Blank Slate Thinking: A Sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:14-17

     “Blank Slate Thinking”

Photo by Gareth David on Unsplash

2 Corinthians 5:14-17

A Sermon by Carrie Houston, given on June 13, 2021 at First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas

When you walked into this space this morning, you brought something very unique with you. No, it’s not your characteristic laugh, or your flashy fashion style, or the cup of coffee in your hand. Whether you like it or not, you brought in with you a unique worldview that is specific to who you are as a person and the things you’ve experienced in life.  This collection of attitudes, values, expectations and biases go with you everywhere you go, informing your every move, helping you quickly process new information in front of you. 

For example, if you believe humans are fundamentally good, your first thought when meeting someone for the first time, wouldn’t jump to the suspicious, but rather, you’d think the best of the person until they prove you otherwise. On the contrary, when you assume the worst in people, you are less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt and more likely to take their actions as a personal slight against you. These ways of looking at the world have been forming in you since birth, adapting and changing as you process human interactions and make sense of the world.

 

Sometimes helpful and other times hurtful, your biases help your brain make quick judgements of a situation. From questions like, “Am I in danger?” to “Do I fit in?” your brain will try to make sense of what it’s experiencing.  

 

Here’s a scenario.  You text a friend, but they don’t rely. (or for those that don’t text, you call) Your first thought may be, “oh, maybe they are just busy at work.” A day passes and you start to get worried. “I hope they are ok,” you think. Another day passes and you start to get annoyed. You try to think of any possible reason why your friend wouldn’t reply.  “Did I offend her? Did I say something to make her mad?” Your brain begins to take you down a mental journey of assuming that the lack of response was personal, because you KNOW she read your message at 3:47pm on Tuesday. So, resentment starts to set in.  You think something like, “I can’t believe she would be so immature. If she had a problem with me, she should have just told me.” You question whether or not the friendship is worth having and begin to stew in your anger. Finally, three days later, your friend replies, apologizes for not replying sooner and tells you that her father passed away suddenly and she’s been busying making arrangements for her family. 

 

Wow, you feel like a jerk right now. 

 

But this is just what our brain does to make sense of the world. It’s a protection mechanism. Our biases serve as a way to protect us. 

 

Your brain also does something funny to protect you. Let’s say you are a greeter at the front door of the church. A couple walks in that you’ve never met. Your brain automatically goes through its catalog of biases as you take in information about their physical characteristics, socioeconomic status or race. These prejudgments, also called cognitive biases, are meant to protect you as your brain tries to determine whether or not you are safe or in danger. But often these biases can lead you to presume untrue things because a disconnect is happening between the information that is actually there versus what your brain has predetermined about a person. 

 

Here’s another example- You see a gathering of teenagers at the mall. They are wearing clothes that are different than you and have a different skin color. You automatically assume it’s a mob with malicious intent and your fight or flight instants are pricked. Then, the group of teens bury their faces in their phones and walk past right past you, no malicious intent in sight.

 

Like that cliché phrase, you are judging a book by it’s cover and you end up making assumptions about a person based on very little information other than surface level thinking.  This is also how stereotypes continue to be ingrained into our society.  We don’t dive deeper to get to know someone before we label them with a stereotype.  

 

For example, how often have you heard these stereotypes perpetuated:

Women aren’t as smart as men

People who live in England have bad teeth

Blondes are unintelligent

Millennials are lazy and entitled

Women preachers are the best preachers. Ok that one’s not a stereotype, that’s just plain fact.

 

Once you’ve made assumptions about a certain group of people, it’s hard to re-train your brain to change those conclusions. Over the course of your entire life, your brain is constantly adding to its bias rolodex (that’s just an old school way that boomers and gen x-ers would file information involving little index cards and this plastic wheely thing that you can scroll through with your hands to find information. I mean, I’ve never used one before but I imagine they were useful back before computers were invented.), 

 

You can see how our personal biases can distort our critical thinking and can cause us to perpetuate misconceptions or stereotypes about a person or a people group.  When scripture is clear about our command to love others, our biases can get in the way of our ability and willingness to do so.

 

There are even examples of this in the bible. Take the story of the good Samaritan.  Samaritans were hated by Jews due to years and years of theological differences, violence, and political hostility. It’s not far from our modern-day stories of vandalism of Muslim mosques, or the burning of black churches, or the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.   The hate and hostility between the Jews and Samaritans was actively passed down through generations and generations of bigotry and prejudices and grudges from past wrongs. The radical part of this story occurs when the prejudices and generational hatred are set aside and the Samaritan is seen as a human, not an immigrant, unclean, or 3/5s of a person. He was not just a stereotype. This human was worthy of compassion, love, and medical care. 

 

We all are. 

 

And in our scripture today, Paul explicitly calls out our tendency to see things with our human eyes and biases and challenges us to a new way of living. Scripture says, 

^16 “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;^[a] even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,^[b] we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷ So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Our human standards of looking at others won’t cut it anymore. Christ died for all of us….all people, all people, all people. No exceptions. And because Christ died for all of us, it means that love and respect and kindness should be our first response, not AFTER we affirm that they share our political beliefs, live in our neighborhood, or have a similar sexual orientation.  The love and respect we show others should be a direct response to the love shown to us FIRST in Christ’s death and resurrection. “We love because He first loved us” as 1 John 4:19 says.  As God’s beloved, loving others is not an option for us. We can’t pick and choose whom to love. ALL PEOPLE. Yes, even those you realllly dislike. ALL PEOPLE. 

