Culture and Identity

Homily for Sunday, August 7, 2022
The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16

When we feel threatened by a perceived loss of our culture or identity, fear is a common, if not the most common, response.  For example, and here I quote from a Times article this past May:

Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of anti-Semitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.  The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart…later telling police he had sought to kill Mexicans.  And in yet another…mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo [earlier this year], a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my…people.”  [New York Times, May 15, 2022]

When we feel threatened by a perceived loss of our culture or identity, fear is a common, if not the most common, response.

The community to which the Letter to the Hebrews was written—the letter from which we heard this morning and from which we will hear throughout the month of August—was a community threatened with the loss of culture and identity.  The Christian community in the Letter to the Hebrews was a small minority, surrounded by a much larger Jewish majority that could have swallowed the Christian community and erased their new faith.  Though the author may have felt threatened and fearful for the loss of his community’s culture and identity, instead of responding with fear, the author chose rather to respond with curiosity and creativity.  Let me explain.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews chose to respond with curiosity: curiosity about his own community.  For example, the author examines his community’s beliefs and writes about angels.  He considers aspects of his community’s ritual and writes about the Temple and the priesthood.  The author time and again refers to the community’s scriptures, and not merely to any one book but to the full breadth of their books: to the books of Moses, the prophets, the so-called “historical books,” the Psalms, and even the books of the Maccabees.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, in response to the possible loss of his community’s culture and identity, though he may have felt fear, did not respond with fear.  Rather, he allowed himself to become curious about his own community, their scriptures and traditions.

And the author of Hebrews chose to respond to the possible loss of his community’s culture and identity, not merely with curiosity, but also with creativity.  It is the author of Hebrews, for example, who gives us the image of Jesus as both priest (4:14ff) and sacrifice (e.g., 9:11–14).  It is the author of Hebrews who gives us the image of Jesus as a Pioneer (e.g., 2:10), who “passed through the heavens” (4:14) and who “through his flesh… opened a new and living way” (10:20).  It is the author of Hebrews who speaks of Jesus as our mediator (e.g., 8:6, 9:24) who enables us to “approach the throne of grace with boldness” (4:16).  It is the author of Hebrews who tells us that the earthly Temple in Jerusalem is but a precursor of a more real Temple in heaven (ch 9) and who regards the Law as but a “shadow of the good things to come” (10:1).  And the author creatively (dare I say) “entertains” his readers with (for example) colorful stories of the saints (11:29ff), with rousing and inspiring rhetoric (e.g., 12:1–3), with details from the Jerusalem Temple that only the priests would know, and with details of rituals for the Day of Atonement that only the priests would see (chapter 9).  Whoever was the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, they were a creative and gifted writer.

The upshot of the author‘s response to the perceived loss of his community’s culture and identity, not with fear but with curiosity and creativity, is clarity: clarity about who they are, their own culture and identity.  Unlike the gunmen, who in response to a perceived loss of culture and identity, focused on others, the author of Hebrews focused rather on himself and on his own community; and he allowed himself to become curious.  And through creativity, the author forged a secure and confident identity for his community such that they needed not be fearful or feel threatened by those who may be different.  He developed for them a healthy “immune system,” as it were, that enabled them to move among their neighbors without feeling the need to do violence.

It is easy when faced with the possible loss of culture and identity to react, as did the white-supremacist gunmen, with fear and to focus on and to blame those whom we consider to be “other.”  The author of the Hebrews shows us a better way.  Faced with the possible loss of his community’s culture and identity, the author responded with curiosity and creativity.  It is more difficult to respond with curiosity and creativity, for curiosity and creativity require effort.  Yet we Christians are called, not to point at and to blame others, but rather to point to Him, and to allow ourselves to become ever more curious about Him and about our community, His body, the Church.  For by allowing ourselves to become curious about who He is and about who we are because of Him, and by making the effort to exercise our God-given gift of creativity, we need not let our hearts be troubled, we need not let them be afraid.  Being clear about who we are in Christ, we will—like the community in the letter to the Hebrews—be able to live together with those who may be different, and we can be agents of reconciliation helping to reconcile the world to God’s self through Christ (2 Cor 5:19).

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