Matthew 5:21-26 (NRSV)
A number of years ago now, I was visiting my brother and his family in California. One day, I was in the car with my brother and my youngest niece, Courtney, who was about 8 years old at the time. We were on the freeway, and I had gotten really anxious over the fact that my brother was driving so close to the car in front of him while doing about 75 miles an hour. (Of course, everybody else seemed to be doing the same thing.) Finally, I asked him, “Do you always drive so close to the car in front of you?” He laughed and said, “Well, if I drop back more than about 10 feet, somebody will try to cut in front of us.” He had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when, sure enough, someone cut in front of us, forcing my brother to slam on the brakes. He said, “Courtney, what was that?” Courtney answered, “That was an idiot!” I’m sure she must have heard my brother refer to other drivers that way! And according to a strict reading of Jesus’s words in Matthew, she will go to hell for saying that.
Actually, I don’t think that’s really what Jesus was talking about. I think that Jesus was really concerned with the bigger picture of keeping peace between people, especially between Christians. And it is not easy to keep the peace, or to make peace, when we allow divisions to separate us.
For several years, I have been gravely concerned by the increasing division – divisiveness – in our country. People have become polarized over politics, race, gender issues, and religion. I have read a number of books and on-line resources. I can highly recommend to you a book by Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized, which is available at the library. Also How to Heal Our Divides, compiled and edited by Brian Allain and Adam Thomas.
People become polarized for a number of reasons. Brian McLaren, author and speaker, says that “we humans tend to flock with birds of a feather who confirm what we already think, who makes us feel good about us and nervous about them, and who value division as a marker of in-group identity. Because of our biases, attempts to bring people over to ‘our side’ often have the opposite effect: hardening both us and them in our postures of mutual hostility, so that eventually, we humans typically hardly know who we are until we know who we are against … In large part, that’s why we become so persistently polarized, and that’s why our divisions can intensify to the point of mutual fear, hatred, and hellish violence.”
Ezra Klein traces the increased polarization in the political arena in his book. He says that it used to be that the two parties had more in common than not. There weren’t such well-defined party issues or platforms. Often, voters would vote a split ticket, more concerned with the individual candidate than the party he or she represented. But over the past 60 years of so, the parties became more concerned with electing members of their own party to political office, and they worked to that end by more clearly defining their stances on particular issues. And over the decades, the parties became more and more different in their positions and more and more polarized. There were no moderates anymore, or so it would seem.
This is a real problem. Diana Butler Bass, author and speaker, writes, “Fostering animus between people for the sake of political gain is not a moral good … [But] division is one of the most persistent political strategies in the western world.” She goes on to say, “Religions emphasize peace and unity, and they offer ethical visions for a world of equanimity and justice.” Even religious people are not above becoming politically polarized. Bass writes, “Even when we say we want to get beyond division and invective, many (including me) secretly think, ‘But I don’t want to be with those people … You can’t make peace with them.’ … deep inside, I’m uneasily grateful that something still separates me from others. The boundary between my moral rightness and another’s ethical failing seems necessary to protect. Those boundaries become hidden prejudices, the prejudices turn into partisanship, and all-too-often, partisanship crystalizes into bigotry.”
There seem to be at least three major areas in which Americans have become more polarized in recent years: politics, race, and religion. I’d like to look at these three in a little more detail.
First, political polarization. I don’t remember an uglier election season than we had in 2020 and 2022. The ads for candidates on both sides were hate-filled and designed to further polarize voters. Of course, that has been the strategy of both parties for years, because it helps them to get their own candidates elected. The campaigns are negative, focused more on showing what’s wrong with one’s opponent instead of what’s good about your own candidate.
The place of hope for me is the realization that most Americans are not as polarized as the media would have us believe. Author Mark Feldmeir writes that “there is actually broad agreement on most of the controversial issues of our day. We have far more in common than we’ve been led to believe by the media, which are driven by profit, and our political institutions, which are motivated by power. Each are highly organized and resourced to amplify and exploit the differences among us … Each thrive on, and perpetuate, a kind of binary thinking that compels us – even coerces us – to view our neighbors in terms of good and evil, right and wrong, friend and enemy… The vast majority of Americans are not on the extremes of any of these issues, but most of what we hear and read is from people who reflect more extreme views.”
Second, polarization around race. Politicians in recent elections have not been above playing the race card, hoping that people’s fears about others who look different from them will lead them to vote a certain way. The incidents of unarmed black men and women being killed by police have led to protests – mostly peaceful, but some more violent. With every instance, we wonder how these things keep on happening. But even among religious people, dealing with racism and learning how to combat racism is not a simple task.
Catherine Meeks, Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, describes what happened when the Episcopal General Convention mandated that all church leaders had to participate in anti-racism training. The Diocese of Atlanta set up an Anti-Racism Commission which began to hold training events. Meeks writes that “folks who were mandated to participate in the training resented that fact and many people became quite proficient at finding ways to avoid it. An unfortunate spirit of negativity began to form around the Anti-Racism Commission in general and the workshop sessions in particular.” (I might add that similar reactions have happened among United Methodist clergy in New England who are required to attend similar training events.)
