Let us call to order this meeting of the International Assumptions Club. I think we know why we’re all here.

I like asking questions on social media to help build my sermons. Last week I asked,  “What is a movie that you hate that everyone else loves?” What I thought would be fun quickly turned painful. The first few answers all contained my favorite movies: Star Wars, Forrest Gump, The Matrix, and The Princess Bride.

I was speechless. How could anyone hate those movies?!

It’s painful coming face-to-face with your assumptions. I assumed everyone knows and loves these movies. Apparently it’s not universal.

It can be a shocking experience when you realize that others don’t see the world as you do. When I was telling my in-laws about my favorite movies, they just looked at me curiously. When I asked then what their favorite movie was, they answered the 1968 movie The Lion In Winter. A movie I had never heard of. They assumed everyone had heard about it.

I watched it, and I learned something. I started to watch movies from their era. I started to listen to music from other eras. It has been said that the music we were listening to when we were in high school is the same music that we’re listening to today. There’s some truth in that. I’m still listening to many of the same bands, and if not the bands then I’m still drawn to similar styles.

Asking questions about movies and pop culture is a safe way to learn about the context that forms others. If someone says their favorite band is The Beatles, then you have a sense of the time they grew up in or that their parents grew up in. The same could hold true if someone would answer Nirvana or Rihanna. These questions are the question in front of the question. The question behind the question is, “What do you think is ‘normal’?”

Context shapes us. The time and place we grow up in. The family system we are raised in. All of this silently forms in us a way of looking at the world. We interpret the world though this lens, and we aren’t even aware of it until something cross the threshold that challenges our assumptions.

I am a tall, straight white male from a single parent family. I was raised in a small town and grew up in the late ’80s and ’90s. This is my frame of reference, this is what I consider normal. It’s normal to be the oldest child. It’s normal to have a little sister and a single mom. It’s normal to read comic books and listen to The Smashing Pumpkins. It’s normal to root for Cleveland sports teams. And everyone’s favorite sports are basketball and football, no exceptions… wait.. I’m doing it again aren’t I?

I went to college, and I was ready to learn. I took a Native American History class that really opened my eyes. I signed up for the class because I grew up thinking I was part Native American. I had heard two things about my father growing up: He was prone to lying, and he was part Native American.

Naturally, I seized on the Native American part. I heard we were part Cherokee. So I learned everything I could about them. How they had their own printed language and alphabet and they had newspapers and such printed in that language, trying to match their European counterparts. That didn’t prevent their displacement and the Trail of Tears. I read all about the Cherokee.

I met my older half-sister when I was 18. She knew my father more than I did. I asked her, “So what’s it like being part-Cherokee?”

“Cherokee?!” She said. “We’re not Cherokee. We’re Cree!”

Oh… I guess that’s an honest mistake. Cree, Cherokee. Ok. Fine. I went on to take the Native American History class in college, where I wrote a few papers about the Cree. They are a fascinating people, migrating all over Canada.

After college, I meet my younger half-brother. He lives on the same street as my father. So I asked him, “What’s it like growing up Cree?”

“Cree?!” He said. “We’re not Cree. We’re Black Foot!”

Wait… what?! Black Foot is Western Canada. Am I really Native American at all?

Then I met my father a few years ago, and he said that we were either Black Foot or Lakota Sioux. When he said that, I suspected where my Native American roots came from. They came from Dances With Wolves, from Hollywood.

I took the Native American class in college to affirm this part of my identity. What I learned in that class was shocking. Turns out the view from the reservation isn’t as patriotic as the view from Ohio. When playing Cowboys and Indians, as many of us did growing up, the cowboys were the bad guys on the reservation. When I was home from college, I told all of this to my mom and her then-boyfriend. Her boyfriend couldn’t accept this view point. He got really loud and started disparaging my college and “too much learning.”

What I didn’t factor in was his view. He loved John Wayne. His favorite style of movies were Spaghetti Westerns. His worldview was being fundamentally challenged. He couldn’t see any other way of looking at the world, another telling of history.

I feel like my life has been a journey of learning to challenge my worldview and try to see things from another’s point of view. I try to challenge my assumptions and surround myself with people who help with that.

My sister has been a great ally in this endeavor. For Christmas one year, she gave me a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. You spit in a little tube and send it off, and 6 weeks later, you get the results. Turns out that what my family said we were, namely mixed-European mutts that are largely Irish and Slovakian is true. But I’m also Scandinavian. That was a surprise. And what wasn’t really a surprise: No Native American. Not a drop.

And I’m okay with that. I’m opening myself to that. Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. I died to that part of my identity a long while ago. Just listening to another’s perspective produces fruit. Listening without comment, is important!

I’m middle class. I wasn’t always. I am sensitive to how the poor are treated. I find great wisdom in Father Greg Boyle’s phrase, “to stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” When we learn of what people have gone through. With all they have had to carry, our hearts open up.

