It
Ain't Necessarily So!
©
by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers,
September 17, 2000; 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B; Homecoming Sunday)
Mark
8:27–33 (NT, p. 44); James
3:1–6a (NT, pp. 247–248)
“Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
How many of you grew up, as I did, trying to ward off the taunts of peers
by chanting those words, usually amidst tears? For even as you and I uttered these lines we knew they weren’t true; we knew, deep down, that words can
hurt, and wound, and exclude.
“The tongue is a fire!” warns the Letter of James.
Now, in the ancient Mediterranean world of James’s day, there was
widespread consensus about the dangers of speech.
The sayings of the sages of ancient Egypt the wisdom books of the Jews,
and the essays of Roman thinkers like Plutarch and Seneca—all agreed that a
person is far better off keeping silent than speaking!
This
month we’ve seen the opening of our public and private schools, and today
marks the opening of our Sunday School. Teachers,
of course, are persons who cannot remain silent.
We must speak.
And
the Letter of James warns that it is teachers above all who need to be careful
with our words. In the book A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen tell
this story about the effects on one particular child of the words spoken by two
different teachers of art.
“In
first grade, Mr. Lohr said my purple teepee wasn’t realistic enough, that
purple was no color for a tent, that purple was a color for people who died,
that my drawing wasn’t good enough to hang with the others.
I walked back to my seat counting the swish swish swishes of my baggy
corduroy trousers. With a black
crayon, nightfall came to my purple tent in the middle of an afternoon.”
Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
Would that that were true, but it’s not.
Words can and do hurt and wound and exclude.
“In second grade, Mr. Barta said, ‘Draw anything.’
He didn’t care what. I
left my paper blank and when he came around to my desk, my heart beat like a
tom-tom while he touched my head with his big hand and in a soft voice said,
‘The snowfall. How clean and white and beautiful.’”
Through
words of criticism and rejection, like those of Mr. Lohr in first grade,
teachers are able to harm their students. And
teachers are also able to harm their students through words that create
exclusion, words that may sound good and true, but really aren’t.
How
many of you learned this little ditty from your teacher, as I did?
“In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
In fourteen hundred ninety-three, the Queen praised his discovery.”
We
now recognize that Columbus did not “discover America,” that in 1492 North
America was already populated by more than 20 million inhabitants.
And we also recognize that Columbus was not even the first European to
visit this continent. The Vikings
beat him to it by some five hundred years!
Yes,
we have become increasingly aware in recent years of the ways by which the
tongue can “exclude” by giving conscious or unconscious expression to
racism, sexism, and other prejudices—as in the sentence, “Columbus
discovered America,” words that exclude by dismissing the prior existence here
of millions of Native Americans. Learning
to use words that include people,
rather than exclude them, is no trivial matter.
Is
there a ditty about 1492 that a teacher may sing with her children?
One proponent of a radical, alternative social studies curriculum has
proposed this one: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean
blue. In fourteen hundred
ninety-three, he stole whatever he could see.”
Well, these words may come closer to the truth, but to me these, too,
seem to flash forth fire!
Yes,
“the tongue is a fire,” a dangerous thing, as James warns.
And beyond the examples of Mr. Lohr and these 1492 ditties, we encounter
yet another instance of dangerous words—in our First Lesson.
There Peter speaks to Jesus with fiery passion, rebuking Jesus for
talking about the suffering that he, as the Messiah, must soon undergo.
Peter rejects such an idea, for, as every Jew should know, God’s
Messiah is destined not to suffer, but to triumph as a conquering hero.
Like Mr. Lohr speaking to that first-grade child, Peter tells Jesus,
“You’ve colored the Messiah with the purple of suffering and death. That’s the wrong color!
I won’t hang that picture.”
But
unlike the first-grade child who carries his wound in silence all the way into
the second grade, Jesus speaks for himself, and for that child, and for all who
have been wounded by another's words by immediately reprimanding the speaker:
“Get behind me Satan!”
Yes,
as demonstrated by Peter and Mr. Lohr and the songs about 1492, a person’s
tongue can be a mighty devilish thing.
Today
is Homecoming Sunday at the Rutgers Presbyterian Church, and whenever I think of
Homecoming Sunday here I think of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy
and Bess. For a highlight of
our Homecoming Sunday potluck luncheon has always been hearing Rutgers’ own
Claudia Hall, a member of Porgy and Bess’s
original road company, singing “Summertime.”
This
year, inspired by our lectionary texts’ references to Satan and to a
trouble-causing tongue, I couldn’t help but think of another character in Porgy and Bess—not Clara, who first sings “Summertime,” but
the man who sings “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” namely, the devil-like figure
Sportin’ Life.