The Commission decided to change the name and focus of its work. It became known as Beloved Community: Commission for Dismantling Racism. And they began to frame dismantling racism work as spiritual formation. Meeks writes, “Prior to this reimagining process, it was very easy to see the day’s workshop more as a chore that had to be completed … rather than seeing it as being part of one’s ongoing spiritual formation. Dismantling racism work is not a box to check off after completing a one-day workshop; it is a lifetime of inner and outer work …” The Center for Racial Healing was formed out of the work of the Commission, and their model has spread to 65 of the 99 dioceses in the Episcopal Church.
And finally, there is religious polarization. Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Muslims and Jews, find themselves being boxed in and separated by fear, distrust, and a lack of understanding. But consider the story of a rabbi, an imam, and a Christian pastor in Peoria, Illinois who decided to overcome this division. A documentary made about their relationship, titled “No Joke,” shows how they became friends. Jim Hancock and Jim Hendeson, who made the documentary, state that even though each lost members of their congregation because of their relationship, “they decided it was worth it to keep going, not because they agreed with each other about religion, or politics, or immigration, or even sports. They decided it was worth it because they came to respect, and then love each other.” They stayed in the room with each other despite broad and deep disagreements on very important matters.
So how do we begin to heal the divisions between us? Where do we start?
We, of course, begin by looking to Jesus. Look at who his friends were. Consider who was sitting at his dinner table. He included a Zealot and a tax collector, even though Zealots killed tax collectors for fun. He included Pharisees and marginalized women, which never happened in public. Jesus welcomed anyone and everyone who would come with him.
We might remember the first Christian creed, which was used at baptisms. It said, “For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.” New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson says, Christianity was successful because it imparted a social vision of unity in a deeply divided world and called people to a new identity … “This creed claims that there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are children of God.” And the early Christians lived this out, practicing it in their communities. Says Patterson, “They developed habits of including others, of breaking down barriers, of eating with and befriending those whom they once found objectionable.”
Shane Claiborne, author and activist, points to the example of Justin the Martyr, who was killed for his faith in 165. Justin wrote, “We who formerly hated and murdered one another now live together and share the same table. We pray for our enemies and try to win those who hate us … We have changed our swords for plowshares, and spears for farm tools … now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the crucified one.”
Another important step in healing the divisions is to actually bring people together who are on opposite “sides” in order for them to get to know each other better. We need to honestly understand the experiences, feelings, and beliefs of those with whom we disagree and be able to be better understood by them. This requires a certain amount of humility. As Shane Claiborne states, “Self-righteousness is toxic.” We need to listen deeply to each other in order to understand each other’s point of view. And often, as Jesus pointed out in this passage, that means we must take the initiative to approach those with whom we disagree.
One example of this can be found in the life of John Perkins. Perkins was the son of a sharecropper and his mother died at his birth. Perkins was arrested, tortured and brutalized by the police. His brother was killed by the police in the struggle for racial justice. But when Perkins heard about a leader of the KKK who had experienced a complete change of heart, Perkins went and talked to him. They eventually became friends and co-authored a book called He’s My Brother. That could never have happened if Perkins had not been willing to sit down and talk with that man. Todd Deatherage writes, “Becoming the peacemakers the world needs often begins by going places you’re not supposed to go, meeting people you’re not supposed to meet, and opening yourself up to unusual conversations, relationships, and experiences.”
When we meet together and practice deep listening in order to understand each other better, and to be understood by others, we will find common ground upon which we can agree in order to work for the common good. We might discover that there are things about which we do agree. We share ultimate goals that we can work towards for the common good, goals that both sides want to achieve, and which neither side can accomplish without the cooperation of the other side.
Finally, I would like to say that healing the divisions in our country requires Christians to talk about and involve themselves in politics. This is clearly outlined by Mark Feldmeir, who writes, “the Scriptures are not politically neutral, and … when Christians are in church, they should actually be at their most political. By political I do not mean partisan … To do politics is to be concerned about the affairs of the communities in which we live; to do politics in church is to ask, ‘What does the gospel of Jesus Christ say about how I should live in my community and what my responsibility should be to the people who are members of that community?” He goes on to say that Christian politics “is a politics of compassion, and it is vastly different from the politics of contempt that has swept across America’s political landscape in recent years. A politics of compassion transcends ‘issue politics’ and ‘culture wars’…”
Jesus detailed the politics of compassion in Matthew 25, when he equated caring for the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and those in prison, with caring for him. Feldmeir says, “This is the only kind of politics that mattered to Jesus, and it’s the kind of politics that can inspire people of faith from both sides of the political aisle to find enough common ground to work for the common good.”
In closing, I would admit that making peace is challenging, difficult, often frustrating, and requires the ability to compromise and work together with people who do not share our views. It is not for the fainthearted. But we should remember the words of environmentalist Annie Leonard, who wrote, “There is no away. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere.” Brian McLaren shows how this applies to peace-making: “What is true in our physical environment is also true of our social environment. When we identify someone as alien, other, outsider, and enemy, we think we can throw them away. But there is no away; we are neighbors, and we can’t escape that fact. Eventually we will need to learn what Dr. King said: ‘The only way to get rid of an enemy permanently is to make him your friend.’”
