Proper 7, Yr C

The Rev. G. Hendree Harrison, Jr.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Maps and Borders

I got a new map in the mail last week. The organization Doctors Without Borders sent me, along with their newsletter, a beautiful glossy map of the world. After I hung my new map on the wall in my office, I sat back and studied it a bit.

I like looking at maps of the world because seeing all the far away places and strange names ignites my sense of adventure and jolts my middle class white American perspective.

As I look, I wonder what the weather’s like in Turkmenistan, and how do the people dress? I wonder if you can swim from Madagascar to Mozambique. Looking at my new map, I noticed for the first time that Brazil is as large as our country. I don’t like the maps that have the United States placed in the center of the global scene. I like the National Geographic maps that have us off to the west and picture Africa roughly center.

My Doctors Without Borders map is like this, and I’m glad because it gives me a sense that our country is a part of a global community and not just the superpower on center stage.

My new map, like most all maps, has boundary lines drawn in dark ink between all the countries. As I studied these dividing lines that split the world into parts, it struck me that Doctors Without Borders missed a clever marketing angle. Doctors Without Borders shouldn’t have borders on their maps! If all the countries bled and blended together on their maps, it would really drive home the point of their mission, which is to go wherever the condition is worst and the need is most desperate, regardless of any boundaries.

Of course, it could mean trouble if we strip the boundary lines off of all of our maps, because the countries will blur and we won’t be able to tell one country from another.

For instance, who would know where the United States ends and Mexico begins? The Americas would become an uninterrupted river of land flowing from Canada to Argentina.  Without boundary lines, Europe would get tangled up with the Russian Federation and the Middle East would start to confuse itself with Northern Africa. Without all our well-ordered borders, our identities would become all a mess and our nationalist perspectives would collapse.

A map without lines would be hard for us to live with because we like to know where our stuff is kept; which land is your land, and which land is mine. We like to know where the borders are, and we’d just as soon have them drawn out indelibly in dark ink.

But not God! The maps hanging in the halls of heaven don’t have border lines on them.  From the heavenly perspective, people are people and land is land. From God’s angle, mountains, valleys and level places, all run together– there are no great walls and the people are all like ants running back and forth across the ground. There are no Americans, no Mexicans, and no Sudanese. From the heavenly view there are just children of God. At least, that’s what the apostle Paul would have us think.

Paul wrote to the Galatians community who had their own lines drawn around people and land, saying, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Now, Paul is doing two things here in this famous passage. One, he is dealing with a community that is splitting up over the lines drawn between Jews and Gentiles, and he is saying to them, “Listen, you have accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you are in Christ, then all the boundary lines are collapsed- there are no more distinctions between you.”

I think this passage also implies a broader collapse of border lines beyond just those distinctions which lie between Christian folk. What I mean is Christians who put on Christ and enter into the gospel should then see the world through new eyes; eyes that do not distinguish one person from another by race, religion, creed, or color. New eyes that do not see the lines on the map but rather see brother and sister, children of God, all scattered across the broad expanse of God’s created earth.

The gospel scene this morning is a good illustration of Paul’s teaching. It finds Jesus crossing all sorts of boundaries as if he were unaware of dividing lines.  Before this morning’s scene, Jesus has been ministering in a predominantly Jewish area. Recall that last week we found him eating with a devout Jew, Simon the Pharisee. And now, he has crossed over the Sea of Galilee and into a primarily Gentile area. So you see he’s physically bridging the gap between Jew and Gentile. 

The first thing he does when he steps out of the boat is get involved with a monster who makes some of Stephen King’s horror film characters look tame. It’s not enough that this man was possessed by a legion of demons, he is also running around naked, and he lives in the graveyard near a herd of dirty pigs. 

The wild man approaches Jesus, and Jesus does not side step him like any normal rational person might. Rather, he asks him a question– he engages the man saying, “What is your name?”  Jesus wanted to get involved with this fellow who had a long list of boundary lines drawn around his life – unclean, horrific, gentile, lives in a cemetery, demon possessed, and naked!  No matter to Jesus though!  “What is your name?” He says softly.  It’s almost as if Jesus were putting on a demonstration on collapsing divisions. “Come with me,” he says to the disciples, “I’ve got a guy I want you to meet.” And when Jesus collapses something, he doesn’t do it in some subtle, nuanced way.

When I picture Jesus making a change, I picture the films you sometimes see on the news of a demolition crew collapsing a building with explosives. You know, the whole thing just falls into the ground and is instantly dust and rubble.  That’s what Jesus does to the lines that divide us. That’s what we can do to the walls that divide us if we will look at the world through Jesus’ eyes and reach out to the world with Jesus’ hands.

For me, it is some great relief that Paul says, “in Christ there are no dividing lines” because frankly, I like my chances with God better if I’m just labeled as one of his children than I do if I am saddled with all the labels attached to me by the world. You know– white, male, Episcopalian, American, North American, westerner and middle class to name a few.  What if we scrubbed the lines off of our maps and then sat back and studied them together - from God’s view? I suspect that we would see that in God’s view there are no Americans, or Brazilians, or Russians, no black or white, or brown skinned folks, no citizens, superpowers, or illegal immigrants, no Jews or Greeks, or slave, or free – there are just children of God from God’s view.  Children of God, all running about, and each loved like they’re God’s greatest treasure.