Porgy and Bess is set in South Carolina, in the Catfish Row ghetto of Charleston.
To the good folk who live there, down-south, New York seems a
far-off place of wickedness. The
opera’s hero is Porgy, a dignified, decent, warm, generous, devout, and at
times almost mystical figure—a man who’s physically crippled, but not beaten
down by life. In contrast to him,
Sportin’ Life is an interloper, a “high-yellow Negro” from Harlem who
brings into Catfish Row bootleg liquor, cocaine, and up-north urban vices.
He’s a dancing, laugh-getting villain who, while likeable, is
nonetheless evil.
The
opera’s central female character is Bess.
She’s the girlfriend of a rough-and-ready stevedore named Crown.
Crown, in a cocaine-and-alcohol-fueled rage over a game of craps, murders
one of the other men, and Bess sends Crown off into hiding.
Left behind, Bess is at first shunned by the rest of the community, but
she’s finally taken in by Porgy. And
love blossoms between the two of them.
Porgy
and Bess’s moment of security and trust is soon lost, however, as Sportin’
Life takes over the scene. Bess and
the other residents of Catfish Row go off on a daylong picnic excursion to
Kittiwah Island while the crippled Porgy stays behind.
At
the picnic, the devilish Sportin’ Life takes charge of the group, burlesquing
the role of the black preacher among his flock by preaching a satirical
“sermon,” complete with the traditional African-American call and response
pattern. In his “sermon,”
Sportin’ Life insinuates that the stories of the Bible “ain’t necessarily
so.” He also challenges the
people’s belief that the devil is a villain, and he urges “his flock” to
take the gospel’s teachings about clean living with a grain of salt.
Listen,
while Duncan Hartman and the choir sing the last part of “It Ain’t
Necessarily So,” this “sermon” spoken with a devil’s tongue:
(music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin)
“It ain’t
necessarily so,
[It
ain’t necessarily so,}
Dey tell all you chillun
De debble’s a villun
But
it ain’t necessarily so.
To get into hebben
Don’t
snap fo’ a seben—
Live clean! Don’t have no
fault!
Oh,
I takes dat gospel
Whenever
it’s pos’ple—
But wid a grain of salt!
Methus’lah live nine hunderd years,
[Methus’lah
live nine hunderd years—]
But who calls dat livin’
When no gal’ll give in
To
no man what’s nine hunderd years?
I’m preachin’ dis sermon to show
It
ain’t nessa, ain’t nessa,
Ain’t
nessa, ain’t nessa,
Ain’t
necessarily so!
From
the moment the devil-like Sportin’ Life tongues this song, the goodness in
Bess’s relationship with Porgy is doomed.
Much, much is yet to happen in the opera between Bess and Crown, and Bess
and Porgy, and Porgy and Crown. But
in the end, Sportin’ Life gains control over Bess, plying her with cocaine and
using words to entice her away to New York, promising her all the latest styles
in silks and satins and a mansion in Harlem, on upper Fifth Avenue.
When last we see her, Bess is clearly high on cocaine and strutting off
to board the boat to New York, arm-in-arm with Sportin’ Life, who's now her
pimp.
The
opera does not end with this tragic scene, however.
Gershwin allows his audience some hope for Bess’s deliverance. For in the final scene, we see Porgy setting off from
Charleston to New York in his goat cart. Will
he get there? And if he gets there,
will he ever find Bess? As the
opera concludes, Porgy and his friends sing and pray together these final words:
“Oh Lawd, it’s a long long way, but you’ll be there to take my han’.”
A
person’s tongue can be a mighty devilish thing, as demonstrated so well by
Sportin’ Life, and by Mr. Lohr, the first-grade teacher, and by the songs
about 1492, and by even the apostle Peter.
So
what lessons can we learn this morning?
First,
the lesson that we need to watch our own tongues.
We need to avoid all words that hurt and wound and exclude and
misrepresent.
And
then, going beyond that, a positive lesson: we need to become persons like
Jesus, swiftly reprimanding the one who speaks with a devilish tongue.
And
we need to become persons like Mr. Barta, the second-grade teacher, using words
to heal the one who’s been wounded by a devilish tongue.
And
we need to become persons like Porgy, refusing to give up on the one who’s
become lost through a devilish tongue.
Jesus,
who reprimanded; Mr. Barta, who healed; and Porgy, who went in search. That’s pretty good company to keep!
Let
us pray:
O Lord, it is a long, long way—a long, long way to
learning how to curb our own tongues, a long, long way to knowing how to heal
the victims of others’ words. But
we know you’re there to take our hands and pull us on. Amen.
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