Phillipians 1: 3-11 I thank my God every
time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers
for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day
until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among
you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
It is right for me to think this way
about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in
God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and
confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you
with the compassion of Christ Jesus.
And this is my prayer, that your love
may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to
determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and
blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through
Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
One of my
friends posted a video on Facebook the other day that I found just
fascinating. It was a woman petting a
porcupine. A real live porcupine, the
prickly kind that we usually see as road kill in the spring and that if we do
happen to meet up with them on a hike, we will back away from slowly and
carefully. The kind of animal that if
your dog ever met, you would end up taking a trip to the vet to get a muzzle
full of quills removed from your poor pooch.
I thought
about porcupines being all prickly, and how they are a good animal to reflect
on for Peace Sunday. Truth be told, I
bet on any one given day, people will meet up with someone who will make them
feel like they’ve been hit with a facefull of quills. A neighbor, a friend, a co-worker, who throws
out barbed comments, or takes a swack at you emotionally, or takes the simplest
comment and see it as an attack. They
are prickly. And we wish we could avoid
them or de-barb them or do something, anything, to keep them from hurting us.
Such is the
stuff of warfare. Whenever we take
another human being and assume that we know they are less than us, less
friendly, less righteous, less blameless or pure than us, whenever we label
them as a porcupine or a terrorist or a, well, you fill in the blank, somehow
that dehumanizes them enough that it is okay to discriminate against them. “He’s a bully, she’s a communist, that’s a porcupine”
and we use the label to determine how we will treat them. Take the Syrians in France and Lebanon and
Greece and Turkey. Are they refugees or
are they terrorists? The political
pundits are busy trying to convince us to label human beings that will help
determine our policies, our politics and our personal reactions to the
newcomers who will be coming to Athabasca.
I know what
it’s like to be labelled. In 1981, I
went to the University of Alberta to learn how to become an engineer. While I was there, people would react in
several different ways to my course of study.
Sometimes they would assume that I was a butch tomboy, someone that
Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam” referred to as ‘women in comfortable
shoes’. Sometimes they would assume that
I was just looking for my ‘MRS’ degree, only there to catch a husband. But generally when people found out that I
was in that faculty, they talked to me like I actually had intelligence, and
really saw me for a human being and not just a cute young female. Although people scoff that I had experienced
such labelling, it was only eight years later that a man walked into a Canadian
school for engineers, separated the men from the women, and executed 14 women
for their audacity. The label he applied
to all the women he found was ‘feminist’, and he used that label to scapegoat
and kill them.
The latest
shooting in the states is only one of many.
According to one newspaper, there have been over 12 thousand deaths in
2015 in the US to date due to gun violence, 309 were from mass shootings like
the one this week. 2 ½%. In 2012, the most
recent report on gun violence, Stats Can reported that our rate of gun murders was
7 times lower than that of Americans and had been steadily dropping over all
since 1972.
When we
label others, it gives us permission to think that they are less than
human. Oh, those violent Americans who
can’t control their guns. Oh those
terrorists or those mentally ill people or whatever label we use. Those who we don’t like, those bullies, those
immigrants, those other people that look or sound or smell different than us. Oh
those porcupines
This is not
the way to peace. Labels and blaming don’t
work. Martin Luther King, Jr., a
champion for Christian non-violence, wrote,
The ultimate
weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very
thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of
diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you
may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely
increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies
violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness
cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate:
only love can do that.
Paul met the
Philippians with love. He remembered
them with love. He encouraged them with
love, and he hoped they would do the same with the people they met. They were different than him, but that didn’t
stop him sharing the good news that there is an alternative to the cycle of
violence. “It is right for me to think
of you in this way, because you reflect back the love to me.” If you get a
chance to see the video of someone petting the porcupine, you will see that
they do it with love. Protection, so
they won’t get the point the hard way, but love. Even porcupines can respond to love. The reality is that we all have moments when
we are anything but pure and blameless, without offence. We are all porcupines.
I’ll never
forget the day that a young man said to me, “did you know that once a month, we
have a fight and it coincides with your hormonal cycle?” I instantly
transformed into a vicious porcupine, spewing angry denials. It takes a lot of
patience and honesty to learn to function without spewing blame as fast as
porcupines spread quills when feeling scared or angry. And interestingly, the word Paul uses for ‘blameless’
can be translated as ‘without bumps’.
Without quills, perhaps. And what
if we rethought blameless to not be the picture of innocence and perfection but
instead thought of it as someone who chooses not to blame others. How do you pet a porcupine? By treating them
with love, by being trustworthy and patient, and by being well-protected with
thick leather clothing just in case. When we do that, porcupines tend to react to
being petted like this:
Don’t take
their barbs personally, remember that some porcupines need professional
handling, and be honest with yourself when you are feeling prickly to remember
that none of us will be perfect, at least not until the Day of Christ comes and
will make all blameless. Thanks be to
God that the Day of Christ will be a day of great love, and that Christ will
love us regardless of how much like a porcupine we might be. Then we too will dance like a happy, petted
and loved porcupine!
1 comment:
Thanks for the reflection
, insight, and imagery.
Great message.
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