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“Born in the U.S.A”
A sermon delivered by Rev. Maria Swearingen
at Myers Park Baptist Church
on July 3, 2016
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost from Galatians 6:1-18
I would imagine that once or twice in your lifetime, someone has asked you the benign,
conversational, cocktail party question, “Where were you born?” And you respond predictably with
Charlotte, NC. Mumbai, India. Seattle, Washington. Or in my case, Lafayette, Louisiana.
But we all know there’s more to that question, isn’t there? What we are really searching for when
we ask someone that question goes far beyond those few words. Packed inside it, we are also asking
each other:
Where do you come from?
Who are your people?
What defines you, who raised you, what do you believe?
How do you make sense of the world?
What makes you, you?
In fact, if you were at a cocktail party with Southerners, they would have probably just cut to the
chase and asked, “Who’s your mom ‘n ‘em?”
I recently came across an interactive piece entitled, “How Powerful is Your Passport?” As you might
guess, Western European countries and the United States had a very strong “passport power” while
countries in the Middle East and African continent were considered weak. Technically, the article
was measuring how widely a person with a particular passport could travel internationally. But we
all know that passport power is connected to much deeper kinds of powers…older ones, historic
ones, colonial ones, imperial ones. Powers that have long determined which countries are the
“greatest in the world.”
Where we are born, how we are born, what marks us and defines and describes us—These things
matter a great deal, don’t they?
As Americans (Happy Fourth tomorrow, by the way) there’s a way in which our “passport power”,
our nationality—that thing that marks us and defines us right at birth, makes us feel safer. Those
stamped, square blue notebooks tell us we can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone we want to be.
No borders confine us. No boundaries inscribe us. Nothing can stop us. And we can live with the
assurance that our passport power will keep us safe.
Last week, your brave pastor and pulpiteer unpacked the seemingly un-packable and began peeling
back the layers on the famously infamous apostle Paul.
And slowly but surely, he made the case that this early Church leader, whose letter-writing library
has been used by others throughout Christian history to condone slavery, misogyny, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and the thrilling list ending in y’s, isms, and phobias goes on, might not be the slaveholding, woman-bashing, homophobe that he appears to be at first glance. The letters of Paul, as we
now have them, have been misappropriated and forcibly edited over time. As a result, they tell a
story that often stands in 180-degree opposition to the one Paul struggled to unearth during the
earliest days of the church’s formation.
© 2016 Maria Swearingen
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These early communities of the Way challenged things like imperial rule, blind ideology, and
cultural exclusion. They questioned how important things like passport power, nationality, and
citizenship really were to human dignity. They did this with their very bodies, gathering in one
another’s homes at tables of hospitality—Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, and female alike—mucking
up power dynamics, changing the social order, doing things that unsettled everybody (religious
ideologues and imperial enforcers alike).
Yet that story, the one I just described, about Paul seems to be buried under the rubble of centuries
old misinterpretation. So, as an act of faithfulness to the gospel, we keep trying to ingest and digest;
here we all are with our theological shovels and pick axes, ready to excavate. Who says church is
boring?
So, we find ourselves again today with this strange, new, old Paul in the book of Galatians: Talking
about circumcision (I heard your nervous laughter last week, menfolk!) and the marks of Christ,
about bearing one another’s burdens, and about boasting in nothing other than the cross.
Beginning in verse 11, Paul says, “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own
hand!”— i.e., “I really mean what I’m about to tell you!”
Paul continues, “It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to
be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised
do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about
your flesh.”
So, grab your shovels folks. Let’s excavate. There are a number of explanations scholars have given
about why members of the Galatians community were compelling new Gentile converts to be
circumcised. Here’s one I’d like us to churn on today:
While the Roman Empire spent lots of time and energy building homogeneity within its
borders, such a large and vast system had to allow for a little difference to flourish, here and
there—especially when most of the empire was conquered lands with people who already
had traditions and customs, gods and rituals.
So, some people-groups were given special “passes”, if you will, to continue cultural and religious
customs that weren’t the norm within the Roman Empire. One of these passes, and I use that term
very loosely, went to ancient Near Eastern Jews who could still have Passover and follow Sabbath
laws and worship one God and circumcise their infant boys. It’s quite possible that the early
Galatian Christian church, doing weird things like gathering together landowner and slave, male
and female, Jew and Gentile into their community might have been drawing a little unwanted
imperial attention. Especially if the slave among them starting saying things like, “This liberating
gospel thing seems to be telling me that I’m not supposed to be owned by someone else.” Or, “This
liberating gospel thing seems to be telling me that just because I’m female doesn’t mean I’m
property.”
It’s quite possible that Jewish Christians began saying to their Gentile Christian friends, “This
liberating gospel thing is starting to turn some heads. And even though we are odd ducks in the
Roman Empire, at least we are odd ducks with a little bit more wiggle room. Maybe if you were
circumcised and people thought you were really Jewish and not whatever it is this whole
community of the Way thing is, that might make us all a little safer here.”
Perhaps, circumcision felt like a way to get just a slice of Roman passport power.
© 2016 Maria Swearingen
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You can understand why this Galatians community might be concerned. Only a few years after this
letter is written, the temple in Jerusalem is desecrated and burned to the ground. And not too long
after that, Christians begin experiencing blanket persecution. And Paul was already getting it from
all sides.
It’s hard to press forward, to imagine reaping a harvest and not giving up as Galatians 6:9
proclaims, when you are afraid for your very life—afraid of temples burning, houses burning, afraid
of prison, persecution, crucifixion, violent death.
It’s easy to call out these Jewish Christians for compelling people to be who they weren’t. But the
violence wasn’t really theirs to start with. They were stuck inside a system that perpetuated this
violence—all the while, calling itself Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), the securer of the world,
passport power beyond your wildest dreams, the assurance of security and safety for all people . . .
well, at least some people.
