LESSONS IN LIVING The Theology of Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who! A St. Andrew s Sermon Delivered by Dr. Jim Rigby September 29, 2013 Scripture Reading: Matthew 25:31-46 (The Inclusive Bible) The very last parable that Jesus gave, according to Matthew, is really an incredible place for the story to end, because it contradicts almost everything that the Church says about salvation. When I was in Seminary, what I was taught was that you are saved by faith alone. It was just a given. There are other denominations that think you re saved by obeying the rules, by believing something about Jesus, or by doing a ritual about Jesus. So Jesus ends his ministry by telling a story that negates all of that. He talks about the last judgment; now I don t believe in Hell Jesus is telling a parable so it s a much more interesting story if you ve got angels and devils and this kind of thing at least it is to me. Plus, at the end of it, you get to tell someone to go to Hell, and you don t have to take responsibility for it! (laughter) which is pretty clever, I think. So Jesus says that in the last judgment, God will be like a shepherd and divide the sheep [indicating the right-hand side of the congregation] and the goats, [indicating the left-hand side] so if you ve sat on the right-hand side, you re going to like this sermon. (laughter) Goats, maybe not so much.
So the sheep side folks were secular humanists hippy; what else, you know the spiel. And Jesus says to them, Come into the blessings that were prepared for you, for when I was hungry, you fed me, when I was thirsty, you gave me drink, when I was naked, you clothed me, when I was sick, you visited me, when I was in prison, you visited me. And they said, When did we ever see you? We don t even know who you are. Isn t that interesting that Jesus would do that? The people that are the saved weren t doing it for Jesus; they were doing it because it was right. They were doing it out of compassion. So, congratulations, right-hand side. Now, to the left-hand side folks, Jesus says, Bad news for you. When I was hungry, you didn t give me food, when I was thirsty, you didn t give me drink, when I was naked when I was in prison when I was sick And they say, What are you talking about, Jesus? When did we ever do that to you? We love you! We would do that for you! But we were looking at all these people that want health care. (laughter) We were looking at the immigrants. We were looking at bad people. Not you, we love you, Jesus! We d do anything for you. And Jesus says, Well, guess what? What you do to the least of these, you have done to me. So that is a pretty shocking way for a gospel to end, and that s why the church plays like it isn t even there. You may tell the story, but you don t get to the punch line. We re going to look today at a Dr. Seuss story in a sort of tension with this story. They have a very similar punch line, I think. A person is a person, no matter how small is that punch line. But Dr. Seuss got to this story the hard way. This is a book that he wrote after a part of his life that he was not very proud of. During World War II, he bought into the anti-japanese propaganda, and he drew cartoons that were nothing short of racist dehumanizing Japanese, because that s what happens in war. You can t look at the face of your enemy and see a human being, or it changes what you can and cannot do. You may remember that during World War II, we had concentration camps in the United States, where we kept wonderful, decent people locked up; people who loved this country kept in concentration camps only because they were different. After the war, Dr. Seuss wanted to never forget that he had supported this, so he wrote this book. It s a story about an elephant named Horton, as every child here knows. This elephant has very good hearing, and he can hear a little bitty city called Whoville, and its little bitty people. This can be a dangerous image, because you don t want to say that other people are smaller, but it s a children s story. So Horton can hear what nobody else can 2
hear. What I want to suggest is that this is a story about how to be an ally. It s not just about any one issue. It s about all the social justice issues. So as we look at this, we need to think in terms of a cause that we don t get anything out of. If you are part of an oppressed group and you re fighting for your own justice, that s very good, but that s not what an ally does. An ally is doing this for someone outside their own self-interest. Now people can look at what that means differently, and you are absolutely free to disagree with everything I m saying, but you ll also be disagreeing with Dr. Seuss, so live with that! (laughter) We can debate on where Jesus would come down on this The first thing that Horton does is hear. Never underestimate how important it is to hear the cry of oppressed people hear it, feel it, take it in. Because what happens in a culture is that certain voices are not listened to. Certain faces become invisible. They re just as big, just as important, just as smart, just as powerful, just as strong, but it may be race, it may be gender, it may be economics, it may be religion, but people are taught to hear certain voices louder and other voices sometimes not at all. One of the things that happened to me when I first began to work with rape survivors was when they d tell their stories, so often they d say, He covered up my face he wouldn t look at my face. He d call me names de-humanizing names. In an oppressive worldview, it is so important not to see the human face, not to hear the voice. Why do you suppose President Obama has refused to let the advocates for the people who have been killed by drone bombing testify before Congress? The State Department will not let the representatives speak not even let them in the country, because if you are going to have an empire, you cannot look in the face of your victims. That s the price of maintaining an empire. If we re going to have this economy that we re so proud of, we cannot look at the fact that it s based on slavery offshore that the wonderful deals we get at Wal-Mart, at Sears, at Target, means slavery for someone else, someplace else. And the culture is very clear on not letting those faces be seen, voices be heard. There was a woman who died trying to get into the United States who obviously wouldn t make the news. She s probably going to be buried in an unmarked grave; she s being called Jane Doe. She came from Mexico. She was wearing a Gold s 3
