Being invisible

There’s a picture book about a kid who feels invisible.   Every day Brian goes to school, and no one notices him.  He draws pictures that nobody sees, and he eats lunches all by himself and no one picks him to play on their team in gym class.  Even the teacher doesn’t see him, and he feels safe that way.  Then a new kid moves to town and gets laughed at for bringing his favorite lunch to school.  Brian thinks it’s worse to be laughed at than to be invisible, so Brian draws a picture with an encouraging note and leaves it where the new kids will find it.  That’s the day things start to change.  The new kid starts to see Brian and treats him with the same kindness Brian showed in his note.

There are days when we may feel invisible.  And there are days when we feel like we are living under the spotlight.  The election has spotlighted a whole bunch of people who we may never have heard about before they ran for power.  There are people in our world who are terrified of being invisible, of not having their votes and their opinions count.  There are a couple of fundamentalist churches in Canada who are quietly working to make our country more restrictive, with a racist and homophobic agenda to elect politicians and influence both educational and judicial systems, according to a CBC research report.  They want to work invisibly to have their political views imposed on all.  There are others who desperately want to be in the spotlight, they crave the attention they get when they make controversial statements and end up in the media.

I wish I knew what the answer was in our argumentative world where we are all struggling to breathe, never mind argue over who is better than whom.  When the smoke from our forest fires reaches all the way to New York, surely we should all be working together to save our environment?  But no, let’s get upset at how an oppressed and generally invisible minority uses paint in public so they can feel seen as is what is happening in Westlock this week.

Maybe that was the same feeling the Pharisees had when they saw Jesus talking to the tax collectors. People like Matthew would have been seen as irredeemable by the religious scholars of the day, a lost cause, and worthy of being treated as if they were invisible.  And no one asked the question of why they chose such a career that made them invisible in the first place?  Why were tax collectors so shunned?

When we think of traitors, World War 2 comes to mind, especially after the June 6 commemoration we observed this week.  Did you know that for months after the troops landed on Normandy beaches on D-Day, some 20,000 women in France were forcibly attacked by men, often French men, and had their hair shaved off?  This was done so everyone knew that they were collaborators with the Germans.  The shaving was not part of a legal investigation, or a Truth and Reconciliation hearing, but a vigilante action by men wanting to prove their loyalty to France.  Like the medieval witch hunts centuries before, the women who were targeted were often single, widowed or with husbands away in a prisoner of war camp.  Invisible women that no one would protect. No one asked them if they had collaborated or why they had collaborated.  Sometimes they were punished or even killed simply because someone said they saw the woman talking to a German soldier in public.  It’s an ugly and invisible part of the aftermath of the liberation that happened across Europe.  As one novelist pointed out, many of these women had no choice.  The Germans would invade a town, pick out the nicest houses and force the inhabitants to serve them unquestioningly day and night.  If the woman had children, the officers would threaten the children to ensure obedience. 

Going back to Matthew the Tax collector, why was he seen with such disdain? We don’t think of Canada Revenue Agency workers in the same class as collaborators and traitors, though we may like to grumble at bloated government departments and overpaid federal employees; maybe we even make sweeping generalizations about invisible people we may never meet in person.  The tax collectors in the time of Jesus were seen as traitors working with the Roman occupiers.  Not worthy to be seen by Jesus.  Nor were women who had hemorrhages.  They were not to be seen during their monthly menstrual times.  They certainly weren’t supposed to be sneaking out in public to grab the fringe of Jesus’ cloak!  And a little girl who was dead was also seen as unclean, something a good rabbi should never touch.  If Jesus had been a proper religious expert, he would have ignored all three of these kinds of people.  He would have treated them as invisible.

But Jesus didn’t just see Matthew and his co-workers, or the sick woman, he called them to join his new community!  Just as God didn’t just see Abraham in his crowded city, God called Abraham out of safety to start a new society.  Abraham was invisible to his father’s culture as a second-born child who would inherit nothing and would have had nothing to lose by venturing out into the wilderness.  Abraham brought invisible people with him, a wife that had little say in where he would go next and brought who knows how many unnamed slaves.  The country he moved to had invisible people already living in it.  Even though the land was occupied, God chose that Abraham’s family would inherit it, not the indigenous people.  Suddenly this is not a comfortable scripture, but one to be wrestled with.

Still, the tension of who is seen and who isn’t is important to reflect on.  Who do we choose to see?  Who do we wish were more invisible?  Do we feel invisible like Matthew, but are we truly invisible? Do we ask ourselves who God calls us to see? Do we crave the spotlight or crave invisibility?  Do we have the courage to hear God’s call to us, regardless of who we are, to see others as Christ sees us?  Is our church invisible or seen by all? Are we ready to risk being a bold visible community that welcomes all? And how do we do that? 

Through deep spirituality first and foremost.  Spiritual practices, prayer, humbleness, intentional times to think about our faith and our call will build the deep empathy and resilience that we need.  Then we can practice bold discipleship where we take courageous steps to welcome the invisible and bring healing good news to those who are hurting. And lastly, we can choose to heed the call to step into the spotlight that daring justice needs, in order to heal God’s beloved creation. Like Abraham, we are called to go into an unknown world which needs so much healing.  Like Matthew, we are called to new communities of faith, like Jesus we are called to help the invisible be seen.  May God bless us and keep us on this journey we are called to be on.  Amen.