 Dr. Carl Price |
Belonging:
A Word to Remember
Sermon:
Scripture: |
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A few years ago, a story
appeared in the New York Times entitled “He Would
Like to Belong.” The story was about a small boy who was
riding on a bus. He was sitting on the longer back seat,
between two women. The boy kept edging his way closer to the
woman on his left, who was dressed in gray. Other riders
assumed that he was traveling with her. In his inching closer
to the one woman, he did not notice that when he had drawn his
feet up on the seat, his muddy shoes were rubbing against the
dress of the lady seated on the other side. The second lady leaned
over and politely asked the woman in gray if she would ask her
little boy to take his feet off the seat. The mud was staining
her dress. The woman in gray gave the boy a small shove and replied, “He’s not my boy. I never saw him before.” The boy squirmed and
straightened up, letting his feet dangle over the front of the
seat. He lowered his eyes and said, almost in a whisper,
"I'm sorry I got your dress dirty. I didn't mean
to." The first woman was a bit
embarrassed herself and said, “Oh, that’s all right.”
And then she asked him, “Are you going somewhere. .
.alone?” “Yes,” he said. “I
always go alone. There isn’t anyone to go with me. I don’t
have a mom or dad. I live with Aunt Clara and she says that
Aunt Mildred ought to help take care of me, so when she gets
tired of me and wants to go someplace, she sends me over to
stay with Aunt Mildred.” The woman asked, “Are
you on your way to Aunt Mildred’s now?” The boy continued, “Yes,
but sometimes Aunt Mildred isn’t home and I have to wait
outside until she gets back. I hope she is home today because
it looks like it might rain.” The woman felt a lump in
her throat and said, “You are a very little boy to be
shifted around like that. You could get lost.” The child replied, “Oh,
I never get lost. But I get lonesome sometimes. So when I see
someone I think I would like to belong to, I sit real close
and snuggle up a little bit and pretend that I belong to them.
That’s what I was doing when I got your dress dirty. I was
pretending that I belonged to that other lady and I forgot
about my feet.” The woman put her arm around the boy and
hugged him very hard. He wanted to belong to somebody and in
her heart of hearts she wished that he belonged to her. (Story
told in Lectionaid, July 17, 1994, p.11-12. No author
listed.) Wanting
to belong; it is one of the most powerful forces in
human life. That is one of the lessons that ethnic groups in
our society are reminding us about these days. For the past
few years, we have been hearing new importance placed on some
of the very things that once gave them their greatest
difficulties—race, color, language, nationality. In short,
they are stressing being a part of their heritage, claiming
that to which they belong. In its more negative
manifestations, belonging is the power that drives much of the
carnage and slaughter of our wars. From Bosnia to the Middle
East, the questions are not about the good or evil for which
you are personally responsible, so much as it is about which
group you belong to. There is a small piece of
land on the west side of Jerusalem that is often in the news.
We drove by it on our last visit to the Holy Land on our way
to Bethlehem. It is a rocky valley that our guide, an Arab
Christian, told us has been owned by three Palestinian
families for several generations. Bulldozers were there then,
knocking down the houses; the land had been confiscated by the
Israeli government as a site for a new housing project for
Jewish settlers. That was not because the owners had done
something wrong. It was because the owners are Palestinians
and supposedly their ancestors confiscated
it from Jewish owners centuries before.
And before we point too quickly at the Jewish
government, we might ask about the people that our ancestors
dispossessed in the land in which we live and what has
happened to them. It is often rather much a matter of which
group you belong to, isn’t it? This being the case, it is
important that we listen to what the Gospel tells us about
belonging. It was this thought of belonging that awed the Old
Testament prophets and the writers of the New Testament, as
well: we belong to God. That ownership is affirmed many times.