Gym tee shirt, pink tennis shoes, as I remember, and in her pocket was a picture of a five-year-old boy. Now had something like that happened to someone from Hollywood, the story would have been on the front page. But some people s pictures are very small, and some people s pictures are very big. It is not your fault if you have been raised in that trance, because that s what television is going to teach you, that s what the news is going to teach you, that s what magazines are going to teach you. Some people are big and some people are very small. One of the most important things we can do is to stop believing our judgments of other people, and listen to their voices. Every day, go online and read somebody who s on the other side of the line from you somebody who doesn t have a voice in our culture somebody whose face is dis-regarded. That is a huge step to leave the trance of our culture and listen. The second thing that Horton does is speak on behalf of the Whos, because nobody else can hear them. He s the only one who can hear them. Now that s a little dangerous, because you can t speak for another human being. But the fact is, when there is oppression, there are people locked out of the room. When I began to advocate for gay and lesbian inclusion in the Presbyterian Church, it was because they were locked out of the room. We were having this discussion about them, and they weren t there. Some of you have met Janie Spahr. She s our wonderful friend, she travels the nation, she s called the lesbian evangelist for the Presbyterian Church, although she s retired now. But she would call me. She always travels with a heterosexual ally, and our role was to de-fuse the poison. So when somebody would challenge her to debate on whether or not she could be a Christian, can you understand why she wouldn t want to do that? Nobody should have to defend their humanity. Nobody should have to say, My love is not perverted. If they want to do that, that s fine, but an ally steps in to take in that poison. I remember I was doing a talk at a Take Back the Night rally, and a woman was speaking, saying This is my body, and she could barely speak because she was crying. It convicted me that I could no longer stay on the sidelines. Believe it or not, I was almost completely a-political when I got out of Seminary. I was clueless. So please do not be ashamed if you wake up in a sermon and say, You know what? I have not really thought about this. I say that Christianity is about love, but I don t really think about what that means to other people. 4
Let s do a really quick test. I m tearing a hole in my outline, but it s not the first time, right? (laughter) If I said to you, I love you, but if my group mistreats you they re very important to me, so I m going to choose them over you, and I will participate in your oppression. I love you, but I m not going to give up my privilege over you. I love you, but I will not speak up on your behalf when you re not in the room and somebody is talking about you, how many of you would consider that to be love? Nobody? What Jesus does in parables is twist how we look at things until we can see how he sees love. Love has political consequences. Dr. Seuss was a leftie. He was a leftie. He would not have been happy with Ted Cruz this week (laughter) - quoting Dr. Seuss to take away food stamps or medical care. In fact, he, in this book, Horton Hears a Who!, he threatened to sue a rightto-life group that was using it in saying, A person s a person, no matter how small. He said, That s not the point I m making here! I m talking about the oppressed people of the world. You don t speak for anyone, but you take their message into the places they can t reach. Now what I did and you can choose your own method but I set up a wisdom council. If it was gay-lesbian things, it was gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender people on my wisdom council. I would meet with people like Gerald Gafford, Babs (Miller), and Janie Spahr, and say, Am I still being an ally for you in the Presbyterian Church, because I can t trust my own perceptions since I m not gay? And in dealing with other issues, I don t have ovaries, and I don t have dark skin. So somebody else has to tell me what the message is, and then I take that out as their messenger to the places where that voice is blocked, to the places where that voice cannot go. To get a wisdom council is a step further than just listening. Then you ask them, What is the message that you want me to take out into the world that you want us to take out into the world? How can I be your friend? Now here s the warning that Jesus gives. Once you do that, you will be attacked from all quarters, and you need to realize that. Because if there are people that have privilege, it s not going to feel very good to have that fact pointed out. When men first hear about sexism, it sounds like an attack on them. When white people hear about the horrible history that we don t learn in school, the shame is right below the surface. And we want to clamp down on that message. So it s understandable that people of privilege would attack the message, but you have to also understand that people who are still in harm s way will attack the message as well. It s called 5
internalized oppression. People who have believed the lies told about themselves, who have found some safe hiding place in the system of oppression may stop working for their own liberation, may stop advocating for that, and may be really afraid when somebody else shakes that tree. You can understand that, can t you? If I m a person of privilege, and I tackle your alligator, I m not the one who lives in the swamp. I can throw rocks at your alligator, but you re the one who has to live with it. The most brutal attacks on Martin Luther King, the ones that hurt him the most, were the ones from people of color, telling him he was going too far. I know feminists who left the work because they were attacked by women. The litmus test I decided to use, since you get conflicting messages, is Do they do the work? When you re choosing your wisdom council, are they up at the Capitol at midnight? If they ask you to come into the struggle, then I think you should say, Yes. Justice is not just an opinion we hold about one another, it s a power relationship. There is a struggle taking