Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Trinity

Sunday 31st July 2005

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

I got a letter during the week from a certain Mr. Harrison Cohen. Now, some of you will remember him very well because Harrison was our guide for our trips to Israel both in 1997 and 2000. He was a mind of information and great fun, a perfect combination for someone doing that job, and he was asking for you all!

Anyway, he was letting me know that things are getting back to a relative normality in Israel. You remember that it was something like within a week of our return in 2000 that everything went crazy over there. In that sense, we just got home in time. I suppose we know well ourselves that ‘normality’ is a relative term, and ‘intolerance’ is something we also know about, and not just something which exists in Israel or ‘somewhere else’!

I’m trying to finish a book at the moment that I started on holiday, just an easy-to-read John Grisham novel and it’s about small town America in the 70’s in Mississippi. The black / white thing was a huge issue. Racism still, of course, is a major problem, and not just in the States. In fact, when we look around at our News at home and abroad, we are surrounded by intolerance.

Many attitudes have changed over the centuries. Some attitudes we can now laugh at, but which weren’t very funny at the time. Here’s a simple example; I know it’s hard to believe, but I am old enough to have had a friend in school who at primary level had his left hand tied behind his back to prevent him from using it to write or draw. Do you not find that baffling when you think about it now? You already know that word ‘sinister’ means ‘threatening or suggesting evil’ and it comes from the Latin ‘sinistra’ meaning ‘the left hand ’ or ‘the left side’… How could we have ever thought that left-handed people must be of the devil? Is it simply because most people are right-handed?

When people are demonised for ‘being different’ then we are in real trouble. I am convinced that intolerance, in whatever form it takes, is one of the ugliest works of evil. And it happens now (even in our churches) in sometimes perhaps more subtle ways, but in ways which are just as ugly.

I came across a story from the United States just the other day. Of course, the history of the USA has not been so united. For centuries (as you know) American society was racially segregated. From schools to buses, public restrooms to drinking fountains, restaurants to churches, the country was divided into black and white.

Hospitals were among the last institutions to desegregate because many people were afraid they might get the “wrong blood” during a transfusion. They feared that if they received blood from a person of another colour or ethnic origin, they might actually develop the characteristics of that race. All that changed when Dr. Charles Drew came along.

In the 1930’s Dr. Drew created the process we now use to make plasma. Plasma comes from blood, but it is not type-specific, which means that it can be used to treat bleeding patients, or whatever, without the need for the whole blood. Dr. Drew’s discovery was so noteworthy that he was asked to head the Blood for Britain campaign during World War 2. After the war, Drew founded the American Blood bank, which is still in operation today.

Ironically, Dr. Charles Drew died in 1950 at the age of only 46 because he did not receive a blood transfusion or blood plasma in time. Dr. Drew had been injured in a car accident and taken to a hospital that was still segregated – a hospital that would not admit black people. And Dr. Drew bled to death, because Dr. Drew…
was black.

I suppose we would like to think that such a thing could not happen today. Perhaps we could wonder intellectually how anybody could ever have the right to take another man’s life in the name of whatever cause or creed or colour or simply to refuse to treat someone who was of a different colour. But is this not happening more, not less? Has our so-called civilised world learnt nothing? Attitudes have changed, the world has changed! Indeed, that’s all true, but have we really changed that much?

I have no doubt that intolerance of others for their colour, their political beliefs, their religion, even their sexuality is a form of evil. As a church, I think we need to be careful that we will not fall into a fundamentalist trap that everything outside our creed is wrong and needs to fought on every level by any means. Doesn’t it seem such a small step to take before we are like that? Intolerance and a hatred of what is deemed to be wrong outside our small, limited understanding of things, is a very dangerous place to be.

In Mel Gibson’s now famous film, ‘The Passion of the Christ’, the hands that you see on the screen driving the nails into Christ’s hands on the cross belong to Mel Gibson. It is all we see of him. It’s a very poignant lesson. Back to Dr. Drew for just a moment. It is only in retrospect that we can appreciate the injustice of Dr. Drew’s death. Because public policy has changed, we may believe we’re different from the people of 1950. We cling to the belief that we would have behaved in a more caring manner than those who turned Dr. Drew away that day. Can we be sure of that?

Are we, even, really that different to the people who sent Jesus to the cross? Until we realise our role in all of this, the part that we play, like Mel Gibson’s hands in the film, we will have missed the point altogether. And ‘intolerance’ will happily keep on growing and growing and growing.