Peter is explaining to the devout Pharisees that circumcision is not required to be saved. God, through the universal gift of the Holy Spirit erased that distinction, along with others. Jew, Greek, slave, free. No distinction in God’s eyes (if God had eyes). It’s such an easy thing to profess, and to imagine that I’m like Peter, trying to tell others that there is no difference.
This is especially true now, in the midst of the racial tension in this country. Come on, everyone! Don’t you know that there’s no difference? Can’t we all just get along? There is an increasing number of people crying out, “there is no distinction between them and us!” So why is more not changing? Is it because the Peters of the world are up against more Pharisees? Maybe. But I think it’s a bigger problem than that.
The Pharisees were God-loving, religiously-conscientious people, who genuinely believed they were doing what was right. They had standards that they believed were true and right, and conveyed a truth about God and their relationship with God. They were not mean, hateful, power-hungry, antagonists, although they are often used as the example of all that Jesus was combating.
I’m going out on a limb to say our problem today is that although many of us profess that we feel like Peter, trying to explain that there is no difference, I suspect we’re more like the Pharisees. We have standards. We are God-loving, religiously conscientious people, who believe we’re doing what’s right. At the same time, we’re crying out for the end of the systems of power and privilege – the very systems that have benefited us.
My first example isn’t race-based, but it illustrates that deep-seated sense of decorum that creates an us vs. them mentality. Fresh out of Grad School, I went to a conference in Jackson Mississippi, on legislative auditing. Like I imagine Peter would have done, I railed against the confederate flags that peppered the town. But like the Pharisees, I secretly thought that people with the slow Southern drawl were somehow less intelligent, or more country-bumpkin-ish. I was amazed time after time when I met smart southerners. Um, that sure daylighted some of my Yankee implicit bias.
In modern day, those biases continue, all the while I’m crying out for equality. African American vernacular is troubling to my ear. It sounds crass (read less proper). I’m certain in job interviews, white folks would make judgments about language, accent, word use – none of which is truly indicative of qualifications for a job. We, like the Pharisees, might argue that they need to dress and speak and groom like we do. In ancient days, we might have said they needed to be circumcised.
Huge hoop earrings, accents, long false eyelashes, words used that aren’t in our white man’s dictionary, a different sense of clothing style. As it turns out, these don’t matter any more than circumcision. We should not care. And yet we do. We secretly judge people who are not from the dominant culture as more than different, we judge them as less than. And by we, I’m speaking of me, and most of my loving Christian friends who’d be the first to stand up like Peter and say there’s no difference!
We have work to do. The first part of work we have is to recognize that we’re probably more like the Pharisees than Peter, even if we don’t see it – especially because we don’t see it. It’s once we recognize that we do have expectations about others who should conform to our sense of right, that we can spot those expectations and genuinely start to dismantle the systems we’ve perpetuated that allow us to make those judgments in the first place.
This morning, I’m thinking about how easy it is to relate to Peter, and decry racism, when I believe we’re more like the Pharisees, with the best of intentions, perpetuating expectations of circumcision. Today, I want to try to spot the little ways I’m more like a Pharisee.
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