In fact, when I inquired of my trusty computer concordance, it
came up with 211 references to the phrase “my people.” To
be sure, many of those were in the Old Testament, but the New
Testament affirms that this matter of belonging extends to us
through Christ, as well. As the
lesson for this morning affirms so beautifully: “Once
we were no people, but now we are God’s people.” We do not
need to go inching up to God in pretense or anxious hope; we
are openly and freely affirmed and invited. James
Kavanaugh penned these lines: Once
I thought it was my accomplishments you loved, “Some
destiny that is beyond all reckoning.” That destiny is that
of belonging to God. Beneath the sometimes-shallow meanings
that we attach to belonging, there is the deeper truth that
whatever we are a part of is a part of us; that to which we
belong has the power to shape what we will become. What we
belong to strengthens and encourages and shapes us, much as
the seed of the oak or the redwood shapes the trees. That
power is not as absolute as it is in trees, of course. An oak
cannot become a pine tree; an apple tree cannot bear palms
nuts. I am not saying that you cannot do anything
except mirror the group that you are a part of, but make no
mistake, the power in belonging is very real. There are plenty of
examples of that. Look at how belonging shapes how people
dress. The large number of
acid-washed jeans has nothing to do with them wearing
better or lasting longer or keeping you warmer in winter or
dryer in the rain. It is a symbol of belonging. No prep
school, no private club, no military establishment is as
ruthless in their insistence on the “right uniform” as the
teenage culture of the day. If you don’t believe me, ask a
young person who doesn’t have the uniform! I remember one
young woman telling how, a few years before, she had scrimped
and saved to buy a pair of Jordache jeans. The first time she
wore them she was told, very scornfully, by someone who had
evidently made a study of
stitching patterns, “Those are last year’s!” To
say that she was crushed would be an understatement. It was
not about blue jeans; it was about belonging. And, of course,
it can be about the width of the lapels on suits or the length
or cut of skirts or the labels on — anything. I heard a story of two
lady golfers in a posh British country club. As they played
near a patch of woods, a man leaped out of the bushes wearing
nothing but a bowler hat. One lady asked him if he was a
member of the club. When he said that he wasn’t, she bent a
golf club over his head. Belonging is what really
matters. You
can see the shaping power of belonging all around you.
Sometimes it is subtle, and we may deny that we are really
being shaped since it is bringing us what we want at the
moment. But the power is there. The language, the dress, the
behavior, the likes and dislikes—they all become a part of
us because that is what we have given ourselves to be a part
of. And it isn’t just about shaping the surface of things.
People do all kinds of things as a part of a group that they
would never do alone. But belonging can have
powerful effects for good, as well. Dr. Fred Craddock tells of
a conversation he once had with the owner of a small
restaurant in Tennessee. The man learned that Craddock was a
preacher and came over and sat down at his table to talk with
him and tell him a story. He told about a boy who
had grown up in a small town in eastern Tennessee, not too far
from where they were. His mother was never married, and this
was in a day when there was a heavy social stigma attached to
being a child in that situation. At school, some of the older
boys called him a name that he came to hate more than any
other word: bastard. When he and his mother went to town to
shop, there was always head turning and whispering that he
knew had to do with them. He
wanted to attend Sunday School, but the teacher didn’t seem
to want him in the class, although that may have been his
over-sensitized feelings more than really the case. But there
was this talk about his possible bad influence on the other
children. One day a new preacher
came to the church, and the boy decided to go to the worship
service to see what the new preacher might be like. He sat in
the back of the sanctuary, trying to look invisible. When the
service was over, as he started past the preacher who was
greeting at the door, the new preacher caught his eye and
called out to him, “Say,” he said, “don’t I know
you?” The boy absolutely froze.
He felt like he was going to die. The new preacher had only
been in town a few days and he had already found out about
him! The preacher came up to him and put his hand on his
shoulder and exclaimed, “I do know you! I can see the
family resemblance. You are a child of God!” Then the
preacher put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and added,
“Son, you have quite an inheritance. Now go out there and
claim it!” When the story was over,
the restaurant owner added, “I was that boy.” And Dr.
Craddock adds that what made the story even more powerful was
that the man who was talking with him was a former governor of
the state of Tennessee. I’ll say
it again: that to which we belong has the power to shape what
we will become. So the lesson of the Gospel is that we are to
become like who we really are—children of God. Like the boy
that Fred Craddock told about, we may feel like slipping out
without being noticed; but at another level of our heart, we
are like that other child on the bus, really wanting to
snuggle up a little closer. So
if you didn’t know it before, remember it from this day
forth: you belong to God. So become like the One to whom you belong!
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