Sermon: On names and labels, and how they keep us from truth (June 28, 2015)

Pentecost 5B

June 28, 2015

Mark 5:21-43

            When my parents were expecting their first child, my brother, they talked about names just like all expecting parents do. Like all parents, they considered many factors: names they liked, names from their family history, names from the Bible, and perhaps most importantly, names that would not lend themselves to terrible nicknames once the kid hit school age. They finally decided on Luke – a strong name, and a biblical one. Who could mess up Luke? And yet, once he went off to school, guess what his friends start calling him? Puke. So much for avoiding terrible nicknames.

            Now, in Puke’s, I mean Luke’s case, his nickname was offered in love by his friends, so no harm done. But of course not all nicknames are this way. Often we are given nicknames that are what we now would call bullying – names that are meant to degrade a person, to bring them down, to make fun of them. And nicknames are tough because they tend to stick. Perhaps even my talking about this right now is making you squirm, remembering your own hurtful nicknames that some mean kid of even a family member gave you that stuck, and it ruined your whole childhood. Maybe it was a name linked to a characteristic, or maybe to just one event. The boy who threw up in class. The girl who was too fat for the PE uniforms. The boy who flunked out. The girl who got pregnant at 15. The boy who’s poor.

            Names and labels are powerful things. As it turns out, the saying is wrong: sticks and stones may break your bones, but words… can cut you to the core in a way that requires years of therapy to

overcome. We all know this – often from personal experience – and yet since the advent of language we have used our words to label and name, for better or for worse. Just look at the poor hemorrhaging woman in our Gospel lesson. That is how she is known: as the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years. Likely, this is the sort of bleeding that most women only endure a few days once a month, and in this 1^st century Jewish culture, that time is a time when women are considered ritually unclean. They are untouchable. They should not be in public during this time, lest someone else touch them and become ritually unclean themselves. But this woman does not endure this a mere few days a month; she has endured it consistently for 12 whole years. Because of this, she is also likely unable to have children, making her even less in the eyes of her culture. So, by no fault of her own, she has acquired several unwanted names and labels: the bleeding woman, the woman who can’t conceive, the untouchable woman, the woman who can’t contribute to society… And none of them is complimentary.

            Why do we feel the need to label others, anyway? Perhaps it is in an effort to make some sense of a situation, especially a situation that makes us uncomfortable, or that we can’t understand. By labeling something – an event, a person, whatever – we are able to box it up neatly, talk more directly about it, find faults, or solutions. Often, it also allows us, if we like or need, to remove ourselves from the difficulty of the situation. It belongs to this other category, which I have no part in.

            I have been thinking a lot about this the past week and a half, as our country continues to mourn following the events in South Carolina last week. It hardly took a few hours before the media was throwing around all kinds of labels. The shooter is a racist. The shooter is a terrorist. The shooter is mentally ill. This is the parents’ fault for raising him wrong. This happened in a church, so it is an attack on Christianity. It’s the Confederate flag’s fault. This is the NRA’s fault. This is the fault of people who are against gun – if those people had all had guns, this wouldn’t have happened. Now, there may be truth in any number of those statements. But the danger of jumping right to them is that it prevents us from taking a moment to really see the people involved. I certainly

Young Dylann and his father, submitted to NBC
News by Dylann's ex-step-mother, Paige Mann

have my opinions about the shooter, too, but what would happen if, before we make assumptions about what kind of person he is, and what kind of family raised such a monster, we took the time to really see him, to understand him? It sounds horrifying in this case, right? Who would want to get in the head of this guy? Well, let me tell you a few things to humanize him: his family raised him in the church, in an ELCA church, in fact, where he was baptized, confirmed, attended church camp, and still attended worship regularly. His father attended worship twice a week. In his own manifesto, Dylann Roof does not blame his parents, saying that they did not instill his views in him, nor did he want them to bear any responsibility for his actions. Suddenly, he is becoming someone who looks more like us: a good Lutheran boy from a devout family, who wants to take responsibility for his own actions, but who fell victim to being swayed by some perverse views on people different from him. None of this is enough to keep me from shaking my head in sadness and disbelief at what he did, but suddenly, he has become a person to me, and slowly but surely the labels either fall away, or at least are offered with slightly less vitriol.

I wonder how many people tried to truly see the woman in our Gospel lesson, the one who is known by her ailment? I wonder what was more painful for her: the disease itself, or living with the consequences of it, or perhaps, living in a reality in which no one even tries to truly see her, to know her, to hear her story, to understand her, to relate to her? When she sees Jesus in the crowd, she probably suspects that he can heal her hemorrhaging, but I wonder if the reason she reaches out to him, and then presents herself to him when he turns around, is that she knows that here is someone who can and who will truly see her, for all that she is. It does take courage to be truly seen by someone – that is why it is “with fear and trembling” that she presents herself – but perhaps she

knows, in some way, that her true healing and restoration will only come when she is healed not only in body, but also in spirit.

Jesus does see her. And when he does, he calls her “daughter” – restoring her to community, restoring her to wholeness. The word our translation translates here as “well” (as in, “your faith has made you well”) can also be translated as “whole”: “Daughter, your faith has made you whole.” Belonging and wholeness – this is what Jesus offers to this woman, previously labeled in all the wrong ways, now claimed publicly as a daughter of faith, and one who is wholly a part of the kingdom.

Taking the time to truly see the other may bring that other into wholeness and joy. But more importantly for us today, is how it affects us: if we are able to suspend labels and name-calling and putting people into a box, we will see people and situations more honestly and clearly – and this will in turn allow us to be changed, to be made whole like the woman in the Gospel story. As soon as we smack a label on something, it is no longer our responsibility. Taking the time to see and to know pushes us to examine ourselves, our own actions, our own role.

And this is why our presiding bishop, Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, has called Lutheran churches

ELCA Presiding Bishop, the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton

around the country into a day today of mourning and of repentance – for the ways we have benefitted from a system so destructive or demeaning to people of color (you may have heard the phrase, “white privilege” – this means that, because I am white, I will probably not be pulled over for my skin color, and if I am, I will be treated with respect. It means I can be pretty sure no one is going to come into our Bible study and shoot us because of the color of our skin), for the times we have made careless jokes or comments that actually cut away at who someone is or their heritage, for turning the other way and ignoring our brothers and sisters who are different from us, assuming that their problem is not our problem.

President Obama spoke eloquently about this in the powerful eulogy he gave at Rev. Pinkney’s funeral on Friday. He said, “Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Rev. Pinkney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into comfortable silence again. Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society, to settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change – that’s how we lose our way again.”

Friends, we cannot lose our way again. We must find ways to enter into the need for repentance – it may start with education, perhaps a discussion group here at church, or reading books on the topic, or building a relationship with a person or group of people who look different from you. Please, if you have ideas about how we as a community might continue this conversation, don’t hesitate to talk to me about it; I am eager to walk this road with you. But for today, we begin with acknowledgment and with prayer. Let us pray…

God of restoration and wholeness, the tendency to separate ourselves from the earth’s ills is so strong in us, we sometimes don’t even realize when we do it. Grant us a spirit of wholeness, of relationship-building, of restoration, so that we might truly see all people as our brothers and sisters, and work together to build up the kingdom of God. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.