Does any of this ring a bell? Can you imagine certain people groups within our nation’s borders
feeling this way— afraid, uncertain, looking for any sliver that might keep them from experiencing
the violence that comes with difference, the violence that comes with challenging systems of power
that classify us, categorize us, and determine our value for us?
Can you imagine your LGBTQ friends struggling to decide if they should “pass as straight” or be
their authentic selves and pay the potential consequences? What about Mexican-American children
whose parents stop teaching them Spanish because they don't want anyone confusing their
citizenship and potentially discriminating against them? How about Black men and women in this
country who know all too well that if their name is Michael or Susan they have a ridiculously higher
chance of being hired for a job than if their name is DeShawn or Letishia?
We must offer compassion to these early Christians, struggling to take on the cross of Christ. Any of
us facing uncertain violence would take on whatever identity we could to secure our safety as well.
But we must ask ourselves: What is this underlying violence that would cause people to cut off
parts of who they are to feel safe? What is it about the system we’ve built that would require
choices like the ones these early Christians were struggling to make? Could it be that the safety we
think we’ve established might be the very thing that is crushing us, destroying our identities,
making us less-than-human in the process?
And so this question lurks under the surface of our consciousness, it pulls on all of us, it challenges
all of us—it makes all of us deeply uncomfortable.
The question is this: “Does the thing that make us safe, make us whole?”
And as these recent days have been a frenzy of strange talk about who is in and who is out in this
country—Syrian refugees, Muslim Americans, Black Lives Matter activists (the list is long), I
couldn’t help but start humming the Springsteen classic "Born in the USA." I imagined it pulsing
through the sound system at a pro-America rally, much like the ones we’ve seen footage of in recent
months. But when I spent time actually reading the lyrics of The Boss’ anthem, I was reminded that
it’s actually the story of a Vietnam veteran, bearing the marks of nationality and power on his body,
only to find himself washed up and washed out, a soldier of PTSD, violence, loss, and grief. It’s the
story of someone who thought his nationality and birthright would assure his safety, would make
him powerful and great and memorable. Instead, it battered him, churned him up and spit him out,
left him as the bearer of violence. What he thought would make him safe didn’t make him whole.
© 2016 Maria Swearingen
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It’s so easy to think that a certain national identity, or a certain religious identity, or a certain ethnic
identity will make us safer, more secure—especially in a world that feels so volatile and uncertain
and unsafe. So we build that identity up, we seek it out, we do everything we can to make it more
powerful and more prominent. We make these identities the markers of who we are. They define us
and secure us.
Yet, the lingering, terrifying truth remains. Under imperial constructs, under systems of power,
even these markers do not make us safe. These things (these markers, these identities) keep us
from relationship. They turn us into bearers of violence and power and greed. They turn other
people into problems, potential thieves of our identities. They destroy the possibility of
brotherhood and sisterhood—of deeper, abiding relationship—because we are spending all of our
time and energy concerned with building these markers up and not on building wholeness, on
building community together.
When I was eight or nine, I have a vivid memory of taking a standardized test. Before we could
begin, we had to fill out a form with what you’d expect (name, age, race, gender, etc.), I’m sure, for
statistical reasons. As a child born to an Anglo-Saxon father and a Puerto Rican mother, I found
myself consternating over the ethnicity box. Above this line, the sentence “Check only one box”
hung over me like a guillotine. I was going to have to pull the lever and pick one.
I remember checking “White”. Why did I check White? We spoke Spanish at home. We ate arroz con
gandules, we sang “Dame La Mano Paloma” at Christmas . . . I spent summers on the island basking
in the Latin sun. I was proud of my heritage. But I’d heard people make fun of my half-brother with
a Hispanic last name. I’d heard people jab at my mom’s accent. I’d heard people in my tiny
hometown in Southeast Texas say how tired they were of immigrants taking their jobs.
I’d heard enough to know it was safer to just check “White”. Amidst all the subconscious swirling, I
remember raising my hand and asking if I could go the restroom. I braced myself over the bathroom
sink, took a long hard look in the mirror, and threw up.
Who was I? Who did I belong to? How did I know that one of those boxes would make me feel safer?
Did it make me feel safer? Did it make me feel whole?
Pax Romana, Pax Americana, Pax Brexit, Pax Whatever . . . Whenever it is wedded to a system that
calls you to claim one box over another—that tells you without words that you are safer if you are
this instead of that, that you are better if you are this than if you are that—it is no Pax at all. And
while it may give you passport power, it has stolen your birthright as the Beloved Child of God.
It is not Pax. It is violence. It is brutality. It is destruction to the human spirit, to human
relationships, to human thriving.
For as Paul says to us, bearing the marks of a violent nation on his very body, “We are a new
creation in Christ.” One not bound by boxes. One that tells us that what makes us safe does not
make us whole.
But what does make us whole is the claiming of our full Belovedness, who we are, as we are? What
does make us whole is claiming one another’s full Belovedness, from whomever, however,
whenever, wherever is must be claimed?
As Christians, as Pauline Christians, we are stirred to call out violence at dinner tables of hospitality.
We are called to refuse our passport power when it stands in opposition to the Spirit’s Power.
Because though some of us might have been born in the USA, we know, we trust, we believe that
our deepest birth cannot be defined by borders or nation-states.
© 2016 Maria Swearingen
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So, where were you born? Who are your people? Where do you come from? Paul asks us. Jesus asks
us. The Spirit of God asks us. I pray the answer will transform you, me, we, the former box checkers
freed by the liberating gospel, to proclaim, “I was born in the very heart of God.” Amen.
© 2016 Maria Swearingen