Thursday, September 5, 2013

Honor and Shame...We Know Them Both!

In this week's Gospel lesson from the fourteenth chapter of Luke, Jesus throws a wrench into the honor-shame culture in which he lived and preached. In that culture, those who were the have's made sure others knew it, and those who were the have-not's did their best to stay out of the limelight. Jesus instructs dinner hosts to invite to their feasts not the well-heeled of the community, nor others who could pay the host back. Instead, he suggests that they invite people to their banquets that they know beyond a doubt cannot ever pay back the debt of hospitality offered. Wow, what's the wisdom in that advice? If we cannot strut our positions and achievements in public, what's the use of striving for excellence? I have watched, with a mixture of amusement and dismay, the proliferation of sashes and cords and medals with which graduates are festooned at commencement ceremonies. Whereas commencement should be a celebration of all graduates having made the grade, so to speak, we have managed to make it another competitive exhibition. Is it not enough we honor academic achievement by listing, and sometimes announcing, Latin honors as the graduates pass? What if everyone wore a plain, black academic gown with no adornments? I write this as one who did not receive his undergraduate degree with honors. But I did receive several graduate degrees with an academic average high enough for top honors, except that the schools involved felt that we ought not acknowledge grade point averages at the graduate level, because it fostered an unhealthy level of competitiveness. "Curses, foiled again!" as Snoopy would say. I remember my first on-going experience of honor-shame. When I was in the third grade, we moved into a new elementary school that housed a cafeteria, something the old school did not have. Up until that time, all of us brought our lunches from home. But my folks insisted that I continue to carry my lunch. That does not sound unreasonable, but for the fact that my school segregated all of the "brown-baggers" from those who bought the hot lunch. We were exiled to a table by the wall, away from the kids who bought their lunches. The worst was Thanksgiving, when even the die-hard brown-bag crowd gave in and bought the feast. But not me. I sat with just a couple of other folks, feeling sheepish and hoping the other kids did not look down on us, while feeling certain that they were doing just that. Our junior high school did not have a cafeteria, and so we all brought our lunches from home for the next three years. When I entered high school, I bought lunch in the cafeteria every day and never carried a brown-bag to school again. Writing this has caused me to remember that little honor-shame saga so clearly, and it is not a pleasant memory, even though it seems so insignificant now. How large a burden, then, must be carried by those whose income level or social status causes them to be marginalized or made to feel different every day, with no end in sight? Jesus sought to end class distinctions forever, and yet they remain, in abundance. Why do we resist his command so vigorously?

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