DIS R-E-S-P-E-C-T

The Queen of Soul was right in calling for respect.  Perhaps “Respect” remains an epic hit because it resonates with the wailing song in each of us that call for the same thing, the same respect.

As the daughter of a preacher, she’d appreciate the story read in thousands of churches this Sunday.  The established religious leaders look at the son of a carpenter as he is teaching, and ask each other how he could possibly have anything of value to offer.  The story ends tragically with the death of the protagonist.   And it’s all because of, you guessed it, disrespect.

The story is called “The Rejection at Nazareth.  Here’s a link.  http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=Mark&ch=6&v=49006001

But in carrying out this assassination, the bad guys were guilty of disrespecting themselves as well, and disrespecting the God they claim to serve.  At it is our own unvoiced wailing cry for respect that calls us to account for ourselves, not as a victim like the carpenter’s son, but a perpetrator like the powerful.

Respect, I’ve often quoted my college Philosophy professor Vaughn Adams, means to “look again.”  Had those hearing Jesus “looked again” at him, looked past their prejudices about sons-of-carpenters, they might have found the brilliant thinker and inspiring speaker who could speak to their hearts, and the caring man who could have become their friend. 

I spend Tuesday evenings preparing and serving dinner at a shelter for homeless people, and follow it with a class on "mining" their value.  You might simply call it “resume preparation” but that would indeed be superficial.  The evidence of their worth is often buried under years of disrespect, from others and eventually from themselves.  I go because I know that unless I do, I’ll fall into the same shallow thinking as the ones in the story. 

Perhaps the kind of disrespect illuminated in this story is that of thinking someone is without capacity.  And a closer look at the story exposes three lacks of re-spect. 

First, disrespecting others, we allow ourselves the sloppy habit of referring only to what we already know about who the person has been.  In this, we foolishly only consider only the past, and only the part of the past that we know and that has gotten through the tight filter of our biases and fears.

Second, we disrespect ourselves by seeing the other as a threat to our own intrinsic value, subjecting ourselves to the same history-bound, static consideration of our own value, devoid of growth, learning, or development.   We fail to reframe our worth as companion, and instead build up our defenses, foolishly attempting to establish our worth by devaluing the other.

Finally, we disrespect the unseen grace of God or human spirit to work in the other, and to work in ourselves.   

Jesus found his value in finding the value in others.  I guess you can call that soul!

  FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.