Refuse to Listen
Exodus 12:1-14; Matthew 18:15-20

September 4, 2005

Maybe it’s just the way one looks at the world, but once again it seems to me that the Lectionary readings are mimicking what is going on in the streets of our city and on our airwaves. Both the infamous Passover and Jesus’ counsel on how to mediate disputes between church members are enmired in irresolvable conflicts. Nothing petty about what is going on way down in Egypt land, and the Gospel makes it sound like civil relationships have come to an impasse. Refusing to listen to one another is our most popular pastime pretty much all over the world. To be human, all too human, is not to listen to other human beings, except when you really have to -- or when you really want to.

The best way to tell a parable is to tell another parable, somebody else’s story, that is safely not connected to your situation. This is really not a safe story for me to tell, as you will quickly find discover, for it is about a strike in the town where I last served as a minister. The day was September 9, 1989, an early Saturday morning that no one forgot.

Boise Cascade Paper Company operated a huge paper mill in International Falls, Minnesota, and after some down years with the closing of a major affiliate in the town, the corporation decided to embark upon the largest expansion in Minnesota corporate history, a one-half billion dollar state of the art paper machine that would take two years to build, employing at its peak about 2000 construction workers. Happy days were here again until Boise Cascade announced that the principle construction company was going to be an Alabama firm, a non-union shop.

A wildcat protest strike began immediately with construction in early July. Tempers flared hot and so did the debate and choosing of sides in the town. Clearly, the issue was viewed in almost Biblical terms - the mill management was the collective Pharaoh, while the mill workers were the oppressed Hebrews. The principle of union organization was sacred as the means to keep less powerful and less wealthy people free from oppression and discrimination.

The workers for the construction company were labeled derogatorily “beekers,” and one of my earliest lessons in social politics became very clear. Barbara Mikulski had been my supervisor for a summer job working in the inner city, and she observed that real prejudice is not based upon race or colour, but upon economics. I thought that was a rather Marxist thought, but she said that the prejudice of one group of people is directed at the group one level below them on the socio-economic scale, a group that threatens to take their jobs. Sure enough, what ensued in this small city was a persistent prejudice and discrimination, not against people of colour, but against those whose English language had a decided Southern accent. Children who would intone “y’all” on the school yards would end up being picked upon and often beaten up for months on end. Children, we must always remember, do listen to their parents.

My church had a newsletter, so I wrote a little Kitchen Sink kind of piece on how both labour and management were not listening to one another, and both had faults in the matter. Recognize your mutual problems and start talking as if you are listening. Most of the people in the church really liked what I said, and several suggested that it be submitted to the daily newspaper, but a few did not like it and told me so. They thought I was supporting one side more than another.

There was a little advance warning about Saturday morning. Around 6:00 a.m., a fleet of buses rolled into this town at the edge of the world with only two roads into town, from the south and the west. Oh, there was a third road: across the border into Fort Frances, Ontario. From there in Canada Falls residents used to say, you could see the end of the world.

The buses were loaded with union members from all over the Upper Midwest, 600 in total. And they were mad. In a couple of hours, they smashed and burned the trailer camp used to house the single men who were migrant construction workers. Boise had moved them all out into the safety of the community the day before based on a tip.

The newspaper and most others would call it a riot, and when the rioters dispersed and disappeared, there was a stunned silence throughout the town. The unions denied any involvement and while a few people were prosecuted, none were ever convicted. People were deathly afraid the anger would escalate and more violence, and worse violence would inevitably follow. It didn’t. The violence turned out to be cathartic and almost immediately the wildcat strike lost momentum and support. By the first week in November, the beginning of the high holy season of deer hunting, the last of the wildcatters left the picket line to bag their deer and that was the end of the strike.

Around 10:00 a.m. Saturday morning, when the radio gave an all-clear signal that the riot was over, my phone rang. It was the chair of our church council who had been one of the dissenters to my newsletter essay. “Now you see what they’re made of,” he said angrily. “Tomorrow in church, just stick to religion.” I felt sick, for now I was in a real quandary. My theological education had been firmly rooted in the need for prophetic social witness and protest. Yet this man had been very kind and supportive of me in past times - and would again later on - but right now I didn’t know where to turn or what to say. I knew that anything I said would now be twisted, simply because neither side was interested in listening to the other.

