It’s often easy to conclude that there are only two kinds of people in the world. Sometimes even the scriptures seem to want to suggest that the world is divvied up this way: God’s chosen people and everybody else; Jews and Gentiles; saints and sinners; the redeemed and the lost. The biblical tradition often seems all too comfortable with binary thinking. And the church often seems this way too.
You can sort of see this way of thinking in the passage we heard from the Acts of the Apostles earlier. You have Paul and Silas doing the work of the Lord, on the one hand, and just about everybody else on the other hand: the slave-owners, the magistrates, the crowd, those in the marketplace, the Roman authorities, the jailer, etc. It’s the good guys against the bad guys.
The Psalmist sometimes adopts this binary point of view. We heard it in the Psalm this morning: “Confounded be all those who worship carved images and delight in false gods,” but, “the Lord loves those who hate evil; he preserves the lives of his saints.”
I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but a binary perspective of the world around us often suits us. Maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world: believers and non-believers; Republicans and Democrats pro-life and pro-choice; straight and Queer; rich and poor; gun owners and gun control advocates; vaxers and anti-vaxers; tree huggers and oil drillers; Fox News watchers and MSNBC watchers. Two kinds of people. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Others have done a much better job than I could of considering why we break the world down into binary categories so easily and so regularly. It probably has to do with the way our brains work, and with media influences, and the complexity and the sheer number of choices we have to make every day. If we decide that there are only two kinds of people in the world, I guess that makes it somewhat easier to decide which side of whatever binary choice it is that we want to be on. I have been feeling the pressure of these binary choices a lot lately, maybe you have too. We seem to have to choose sides about a lot of important things: abortion, and the climate, and gun-control, and so many other things, too.
And the church, oh the church! With her myriad sins and failings, and her long, long list of abuses; the church seems to be the cause of a dilemma that becomes more pronounced with every report of abuse from yet another denomination or powerful institution, making it easier and easier for people to want to disaffiliate from organized religion. It feels almost like a binary choice to remove ourselves from any fellowship that can be so cruel and so self-serving. Do we want to be a part of such a fellowship, such an institution, or not? If there are only two kinds of people in the world, which side are we going to be on?
Every time I think of the war in Ukraine, I begin to think that maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world. It’s been so easy to support Ukrainians, because the war seems to give us a lens through which we can see right and wrong, good and bad so very clearly. And either you’re with ’em or you’re against ’em.
And when the news came from Uvalde, Texas last week, of the nineteen little children who were murdered by an eighteen-year-old boy… and the podcasts, and the news stories, and the editorials, and the social media posts all seemed to urge us to decide and to declare what kind of people we are, in this world in which there are probably only two kinds of people.…. Well! I knew, didn’t I? I know where I stand, and I know why it’s important! And I believe strongly that I am on the right side of gun control. And I am willing to stake my claim that I am on the side of the angels… and most very likely on the side of God himself! That’s the way I see it, and I do believe this! And under the right circumstances I would argue the point!
I am grieving those nineteen children and their two teachers. More quietly, much more quietly, very, very quietly, I am also trying to grieve the death of the eighteen year old boy who perpetrated that fiendish act. But mostly I am digging my fingernails into my arm to try to keep from weeping when I think of the awful deaths of those little children. And I feel I ought to say something to you and to the world about it! I hear all the righteous anger, and the calls to action, as well as the thoughts and the prayers. And I am wondering; I am asking God what God has to say about all this, and how I can help say it for him.
And I happened to be in my car the other day, listening to a radio station that represents the binary choice of my point of view. And I heard a woman named Scarlett Lewis being interviewed by Cory Turner, and she was talking about forgiveness.* Now, I’m big on forgiveness! I’ve been trying to talk about forgiveness too! So I sat up and took notice. And it turns out that Scarlett Lewis is the mother of a 6-year old boy named Jesse “who was murdered alongside many of his classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary” School, ten years ago.
And the story on the radio was going on about school safety, and a report by the Secret Service, and bullying in schools, and something “they call a threat assessment model, where a team of trained staff, including an administrator, a counselor or school psychologist and a law enforcement representative work together to identify and support students in crisis before they hurt others…” which, the reporter told us, reminded him of something Scarlett Lewis had told him a few years ago, when he had interviewed her.
This mother of a child who’d been shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School at the age of six… this is what she said: “There are only two kinds of people in the world…”. And I braced myself, because it seemed like whatever came next was going hurt in its poignant, insightful, truth-telling accuracy.
“There are only two kinds of people in the world,” she said, “good people and good people in pain.”
There are only two kinds of people in the world, good people and good people in pain.
When Jesus prayed for his disciples on the night before he died, he prayed to God the Father “that they may all be one.” It sure doesn’t sound to me like he is thinking that there are only two kinds of people in the world.
Am I going too far, if I suggest that Jesus’ prayer implied that the only kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain? Because, theologically speaking, Scarlett Lewis’s two kinds of people are the only two kinds of people that makes sense if Jesus’ prayer has any hope of leading somewhere: good people, and good people in pain. Scarlett Lewis’s assessment actually sounds like a kind of derivative of Jesus’ prayer that we all might be one, since if the only two kinds of people there are in the world are good people and good people in pain, well… maybe there are not really two kinds of people in the world. Seeing the world and the people in it that way might be the only way that love wins, as we so often hope it will.
I don’t know what measure of grace it takes to survive the murder of your six-year old child and to be able to say that there are only two kinds of people in the world, good people and good people in pain; but I want to get some of that grace.
When Jesus prayed that we might be one, maybe his prayer meant this: that there might be only two kinds of people in the world: good people and good people in pain.
I wonder which kind of person you are. I wonder which kind of person I am.
All these calls to action, these fed-up demands that we finally do something, and to stop it with the thoughts and prayers, these injunctions to one another are not much use as long as insist on seeing each other as one of two kinds of people in the world, since, in such a world, everything we do cancels the other out. We’ll only act, we’ll only do something, we’ll only change, we’ll only be transformed when we are one, and when we can see that the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain.
And Jesus prayed explicitly that we might be one, that in our unity we might share again in the divine nature, as he and the Father are one.
It’s my job to look for Good News, for evidence of the Gospel in the world, and to draw attention to it, highlight it, and help us take something from it for our own good. My God, that task has seemed hard to accomplish this past week.
The good news expressed in Jesus’ prayer that we all may be one, might not be so easy to hear at first, especially when it seems so obvious to us that there really are only two kinds of people in the world… until you consider the possibility, suggested by a woman whose six-year-old child was murdered at his elementary school, that maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world: good people and good people in pain.
And maybe we really all can be one, if there are only good people and good people in pain?
And I think… that’s a world that we could live in, in peace.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
29 May 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
*on “All Things Considered”, National Public Radio, May 26, 2022, The interview with Scarlett Lewis had actually taken place in 2019
