Labels

I didn’t have a very Sabbatical Sunday this week because I had to do a CPR course in the city at Dymocks building. So I missed my usual congregation and attended the Wesley Mission in the city, which I used to attend between 2005-2007 when I was still a medical student/ intern living in Sydney CBD! It was the place where I did introductory courses like “The Purpose Driven Life” and “The Alpha Course”.

The speaker that day was Rev Dr Rick Dacey, an American who grew up in Massachusetts. The title in the newsletter was called “Do you want to be blessed?” but the talk was kind of different, as it was more on the topic of “labels”, and I found it a very interesting talk.

During worship time, a strange looking agitated elderly man walked into the congregation and pointed his walking stick towards the Rev and called out some things that didn’t make sense for less than one minute and immediately walked off saying he doesn’t believe in Jesus. That was a rather unexpected scene as this man is a stranger to this congregation. Anyways the congregation prayed for this man for a minute.

First Rev Dacey describes how the Eastwood region is now very multicultural. One day, when he was shopping there, he was lining up behind a father and son who looked 12y.o. or so. The father spoke to his son in a wholesome Aussie accent, “look at this, the whole place is crawling with them!” Then this guy turned to Rev Dacey, and on seeing that he is also of Caucasian appearance, tried to get him into the conversation with the assumption that he is also “Aussie” and became rather embarrassed when Rev Dacey said “I am one of them too”.

Rev Dacey thinks this man is racist. But he also becomes aware that when he thinks of this, he is also sticking a label on this man, as a “racist”. He asked us, is he not like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 in this case? “The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.” vs "thank God I am not a racist"?

Rev Dacey talked about the Parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37, and how Jesus commands us to “love your neighbor”. When we hear the word Samaritan, we usually think it’s referring to a good guy. However, at that time, historian Josephus said that the Samaritans and Judeans were conducting terrorist attacks on one another. So the Judeans did not think the Samaritans were good guys at all! And Jesus was telling them the Samaritans were their neighbors and to love them!

Rev Dacey then goes on to talk about his childhood background, where his mother grew up in the great depression and developed the habit of never letting anything go to waste. She worked in a supermarket and there was always some canned food which becomes cheap because their labels have fallen off. People in the shop always attempted to have a guess of what those cans were and labelled it with a marker. However, sometimes they got it wrong. For instance, one day his mother brought home one of those cans and they were expecting it to be pear, but it turned out to be peas. So labels can sometimes to be useful, but sometimes not, because we can get it wrong.

Rev Dacey then talks about another time when he went to visit an African-American church in Connecticut because that church is really famous for its worship. When he got into that unfamiliar neighborhood, he naturally started thinking about what each person on the street was up to as he checked them out, and made a few assumptions. Then he got to the church and sat at the very back. Someone warmly greeted him and asked about his background and when she learned he is a pastor, she immediately brought him to the front of the congregation and the whole congregation welcomed him warmly! He is very impressed with the attitude of this church, and that they didn’t try to label him despite him being Caucasian!

Rev Dacey thinks that labels can sometimes be helpful, and sometimes not. For instance, beloved, children of God, etc. are helpful labels.

My personal thoughts:

It is a very interesting sermon and really got me thinking about how each one of us come to our current worldviews. We all make sense of the world through labels, there’s no way around that. We learn from experience, and the way we make sense of the world around us is based on our past experience hence it involves many short cuts. Even language has many limitations, so people would have difficulty communicating anything without using labels in one way or another.

For instance, that strange looking man who walked into the congregation and started saying things that didn’t make sense: based on my medical background I would consider that man to be psychotic. Most people wouldn’t even dare to approach him because he acted really strangely. The term psychosis is a term developed by humans after watching some behavior pattern that’s quite similar across some people. Some cultures may not even have such terms in their language! And even things like medical knowledge, is not something absolute, because it is constantly being updated. For instance, the DSM manual gets updated regularly.

I think we really can’t avoid using labels in our lives. Problems come when we are using labels without being self-aware of doing so, and that sometimes we can be very wrong in our assumptions without realizing it.