I compromised with myself. I would stick to the Lectionary reading for that morning, but in the pastoral prayer I would briefly pray for peace and reconciliation and listening to one another. I already had a reputation in town for being sought out by the newspaper to comment for the liberal point of view on controversial social and political issues, and that reputation would come home to roost soon.

I went over to the church early that Sunday morning, about 8:00 a.m., and almost immediately the phone rang. It was a reporter for Channel 5 TV in Minneapolis and they were in town to get “the reaction of the churches.” Ironically, in a heavily Lutheran and Catholic city, 85% of the population between the two, our small United Church was the only one contacted by the media. The reporter actually wanted to come with a TV camera and film the service and what I would have to say. I can’t do that, I sputtered. I explained to him about my council chair, and he told me he understood because his father was a pastor in Detroit. Finally, I relented and said I would say something careful during the pastoral prayer.

After he rang off, I wrote out the prayer, carefully. I usually offered that prayer extemporaneously, but today I had to be precise and not allow words and emotions to run away from me. The phone rang again, and it was a reporter from the Duluth News-Tribune who just wanted to come to worship. Of course, he would take a few notes. I cautioned him too about my dilemma and urged his caution.

Then finally an hour before worship another phone call rendered me a near babbling idiot. It was the Associated Press, and could they come too? Oh what the heck? The more the merrier. In the end it wasn’t a zoo, though I think you could have called it a petting zoo. There I was on a short clip for the evening Minneapolis news, and the Duluth paper had a nice little article, and the Associated Press cited a mere one sentence segment of my pastoral prayer.

What did I say that was so quotable? Since I was so used to praying from the heart without a script, I absent-mindedly prefaced the prayer with the thought that the violence had made everyone feel hopeless. Do you know what happens when you are quoted by the Associated Press in the United States? It goes literally everywhere, and in the next few days I received phone calls from Georgia, New York, Colorado, California, and Texas, from guys who accused me of supporting management against labour because I had used the word “hopeless.” When people refuse to listen to one another no word makes sense, and every word can become what you want it to be. Language then is dead and only enmity is left.

But, you know, somebodies did listen. Perhaps it was the words we said during that worship service, 17th Sunday after Pentecost or so, that enabled the rest of the town to listen finally to one another. I am not sure still who were the Pharaohs or the Hebrews. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am among you.” The power of God’s gathered company is beyond our comprehension, for it is true, with God nothing is impossible.

The Pharaoh did not want to listen to cries for freedom and justice simply because he would lose something he thought was his alone to possess. One way or another, his heart was hard and loveless, so the point of the Exodus story was that God showed Pharaoh what he really did not possess. The Hebrews remember every last detail because it did not make human sense how they were given their freedom. The Pharaoh had all the power, and a peaceful solution seemed impossible. Then something happened that left no doubt that the Pharaoh and Egypt did not have the final say, that the God who created the heaven and the earth did have the final say. What happened was so specific, so terribly specific, that it left no doubt that God’s justice was not neutral, but took sides.

Already in that little faith community of Matthew, there were nasty arguments and conflicts. People were hurt by other people and stubborn anger reigned. Jesus’ method was simple and direct: get more people involved, be sympathetic, listen openly to one another, and if it still doesn’t work, then there is nothing more you can humanly do. Let God take care of the reconciliation from this point on.

Something happens, however, when two or three or three hundred gather together in the name of God. Being a Christian means being able to relate to other people as Christ would treat other people. The two heresies of modern spirituality are, first, that you can be a Christian without being involved in a church. You don’t get infected by all that hypocrisy, I guess. The other is that you can only be Christian if you are isolated with other believing Christians from the evilness of secular society in a holy ghetto. Christianity has become some endangered species that does not allow itself to be touched by nor touches the rest of the world - and so it is all the easier to ignore Christianity.

Where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name in the midst of this world, unbelievable things happen. Mountains are moved, the sea is divided into two, Pharaohs let oppressed people go free, acrimonious disputes melt into respect and love, labour disputes are settled with dignity for both parties, and one person hurt by one another actually will listen to what the other says. That’s only two people. We love to retell how we’ve been wronged, but let us not forget any detail about how we have regained our brother and our sister.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan