There are so many reasons for dissing people. Though we don’t all have the same ones.
She’s just a Freshman. He’s a drop-out. She’s too intellectual. He’s a socialist. She’s an atheist. He’s a bigot. She’s missing teeth. He’s handicapped. She’s blonde. They’re Yankee fans.
So many ways to dismiss people as irrelevant. To cut them off. To close our minds when they start talking. To see them as somehow less than human.
Just recently I was involved in a big group discussion. I offered what I thought was a powerful point. The moderator waved me off with a few words, dismissed my point entirely, and I felt personally disrespected. I got over it and moved on. But it got me thinking about people who are regularly dissed, and how I sometimes do it myself, as hard as I try not to.
I feel awful when I spot my own prejudices, the ways I categorize people without intending to at all. And when they really start bugging me, I take those pre-judgments into my prayers and into my conversations with friends. Somehow, exposing them is the beginning of overcoming them. For me, it’s a journey of learning to respect beyond the lines, learning to see the way God sees.
This week many Christians around the world will be digging into the story from Mark’s Gospel where Jesus talks about the issue of divorce and then about how children are respected (or not) in his culture.
Take a look at this story: Mark 10:2-16 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:2-16&version=MSG
There’s so much to talk about as far as what divorce was like then as opposed to how it is now, and we’ll do that on Thursday night at Bread for your Journey, but I’ll just get us going a bit here… Jesus is talking about the kind of divorce that a husband could do simply by writing a letter of dismissal, leaving his ex-wife to fend for herself in a woman-unfriendly world. She’s dismissed, disrepected, and terribly alone. She’s damaged goods and will never live the label down… unless…
Unless someone breaks through old attitudes and prejudices and does something about it. Unless someone creates a new kind of community where the dissed can be re-respected. Even children, the most dissed of all, can be seen and held as people of worth we can learn from admire. Is that what Jesus was getting at?
How are you someone that is dissed sometimes and needs to be re-respected, re-connected, re-deemed? And what difference does it make that Jesus is working through us to restore respectful community? What needs to change inside of us for that to begin?
Let’s explore some more this Thursday night 7pm at the Crowne Plaza. And we’ll continue as well on here on the blog this weekend.