Reading the book Nickel and Dimed, it showed how hard it is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, especially if you don’t have boots in the first place. Sure, some of the poor don’t want to work. But many more can’t work. Many more are working multiple jobs and still can’t make ends meet. It’s both individual and corporate. Both a personal and a societal problem. “Well, I gotta get my piece of the pie.” I don’t think that’s a helpful metaphor. It assumes there’s only one pie and if we get a big piece that leaves less for others. How about we just learn to make more pies? Assumptions can be dangerous and sinful.

I’m male. It was eye opening to learn what women have to deal with. I glimpsed this with my mom. She was a mechanic, a “man’s job.” She was harassed, her knowledge was questioned, she had to prove herself time and time again. It was shocking that women make a quarter less per hour for the same work as a man. It was shameful to learn about the glass ceiling. It’s no world for my mom, my sister, my wife, and daughter. I’m committed to righting these wrongs. Yet for me to do this, I have to acknowledge my own assumptions about gender and sexuality. I am not clean in this. Victoria Secret models still catch my eye, yet I know that body type is just one among many. I also struggle with how women’s bodies and sexuality are used to sell everything from underwear to cars to hamburgers. My transgressions and sin are always before me, even when I don’t see it. I’m working on it.

Men, we have to own our part and help each other heal from toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is the assumption that men HAVE to be in charge, they HAVE to be the strong silent type, that they ALWAYS have to watch sports. That there are certain things that are manly and things that aren’t. The idea that men can’t be nurturing parents, able to express their feelings, that they are needy (especially when sick), or can’t cook, sew, clean, knit, read, or be vulnerable must be challenged by men and women alike, and a better standard must be raised up for our young men and boys in this congregation and our nation. We have to die to some assumptions and create a new model, a clean heart.

I am white. More specifically, I am Caucasian even though I can’t find Caucasia on a map. I’m genetically Irish, Slovak, and Swedish, but I’ve been born and raised here. I’m an American through and through. Taking my Native American History class, it was painful to learn of the unjust ways our government has treated and still treats Natives. It’s a shameful part of our history, and many of us want to ignore or deny the impact. Yet the inequity is before us. Our transgression is there.

If you visit Germany, you’ll see no war monuments honoring fallen German soldiers. You’ll read their history with a sense of shame. You’ll read more about the victims, not war heroes. You’ll be able to tour concentration camps. The safeguards Germany has taken to make sure their shameful history doesn’t repeat itself are amazing. When we don’t live like a kernel, when we don’t die, when our egos only demand our own way for our own sense of normal with no apologies or sense of how it’s harming others… Nazi Germany can spring up. Germany has taken so many steps to face down their history.

America has not done a similar thing. It is something to consider. Instead we have reservations. We have statues of a failed and treasonous state and their generals on our land. People still fly and wear the Confederate Flag. These came around during the 1960s when a group of people had the audacity to ask for rights like voting, and proper schooling.[1]

I walk around with my sense of normal. We have that much in common, we all think our perspective is normal. But what’s normal for me, is not normal for you. I’m trying to have a clean heart, but sometimes my ego will insist on its own way. I have no idea what it’s like to be in your shoes, but I love listening to you. I am trying to turn my judgement into curiosity. We don’t have to agree on every little thing, but I hope we can try to talk to one another and figure out where the other is coming from.

Here’s the thing…  It’s as Jesus said today… When he is lifted up, all people will be drawn to him. All. People. People with a similar sense of normal, and people who have a very difference sense of normal. Insisting on my own way will keep be from coming close to Jesus. Dying to myself, allowing my ego to fall away, even for a little while, will produce so much fruit.

I will testify that I’m a better person from knowing your stories. I’m a better person from knowing about Native American, African American, and German history and people. My life is richer from knowing people born before 1982. My life is fuller by knowing people born after 1982. I love discovering what others think is a good movie and what they see in it. How their face lights up and how passion comes into their voices and they light up from the inside, you know what I’m talking about?

When Christ is lifted up, he will draw all people to himself. Christ, a brown-skinned Jewish Palestinian man who lived 2,000 years ago, who is very different from me… takes an interest in my context. He knows how different his Biblical context is from my own and he loves me anyway. He forgives me for not seeing how my life can harm another. He desires a clean heart that is aware of its faults and biases. He invites us into a wider community, a wider sense of who is our family. He desires a joyful life for all.

With such a love freely offered over 2,000 years ago… what’s stopping us from offering a similar love to our neighbor today? Let us seek unity within our diversity. Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at one another, just as God stands in awe with us. God who has placed so many different and interesting people in our lives in in our world… God’s favorite movie is a love story. God’s least favorite movie is war, hate, and division. God’s favorite movie is you and me, living in peace, hope and love… and the greatest of this is… What’s the word..?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future