A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 30, 2015.
I want to tell you a story a friend once told his congregation
about this text:[i]
It was a story about his Aunt Briddie, his father’s oldest sister.
Aunt Briddle and her husband, Uncle Herbert,
enjoyed entertaining, and so many summers,
when the extended family came to town,
“we would gather at their house;
and among other things,
we would do a lot of eating.
“Now, when it comes to meals,
no one in my family is a real stickler for table manners.
We don’t really care on which side of the plate the fork is supposed to lay.
If you want the peas,
you don’t really need to wait for someone to pass them.
Just get up and grab the peas, reach across the table if you have to.
But Aunt Briddie would–and still does—
get irritated if someone showed up at the table with dirty hands.
If it happened to be me,
she’d kinda nudge me behind the shoulder and say,
“Boy, go wash yo’ hands.”
Being a little child, I might run back to the bathroom
and turn the water on without actually washing them
and try to come back to the table.
But Aunt Briddie had a way of knowing when that happened,
so she would just say it again,
“Boy, I thought I told you go wash yo’ hands.”
Now if you made Aunt Briddie repeat herself like that,
you had a feeling that if you didn’t do what she said that time,
then it was all over for you.
You weren’t going to eat that day, and you might not live to eat again.
So you ran back and washed those hands.
“We all know that there are good reasons for keeping our hands clean,”
my friend continued,
“with all the germs and diseases out there—
and I’m sure Aunt Briddie was concerned about all that.
But it always seemed to me that there was something
more than hygiene behind her insistence.
I never knew what that was, as a child, but whatever it was,
it showed itself in these expressions she would make while we were eating.
Sometimes I would look at Aunt Briddie down at the other end of the table,
and I could see this deep contentment come over her face,
as if nothing in the world was going to keep her from enjoying this meal.
Every now and then, she would pause and look around the table at the family,
and she would kind of lean back in her chair with this big smile,
looking proud.
And I would sit there and wonder, “What’s she over there smilin’ about?”
- I mean, the food was good, but not that good.
I just couldn’t understand.
Then as I grew up, I started to hear some stories.
They told me what things were like for them growing up.
My father, Aunt Briddie, and their brothers and sisters
lived through a time when Jim Crow and segregation ruled the South.
My grandparents were sharecroppers.
And in that system, about the only way to make any money
was to have children;
the children would work and help the parents
pay off the debt they owed to the landowner.
And to that end, my grandparents had fifteen children.
Well, that meant that once they made a payment toward the debt,
they had to try to feed fifteen children with what was left.
Quite often, there wasn’t enough left,
so they would have to decide whether or not to borrow even more
from the landowner in order to keep the kids fed.
If they did that, then they would drive the family even farther into debt.
So, many times, instead of doing that, the family simply did not have enough to eat.
Moreover, my grandparents had to try to keep the family healthy at a time
when blacks didn’t have access to good healthcare.
In fact, some of the kids died because of that.
When it came to minor illnesses or, even, a broken bone
they had to treat it with their own remedy.
And, when I hear some of the remedies they came up with,
I’m amazed they survived those, let alone the illness.
They had to do these things in order to survive
when everyday there were people out there trying to keep them in their place,
doing everything in their power to demoralize them by threats
and sometimes violence.
So when I hear those [bible] stories, it all makes sense to me.
In Aunt Briddie’s eyes,
every time we get together as a family or have a meal, that moment is a gift.
That moment is sacred! That moment is impossible!
She feels like Moses must have felt when he saw the bush burning
without burning up and heard the voice, saying,
“Take off your shoes because you’re standing on holy ground.”
Well, when the family eats together, we’re on holy ground.
And that thing she has about washing our hands,
that’s the ritual she came up with to honor the moment.”
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