge had already killed every baby under a certain age just 30 years ago in an attempt to kill Jesus… Just like the pharoah had killed all of the baby boys when they were in Egypt. Oh they saw the writing on the wall. They knew how this story went.

All one needs to do in order to see this played out is to turn on the news. Talk to a Muslim or even Sikh or Indian neighbor about how they have been treated in America since 9/11. Talk to families who live just on the other side of Union St. about what it’s like for their kids to go to school in Dunedin. Talk to Marqueis McGlockton’s family and friends, who’s killer tried to use Florida’s Stand your Ground Law to justify shooting him in a parking lot 1 mile down the road from here, because he “feared for his life.” Fear of the other, although occasionally understandable, does not justify stereotyping of an entire group and preventative justice.

But sometimes we aren’t afraid of physical harm that someone else will bring us, sometimes we are simply afraid that their presence will mean that there won’t be enough of whatever to go around.

The Other will Create Scarcity

Lets face it, this is the rhetoric of our times. I don’t know how to solve the immigration crises, but I do know that there is a fear that new people coming to America will take jobs away from people who are already here. This isn’t new, and I’m pretty sure that it isn’t true. But the fear of scarcity has driven nation to clash against nation, people group to clash against people group, and person to clash against person since, well the first murder. Cain killed Abel because he thought that God’s blessing of Abel would cause a shortage of how much he could bless Cain.

But this is a lie. It is a lie that is believed so deeply in the core of our humanity that our entire existence has caused it to happen. People with both power and a fear of scarcity have gather up resources, creating shortages and scarcity that God never intended. He intended for all of his creation to have enough to survive. The human desire to control God’s generous gifts to all of humanity is both the source of this fear and the cause of actual scarcity in the world. Later on in his teaching Jesus has these words:

Matthew 6:25–27 NIV

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

What Jesus is saying is this: There is enough to go around. The poor and the immigrant aren’t going to take anything away from us that God hadn’t given to us to begin with. And I can’t stress this point enough. If as a church we operate as people who fear reaching out and touching our community because serving and being the people of Christ to the world might mean that we don’t have enough for ourselves, then we aren’t actually functioning as the body of Christ. The early church operated on the premise that those who had gave to support those who lost everything when they chose to follow Jesus. They were worried about each other, what they could do to actively seek the welfare of the community around them. But of course they did not always operate from a place devoid of fear. At some point, they realized that Greeks and Romans wanted to be a part of this movement as well.

The Other Should Become like Me

There was quite a lot of controversy when the non-Jewish people started to come to Christ. What must be done? Christianity was considered a sect of Judaism, so it seemed as though Gentiles (non-jews) may need to become Jewish (both physically and spiritually) in order to be a part of the church. This would require adherence to the law of Moses, as well as circumcision for males as these were the outward signs that one observed the Jewish faith.

However, once the matter was debated, It was decided that this was absurd. Here is what happened in Acts:

Acts 15:5–9 NIV

Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.” The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.

Do you see it? While men see circumcision and keeping of the law as a means of inclusion; God sees the heart and God purifies the heart.

I think you know what this means in our American context. I won’t harp on it. I’ll just ask you this… are you more comfortable around people who adhere to the norms of the culture you grew up in? Does a person of another race wearing a suit look different to you than someone of that same race wearing clothing that reflects their own culture?

And as Christians do we celebrate the diversity of the Kingdom of God or do we hope that others will conform to our traditional American church culture? Are we afraid that people with different ideas, different ways of speaking, and different ways of living outside of the church are going to come in and threaten what we have been doing?

The Couch Returns

Because here’s the deal folks. These are really tough questions, and if all of this is kind of making you feel a little bit uncomfortable, that’s a good thing. As Christians we need to remember that Christianity is not and American Religion. It is not a white religion. We are not members of some exclusive club that is closed to people who think, talk, dance, or sing differently than we do. Even people who are not Christians are not the enemy. Because the Bible -- this is so important — the Bible doesn’t start out with the existence of “the other.” We did that. In fact the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not about Israel at all. They are about all of humanity. And the last Chapters of Revelation are also about all of humanity.

You see we have manufactured the divides that exist in the world. Jesus has made the way for us to heal that divide. The cross is capable of bringing all people together. The cross is the great equalizer. It levels the playing field, it makes us all equal in God’s eyes, and God loves us all. And in order for us to make God’s love evident and visible in our lives and in our world we must heed the words of the Apostle John who said this:

1 John 4:17–19 NIV

This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.

John makes it pretty clear — afraid of someone? Love them. Actively seek their welfare. Jesus, hanging on the cross looked out for the welfare of those who put him there saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” That radical kind of love will drive out fear, that radical kind of love will show us the shared humanity that we have with another, that radical kind of love will allow the image of God in us to recognize the image of God in others.

You see that couch, the one with the bullet hole that reminded my family of a night that fear won, stayed with us for a long time. It moved with us to our next home. And we sat and watched TV on that couch. My mom read me the Bible sitting on that couch. We couldn’t afford to get rid of that couch. And the ironic thing is that it was a sleeper sofa. It was a piece of furniture literally designed to make a home more accommodating to guests. For us it was a reminder of something sinister, just underneath the surface of a beautiful throw blanket.

And so this is what I want you to look at. What’s your blue couch, the one you just can’t afford to get rid of. That reality hiding underneath a beautiful throw blanket. Because we all have them, and I think that naming them will help you to let go of your fear of the other.

So like Jason introduced last week, today I am going to teach you something practical that you can do in every situation to alleviate your fear of people who are different than you. We are going to have a time of Greeting. And while you are passing the peace of Christ to one another, instead of just saying “peace” or “hello” hold the embrace for a moment. Think of one thing that you have in common with that person.

Today should be easy. But my challenge is that all of this week, in your interactions in the world, take a look around. Notice the people around you. Instead of focusing on your differences from them, find the similarities and celebrate them. Remember that our story is one of a God who came to heal the divide in our world, who invites us to be a part of that mission by loving those who are different from us because we know that in God’s eyes we are all the same.