James 2: 1 - 17; Mark 7: 24 - 37
PLU. Maybe you know what that means, but I did not. When I was in seminary, I worked for a time at St. James’ Church, Madison Avenue. It was new territory for me, geographically and culturally: my seminary was in the lower West Side of Manhattan, and St. James’ was a very wealthy parish on the upper East Side. And in my first weeks there, I would occasionally hear people use the term “PLU.” And I kept thinking, “Am I supposed to know what that means?” So one day I said to this very fashionably dressed woman who seemed fairly friendly, “I feel stupid asking this, but could you tell me what PLU means?” She gave me this odd look and said, “It means ‘people like us.’” And it hit me that at least some members of that church were constantly assessing whether or not others were “people like them,” whether or not they were okay and acceptable. Now, I didn’t know (and didn’t ask) whether I was considered PLU or not, but I knew for a fact that many of the people that parish ministered to were not. I was there serving in their social outreach ministry, which involved extensive work with the homeless, the addicted, and those suffering from AIDS. They were doing really good things to help people, but the people they were helping would not be sitting in their pews on a Sunday morning. They were mostly poor and socially unattractive. They were not PLU.
And of course that phenomenon is not unique to St. James’ Church. We can tell from the letter of St. James we read from today that this kind of favoritism reaches back to the earliest decades of the church. The passage we heard this morning is as relevant today as when it was first written, describing how wealthy and attractive people are warmly welcomed at worship, while anyone who is clearly poor and not well-dressed is treated shabbily. Those early Christians were not supposed to make distinctions, but they did — and so do we. I’m guessing that most of us are constantly assessing people without even thinking about it: She’s really smart. He’s good looking. She’s awkward. He goes to a good school. This family is well-to-do. That family is poor. Some people are PLU. Some people are not.
Now, maybe that kind of evaluating is unavoidable, but if we are going to live in the Kingdom of God and experience the fullness of life in the Spirit, we will have to surrender our need to make such distinctions, at least when it comes to sharing the love of Christ. Because the most insidious form of assessment is determining who is worthy of love and who is not. It’s easy to love people who look like us, who think like us, who live like us. And if we’re not careful, we may even start believing that God evaluates in the same way we do. But we would be terribly wrong. Over and over again Jesus scandalizes people by insisting that God loves everyone equally. Everyone. In the Gospel today, a Syrophoenician woman, a Gentile and a foreigner, asks Jesus to cast out a demon from her daughter. What he says to her sounds harsh, but he evokes from her the right response, the only response that is true: God cares for everyone. This woman knows that, and her daughter is healed.
Some of the Pharisees and others who oppose Jesus don’t know this, and are horrified as he shows that God loves prostitutes as much as synagogue leaders, tax collectors as much as scribes, Gentiles as much as Jews. God loves the people who show up at worship in dirty clothes with no money as much as God loves those who arrive with gold rings and fine attire. Even more shocking perhaps, God loves the sinful as much as the virtuous. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, his Father makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45). God loves everyone, infinitely and unconditionally. No exceptions.
That is all true, but I know I can’t just stand up here and exhort you to love everyone equally, because I know it won’t work. I know that because it has never worked on me. Intellectually, I can agree that we are all equal in the eyes of God while my heart continues to make lots of distinctions and I continue to believe that I really am better and more loveable than those people with cardboard signs begging for money at intersections, not to mention murderers or Taliban fighters. But what I can do is share with you a crucial part of my ongoing conversion process, which is failure, my own failure. So many times I have been ugly, mean-spirited, petty, hurtful. I say that with no self-pity: it’s just a fact. There are beautiful things about me as well, and there have been moments when I have radiated the goodness of God. But so many times I have been the exact opposite of Christ-like. My own efforts to be more virtuous have so often failed miserably. And yet, in the depths of my spirit, by sheer grace, I have come to know that I am still loved by God, infinitely and unconditionally. I realize that in the Gospel story today, I am one of the dogs, and — forgive me — so are you. And yet we all, all of us, deserve the crumbs that fall from the table. In fact, God will give us the whole feast.
I am convinced that the key to not assessing others lies in our own honest self-assessment. What can soften our hearts and enlarge our spirits is realizing at the core of our being that we are loved, not because we are good or beautiful or successful, but just because we exist. We all benefit from the fact that God draws no distinctions but cares passionately for everyone. On our worst days we are adored. And knowing that has enabled me to see other people differently. I don’t know what pain or brokenness lies behind someone else’s story, and I don’t know that I would have done any better in their circumstances. I just know that God cherishes and yearns for every person, just as God cherishes and yearns for me. There is just no need for assessments and evaluations, no distinctions to make: all people are PLU. And we can thank God that’s true.
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