 

It’s time we put aside our differences, confront our biases and question our deeply held beliefs and start seeing things through Christ’s point of view. The Christ that dinned with thieves, spoke to outcasts, and pardoned the adulteress. The Christ that brought comfort to those who were hurting, hungry and sick. The Christ who challenged the religious status quo in favor of love and respect and human decency. Jesus saw directly to the heart of a person and never prejudged someone based on the superficial. He doesn’t care how many husbands you’ve had, doesn’t care that you’re a cheat, or a liar.  He loves you anyways and he always will. And he died for you. 

 

Christ’s death and resurrection opened us up to be able to see each other in this way! We are a new creation, after all. But peeling away our biases and seeing people through Christ’s eyes takes effort and intentionality. It doesn’t just happen by magic. This kind of blank slate thinking means acknowledging your bias when it pops up and pushing it down when it gets in the way of really seeing a person for who they are. It’s hard work. It takes daily practice, and… get ready to fail, because you will. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the risk of trying.  

 

Maybe I should have started with this, but the first step to really seeing someone with God’s eyes has to start with loving ourselves first. We have to be willing to arrive ready each day to surrender our own negative self-talk of worthlessness and failures (or whatever it is that keeps yourself from loving yourself) and take on God’s view of ourselves as God’s beloved. We are God’s beloved! Scars, hurts, and hot messes and all because if we don’t see ourselves as worthy of love, how can we spot it in someone else? 

 

So now that we’ve started the day with a good dose of holy self-love, we must turn it on others.  We have to be looking for opportunities to see the face of God in someone else. To see their humanity. 

 

When I was living in Washington D.C. during the summers of my last two years of seminary, I got the opportunity to lead church groups through urban missional experiences where they would be directly confronted with homelessness, hunger, loneliness and poverty. Their week started by visiting organizations battling these issues and ended with some hands-on chances to meet the people these non-profits were serving. 

Street Sense Media, an organization with the mission to end homeless in D.C. creates platforms to raise awareness and spotlight solutions across the community.  They produce a weekly magazine composed of different types of journalism written by people who are currently experiencing homelessness. Vendors take the paper out into the street and sell the newspaper and get to keep all the proceeds.  One week, I was able to volunteer alongside the group I was leading, so a bunch of cute retired men and women from North Carolina and I got the chance to help sell the newspaper on the streets of D.C. 

I remember being nervous but excited to see how many papers I could sell. It was only a dollar, afterall.  Surely it would be easy to sell them. I’m a nice person, right? I could convince people to buy this easily.  So I put on a bright yellow reflective vest with the words “Street Sense” across the back, and headed out into the busy morning rush hour commute. I politely asked the business man in a suit, the tourist glued to their map, and the fast walking woman in high heels if they were interested in purchasing the magazine. 

Nothing. 

Then another round of commuters shuffled out of the metro station. “Would you like to buy a copy of street sense? A magazine elevating the voices of the homeless?” 

No? Silence. 

Wouldn’t even pick up their head to look at me. I was talking directly to them, asking them a simple question and I was being treated as if I didn’t even exist. 

 

That was the first time I realized my privileged of being a white woman because no one had ever treated me like that before.  It was also the first time I experienced the pain of not being noticed, of feeling less than, like an outcast. It hurt.  I got to take off the bright yellow vest at the end of the day, but imagine what it’s like for those who can’t.  Imagine truly being an outcast, someone that society deems as unworthy, someone not even worth looking in the eye. 

 

Christ died for all of us, even those we don’t want to look in the eye. 

 

As new creations in Christ, we must now assess someone’s value with the eyes of a God who thinks we are the most wonderful creation, the most precious and special. So what would the world be like if we viewed everyone like that? That every person we met is seen as valued, worthy, respectable, and loved by God? What if we stopped thinking everyone was out to get us? What if we gave people the benefit of the doubt? What if we gave everyone a blank slate to show us who they really are instead of relying on rumors or outdated stories from the past?

 

Mirabai Star writes this about seeing the face of God in others. “The Holy One has a tendency to hide behind preposterous disguises: he is the homeless man lumbering through the park talking to himself in a loud voice, a pint of Cuervo Gold tucked into the back pocket of his jeans; she is the teenager texting her boyfriend and applying mascara at the stoplight after it has turned green; he is the young father gambling away his children’s dinner at the Indian casino on his way home from another day at the sewage treatment plant; she is the elderly woman slowly counting out change at the convenience store when you are late for a job interview, and he is the Very Busy Man who does not give you the job…. God could pop up anywhere, anytime, and drop His mask. When he does, we must be sure we have treated Him like God, no matter how He was behaving.”

 

If we treated every person we met like we were speaking to God, how would that change us?

What kind of impact would we have on someone’s life if we saw them, really SAW them, with Christ’s eyes? Would you slow down enough to listen to a lonely friend share her pain? Would you sacrifice something you want to do in order to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable? Would you sit with one of our neighbors and share a meal with them? 

 

 

Put on the eyes of Christ and don’t take them off. See everyone you meet as a new creation, god’s beloved creation. And God will change the world through us. 

 

Amen.