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Here is today's (or the most recent) "Morning Reflection" Thursday, September 3, 2010 -- Week of Proper 17, Year Two Prudnece Crandall, Teacher and Prophetic Witness, 1890
For more about the new commemorations in our proposed calendar Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer,
p. 983) Psalms 31 (morning)
35 (evening)
Job 19:1-7, 14-27
Acts 13:13-25
John 9:18-41
Job's friends know that Job is a guilty
sinner because their belief tells them that God only punishes the guilty and that God rewards the righteous. The religious
authorities know that Jesus is a sinner because he violates the Sabbath law by making mud and placing it on the eyes of a
blind man to heal him. In the synagogue, Paul begins his standard sermon to name Jesus as the Jewish messiah and to
proclaim forgiveness to all, including the Gentiles who listen as outsiders within the synagogue. When many of the Gentiles
respond to the free gift of forgiveness and follow Paul, there will be a conflict, and Paul will be forced out of town.
From our perspective as Christians in the year 2010, we find Job's theology more compelling. Sometimes the righteous
suffer and the guilty thrive. We see the flaws in the dominant theology of Job's friends, and we are emotionally swept
into the drama of Job's personal thirst for God. From our perspective, we are sympathetic to Jesus' priorities for compassion
on the sabbath, and we wonder at the hardness of those who would dismiss the value of giving sight to a man born blind just
because it happened on a sabbath. From our perspective, we value Paul's message of inclusion, for we are Gentiles who
have experienced God's grace and forgiveness without having to become Jewish and adopt the particular practices of Judaism.
Yet, from the perspective of these three conflicts, the sentiments we appreciate would all have been minority positions.
Job's friends represented conventional Biblical orthodoxy in his day. The authority's enforcement of the sabbath in
Jesus' day represented the official position of those who worked seriously to uphold the Bible's statutes and traditions.
The synagogue's reaction against Paul made sense to the congregation because Paul's message undermined the centrality of the
Temple and all of the Jewish traditions of forgiveness and cleanliness.
We look back at these historic conflicts,
and we recognize the insight of a minority opinion. We appreciate these challenges to traditional, conventional thinking.
Today we celebrate a new commemoration in our proposed calendar. Prudence Crandall started a girls school in
Canterbury, Connecticut in 1831 where she educated the daughters of the town's elite. In 1833 she admitted a young African
American girl named Sarah Harris. Harris wanted to create a school for other African American children.
The
town was outraged. Crandall refused to expel Harris, and opened a new school for African American girls. Later
that year the Connecticut legislature passed the "Black Law" to make it a crime to open a school which taught black
children from anywhere other than Connecticut. Since Crandall received students from other states, she was arrested,
jailed, tried and convicted. A higher court reversed the decision, so she continued teaching. The harassment however
grew worse, and fearing for her students safety, she closed her school the next year. Today she is recognized as the
official State Heroine of Connecticut.
I see a pattern in these conflicts between traditional, settled, conventional,
or orthodox thinking and the controversial new way that becomes convention. In each of these conflicts, the tendency
toward more empathy, compassion, acceptance and inclusion has been the more powerful and enduring stance.
Job asks
for empathy and compassion, acceptance and inclusion even though he appears cursed because of his suffering. Jesus values
compassion and healing over the religious claims of the sabbath. Paul removes cultural and religious barriers to open
a way of forgiveness and inclusion for outsider Gentiles. Crandall extends acceptance and education to people excluded
by race.
There are many conflicts in our generation that have some of these characteristics. How can we learn
from history and choose what later generations will see as the right and just side? History shows us that it is a wise
strategy to be more empathetic, compassionate, accepting and inclusive and to choose the side which best embodies those qualities.
When we ask "What would Jesus do?" -- or Job or Paul or Prudence Crandall -- the answer very often will
include empathy, compassion, acceptance and inclusion. The arc of justice and history is bent toward those values.
Lowell
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