“Where Do You Draw The Line

“Where Do You Draw The Line?”

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:10-17

© January 27, 2008 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

One day a little girl was getting ready to take her first ride on an airplane. But when the plane took off and passed through the clouds, the child looked out the window down toward the ground and with a puzzled look on her face asked her mother, “Where are the lines?” The mother wondered what her daughter meant and asked, “What lines?” “You know,” the girl said, “the lines that show where the borders are. Without lines, how can God tell where the different states stop and start?”

Like that little girl, most of us just assume that there are lines that have been drawn in the world. Most of us just assume that there are lines that have been drawn that divide the red states from the blue states, lines that divide liberals from conservatives, lines that divide the rich from the poor, lines that divide labor from management. We just take it for granted that those lines are there in the world and that they’ll always be there.

And unfortunately that same kind of mindset at times spills over into the church. For instance, over in the Holy Land in the town of Bethlehem is a church that is called the Church of the Nativity, which is built on the site where tradition says Jesus was born. And since the Church of the Nativity is located at such a holy place, the church doesn’t belong to any one denomination; rather several denominations oversee the church, with each denomination in charge of a very specific part of the building.

Well, as they do every year right after Christmas, on December 26 of this past year the priests who oversee the church went to work, with each denomination cleaning the walls and ceilings in their part of the building. But apparently at one point when the Greek Orthodox priests set up some ladders, the base of the ladders ended up going a few inches over the line that divided their part of the church from the part of the church that belonged to the Armenian Orthodox priests. And it seems that when the Armenian Orthodox priests saw that the Greek Orthodox priests’ ladders had crossed the line, a huge fight broke out in the church – and for more than 15 minutes, bearded priests in black robes yelled at each other, punched each other, and even swung metal bars at each other until a dozen local policemen rushed into the church to break up the fight.[1]

It’s sad to say, but that sort of thing has been going on since virtually the beginning of the Christian faith. No, Christians haven’t always been punching each other and swinging hunks of metal pipe at each other. But since virtually the beginning of the Christian faith there has been a tendency for people to draw lines and to separate themselves from each other.

That was what was going on, for instance, back in the first century in the church in Corinth. You see, according to the reading that we just listened to from the Bible, the apostle Paul had received word that there were divisions developing in the Corinthian church, that people were drawing all kinds of lines, and that things were going from bad to worse. In particular, it seemed that different people were rallying around different leaders in the church. Some were claiming allegiance to Peter, one of the original disciples of Jesus. Others were saying that they were the party of Apollos, who was sort of the Billy Graham of his day, a well-known and well-liked preacher. Still others were saying, “We’re the real Christians here – we belong to Jesus!” So in the midst of that chaos, Paul was trying to bring about some sense of unity. And in effect, what Paul said was: “You people in Corinth have worked so hard at creating divisions among yourselves, that that’s practically all you see now, the lines that separate you from each other! But that’s not the way that God wants it to be.”

But just like long ago in Corinth, even today there are still lines that divide us. For instance, it has often been said that in America, 11:00 Sunday morning is the most segregated hour out of the entire week. What that means, of course, is that when we Americans go to worship, generally speaking we divide ourselves along racial lines. Generally speaking we just assume that white people go to white churches, black people go to black churches, Hispanic people go to Hispanic churches, and so on.

So often we try to convince ourselves that we here in this country worked out all our racial problems and prejudices back in the 1960s with Martin Luther King and with the Civil Rights movement. But whether we like to face up to it or not, there are still lines that divide the different races. For example, I was truly shocked by a story that another Presbyterian minister in the Pittsburgh area recently told me. He said that about 8 years ago he was interviewing with a congregation in North Carolina about the possibility of him becoming the pastor there. But after spending a little time in the community, he noticed that while many, many black and Hispanic people lived in that town, the church he was interviewing with was 100% white.