place every day with people s lives on the line. At the end of this month, women in rural Texas will lose reproductive care in certain places. They ll have to hitchhike; they ll have to seek out inferior forms of health care or may self-induce. This is not an opinion. And when you speak prophetically for others, you re not attacking the oppressors, you re revealing the oppression. Gandhi used to say that all the time. Your point is not to attack an enemy but to illumine a principle. And when people hear it, they will attack you and say you are attacking them. Class war, reverse racism, man bashing you ve heard it all. The point is this. A person is a person. That s not controversial, is it? Every person s body belongs to them. Period. What we do to the least people in our culture, we re doing to whatever we say is most valuable. When we started working on closing down the private prisons, there were people who said, Don t do it because that s going to divide the families. But the people doing the work, the activists, said, Do it! It s worth the price, because we ve got to shut these prisons down even if they punish us by dividing the families at first. When we first started doing gay and lesbian things, we lost church members who were gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, because they didn t want it talked about. But the activists said, Keep doing it. If we re serious about being an ally, there s one last step. Karl Marx called Christianity the opiate of the people, because if we don t turn our opinions into political action, then what we ve done is deaden ourselves. If we think we re being 6
liberationists by having a liberation philosophy or liberation theology, and we re not there for the actual struggle with real people in the real world, we re using philosophy and religion to deaden ourselves. The final act of the activist is to step back to give our privilege to another; someone from the movement, someone to become the voice, the face. I ve been on trial a number of times in the Presbyterian Church, usually for doing gay-lesbian marriages or ordinations. The last time I was on trial, I made my defense be the Essential Tenets of the Reformation. I said, You taught me in Seminary the priesthood of all believers, and now you re going to kick me out for that. I decided I was going to waive having an attorney, and since I could bring one person to stand with me, I would bring a gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender person from then on. I said, What you re going to do is look in their face, and you re going to say the things you ve said to me. You re going to say their love doesn t count. You re going to question their ethics, but you re going to look them in the face while doing it. And I chose Gerald Gafford because Gerald Gafford cries at the drop of a hat. (laughter) Because he feels it! He s gentle, he s courageous enough to feel what this all means and I hoped he would cry, and he did because it s sad, it s very sad, and when he cried, they cried, too! They cried too, because they saw the human face. They d never sat down in the room and tried to say that jargon, words like pervert, words like unclean. You can t look in a human face and say that kind of ugliness. So the last step of being an ally is the most fun. That s when you move to president of the fan club, head cheer leader, and you get to see the power, you get to hear the truth that has been there all along. You ve gotten to hear it all along, but you get to see people getting it, and understanding how important this is, how beautiful this is. It s about universal human rights. It s not any more complicated than that. It s about giving every human being every right you claim for yourself. That s all it is. So Jesus said, What you do to the least of these, you do unto me. What Horton said was, A person is a person, no matter how small. What you and I can do from here on, for the rest of our lives this isn t a burden, this is opening our heart to our human family is live with greater joy, greater wisdom because we listened to every voice and we see very face, and we say, Yes, I love and I m going to speak for you. You just need to tell me what that message is. I love you, and I will join the struggle for your liberation, if you tell me what to do. I love you 7
and, even if it is my own group that is most dear to my heart, if they are oppressing you, I will leave them and stand by your side. That s what it means to be an ally. What I d like you to do now is find An Oath of a Social Justice Ally in today s bulletin. Now one of the things I never do is specifically say what people need to do politically, because I think there s a line there that I need not to cross. You need to be free to disagree with me on the specifics. But justice for all people, universal justice for all people is not negotiable. That s not something we can disagree with in the church. So I can t tell you what the cause is, so you think of a cause that you care about, that doesn t benefit you personally, and when you say this, don t consider it to be a burden you re putting on yourself, but as an opening, a broadening of your heart to greater joy and a greater love. Would you join me, if you re willing, in reciting The Oath of a Social Justice Ally? This movement is not about me. It is about the persons who have been most affected by this injustice. They alone are the central face and voice of this movement. I serve in this movement as an invited guest. I will not patronize or rescue the people for whom I am an ally, but will support them in their efforts at self-determination. I will not speak or act on their behalf, but only in consultation with and under the direction of those most affected by the oppression. I will recognize my cultural privilege as a part of their oppression, and will broker that privilege on their behalf and under their guidance. If I disagree with decisions made by the oppressed group, I will either offer my silent support or I will stand down. I recognize that giving my moment in the spotlight or chair at the table may be the ultimate triumph of an ally. I will remember at all times that working for justice is not a gift, but a duty. Transcribed and edited by a member of the St. Andrew's Sermon Transcription Project. St. Andrew s Church 14311 Wells Port Drive, Austin, Texas 78728 (512) 251-0698 Fax: (512) 251-2617 www.staopen.com Loving Progressive Presbyterian 8