1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28
January 29, 2012
[note: In part, this sermon was inspired by reading the book, "Love's Labor," by Eva Kittay]
“Pull
yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“God
helps those who help themselves.”
“If
you give someone a fish they eat for a day, if you teach someone to fish, they
eat for a lifetime.”
These
sayings have all long been a part of our American lexicon. They are based on a vision of what
constitutes a good life and healthy society.
The idea is that each person is capable of living an independent,
autonomous life and our society should be set up so that every person has that
opportunity. Then, each person can
choose for themselves what a good, happy life looks like, as long as they don’t
prevent another from being able to do the same.
On
the surface, this is appealing. Living a
life where you can provide for yourself, choose to live in a way that makes you
fulfilled and happy, and weather any storms that come your way must be a good
thing, right? It’s a no brainer. And a society whose goal is to encourage
people to live autonomous lives where they don’t have to be dependent on the
government or charity seems logical.
But
I wonder if it is Christian. I even
wonder if it’s practical or helpful.
To
begin with, this doesn’t seem to quite fit with what the bible says. None of those three great slogans made it
into our scriptures. And today’s text is
one of many examples where the bible seems to say just the opposite of these
slogans. When someone needs help, and
they come to Jesus, Jesus helps. And
when you read the gospels carefully, you see that often a big part of the
benefit for those who Jesus helps is that they can be a part of a community
that had previously shunned them on account of their ailment.
Community,
according to torah, the prophets, Jesus, and the early Christians, is where you
need to be in order to be cared for…if the communities live up to its call. Over and over we hear the bible say to the
religious communities of their day, care for the poor, the orphan, the widow,
the imprisoned. If communities do this,
then the goal of helping someone is to restore them to community, not to make
them autonomous.
When
Jesus heals this man full of demons, instead of the goal being that the person could
now live a happy life because he could take care of himself, Jesus breaks down
a barrier so the man could be brought back into the community and live a happy life
because he is cared for by the community.
Jesus takes away the reason the person was shunned in the first place.
It
seems to me that Jesus assumed we are dependent on one another for our well
being and because of that a healthy, caring community, not autonomy for
everyone, should be the goal. And that
fits with my experience. Dependency is a
given in the human condition. At various
times in all of our lives we are
limited and dependent on others for our basic needs. All of us were children at one point, unable
to care for ourselves, requiring the care of some adult for our survival. And I would argue that for most, if not all,
of us there are times other than our childhood when our limitations again make
us dependent on others for our survival, or at least for spiritual and
emotional well being.
Think
about how at the other end of life, many of us will once again be dependent on
others to care for us, to meet our basic needs.
Think about times in your life when you might have been laid up due to
illness or trauma. And of course, some
people have permanent limitations that mean they are dependent on others their
whole life. Cognitive limitation,
emotional limitations, physical limitations.
I
know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, and when folks talk about the
ideal – that everyone should be given the opportunity to live an autonomous
life – and when people discuss policies, all except the most delusional know
there are exceptions and that we are, as human beings, responsible for those
dependents…those who cannot survive without care. But if we don’t start with dependency as the
basic reality, then we don’t tend to do a good job with those exceptions. In part this is because when something is
seen as an exception to the ideal, it is inevitably devalued, denigrated, even
scorned.
Think
about those who are responsible for raising our children. Everyone says children are the most important
things in the world. And no one would
deny that children are completely dependent, yet as a society we do an abysmal
job of supporting those who care for our children. Last I looked, you don’t get health insurance
because you are home taking care of a child…you don’t get paid. And I’m on the board of directors at our
community day care, and the people caring for our children there don’t get
health insurance either, and very little pay.
We
underpay social workers, CNAs, home health aides, special education teachers,
and the list goes on. When it comes to
caring for the dependents in our culture, we don’t help their guardians who are
responsible for them, and we don’t help those we hire to care for them when the
guardians.
And
the problem doesn’t stop there: Once we move beyond the obvious in terms of who
is dependent – children, elderly who can no longer care for themselves,
severely disabled – we don’t do a very good job at thinking about the spectrum
of limitations people face. We don’t quite
know what to do with those who don’t fall at the extreme end of the spectrum. And we don’t know what it means for those people
to ever pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or learn to fish, or help
themselves.
I
know deciding how to care for people in need is incredibly complex…way too
complex for one sermon. Should we try to
help people move from being dependent to being able to support themselves
whenever possible? – of course. Being
dependent on others can really drain your soul.
But I think we need to do a better job of thinking about the “whenever
possible” of that statement. Some of the
people who land somewhere in the middle on the spectrum of limitations are expected
to pull themselves up by the bootstraps because their limitations are less-than-obvious
and less severe. But, they can’t. They’re stuck and we demand they un-stick themselves.
In
addition, I think we need to do a better job of not stigmatizing people who are
dependent, thinking they are less-than because they are not capable of ever
reaching the ideal picture of what it means to live a good life. If we could do this, it would not take such a
toll on someone’s soul to be dependent on others. They would feel valued, instead of being
treated like a pariah, or a drain on resources.
You
probably know this, but it isn’t actually possible to pull yourself up by your
bootstraps. Try it. If you’re on the ground and want to get up,
the bootstraps aren’t going to do the trick…there isn’t enough leverage from
that position. In fact, when this phrase
originated, best folks can tell, it was meant to point out something absurd. It’s absurd, they were saying, to leave
someone in need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Sometimes it was used to encourage soldiers
to help their comrades when they fell.
You can’t leave them there to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…that
would be absurd.
Paul
spent his energy writing to communities about how to care for individuals, not
the other way around. In our passage
this morning, Paul is basically saying to the Jewish Christians even if you
know it doesn’t matter, eat in such a way that others will not feel alienated
by the community. Care for the weak, he
says. Invite them into this community
that follows Christ – a community that builds others up because of love, not
“knowledge.” Having knowledge might be
akin to all those times we think we know what’s better for someone else, and
try to impose that on them in order to make their lives look more like
ours. Having knowledge is the basis for
the fishing metaphor, right. We can teach
them.
All
of us possess knowledge, Paul says, but knowledge puffs up – makes us think we
are better than someone else who might not have the same experience, resources,
abilities or privileges we do. It’s love
that builds up. The knowledge that
matters, according to Paul, is the knowledge that God is love…that Jesus came
to show God’s love in action. And Jesus
didn’t sit people down and try to teach them to fish. In fact, he called all these fishermen to
follow him, requiring them to be dependent on one another and strangers for
their sustenance. They chose dependency – something we would never
condone. Dependency was not a dirty word
to Jesus…it was the basis for human relationships and society. Needing things from others was not the worst
thing – not being a world or community that cares for all was.
There
should be no shame in being dependent on others, regardless of the reason for
it. This means when we find ourselves in
need, no matter how we got there, we should not be ashamed – we should be
grateful for communities that love God and love others. And when we encounter someone in need, no
matter how they got there, we should not shame them…we should help them, both by
meeting any direct need they have, and by integrating them into a community
that loves God and loves others. And our
decisions, policies, and values should begin with the assumption that we are all,
at some point, dependent on one another.
It
isn’t actually possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps – maybe it’s
time we stopped expecting people to do the impossible. Amen.