So eventually the minister decided to ask the search committee about that. When he did, the minister said, immediately he sensed that he had struck a nerve, because for the longest time no one said a word – complete silence. Finally the clerk of session looked at him and said, “We took a vote 17 years ago not to reach out to those people. But we decided that if any of them came on their own to our church and proved that they were serious, we’d consider making them members of the church – but none of them have ever come.” Again, that conversation that that minister had with that church didn’t take place long, long ago, back in the 1950s – no, that conversation was recent – that’s the attitude that that church has right here, right now. And the sad fact is that I’m sure that that church is not unique. The sad fact is that many churches and many Christians continue to draw lines like that, separating themselves from people who might be a different color than they are.

But when it comes to drawing lines, that’s not something that happens just when it comes to race. No, churches and Christians quite often also draw lines when it comes to wealth or class. In previous generations, for instance, it was generally assumed that the poorest people in the community, the members of the lowest class, would belong to the Baptist church. And then when people improved their status a little bit they would become Methodists. After all, the old joke is that a Methodist is just a Baptist who knows how to read! And then if you continued to move up in wealth and class, you would go from being a Methodist to being a Presbyterian. And then if you really made it to the top of society, you would become an Episcopalian.

Those kinds of strict divisions, of course, don’t necessarily apply anymore – after all, we know that nowadays Presbyterians are way better than Episcopalians! But as you look around at different churches, you can’t help but notice that there are lines that divide churches – that some churches tend to be the churches where the rich and the powerful go, and some churches tend to be the churches where the poor and not-so-powerful go.

And there are many other lines that divide people and that divide churches. There are lines that divide according to politics. Some churches tend to attract conservatives who believe that God always votes Republican, while other churches draw a line and tend to attract liberals who are sure that God is a registered Democrat.

There are lines that are sometimes drawn when it comes to music. There are some Christians and some churches that draw a line and say, “We’re going to have classical organ music, and only classical organ music, in our worship services,” and other Christians and churches draw a line and say, “We don’t want any organ music – guitars and drums are the only instruments we want to hear in our worship.”

During my junior year in college, I spent the fall semester studying in Germany. And something rather remarkable in Germany is that they don’t draw lines when it comes to radio stations. What I mean is that here in the United States we’re used to having dozens of different stations to choose from, based on what kind of musical preference we might have. There are stations for people who like rock and roll, there are stations for people who like classical music, there are stations for people who like country music, and so on.

But in Germany they don’t have that. Instead, at least when I was there, there were only two or three radio stations, and each of them played all kinds of different music. After listening to a rock and roll song, you might hear a jazz selection, followed by a piece from Beethoven. At first that seemed so strange. But it turned out that the idea was so that instead of listening to the radio being something that divides everyone into small little groups based on what each person most likes to listen to, German radio was designed to bring people together and expose people as a group to the wide variety of music that exists in the world. In essence, you could say, when it comes to radio-listening in Germany they’ve done their best to erase the lines so that everyone can be part of the same group.

But erasing those lines is not always an easy thing to do. Back during World War I, there was a Protestant chaplain who was serving with the American troops in Italy. And over time that chaplain became very good friends with the Catholic priest in a certain town. But in a battle one day, that chaplain was shot and killed. When the Catholic priest learned about his friend’s death, he asked the military authorities for permission to bury his friend’s body in his church’s cemetery. And the army agreed. But the priest ran into a problem with his own church’s authorities. His superiors said that they were sympathetic to what he wanted to do, but they said that there was no way that they could allow a non-Catholic to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. So the priest ended up burying his friend’s body just outside the cemetery fence.

Years after the war ended, an American veteran made a trip back to Italy to see the places where he had been during the war. Remembering the Protestant chaplain that had died on the battlefield, he went to the village cemetery where he had been buried. And it turned out that the same Catholic priest still served that church. So right away the veteran asked the priest to show him where the chaplain’s grave was. When they walked out into the cemetery, the veteran was surprised to see that the grave was now inside the fence. So the veteran said, “Ah, I see you finally got permission to move the body.” “No,” the old priest said, “They told me where I couldn’t bury the body. But nobody ever told me I couldn’t move the fence.”

Where do you draw the line? We live in a world where lines are being drawn all the time – lines that say who’s in and who’s out. But even though that’s the world that we live in, that’s not the way God wants it to be. So, when it comes to the people around you, consider the lines that you’ve drawn. And although it might not always be easy, look for ways to move those lines and to welcome other people into your life, just as God has moved the lines and welcomed us.