September 17, 2023 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian

Exodus 14:19-31<br /> Psalm 114<br /> Romans 14:1-12<br /> Matthew 18:21-35 My cousin Alan is a big teddy bear of a guy. He’s kind of a cross between a bouncer at a club and a young Santa Claus. Imposing enough that you’d never mess with him, but so gentle and kind that being with him is kind of like sitting on Santa’s lap. Alan tells the story of the day he learned never to judge a book by its cover. In his high school gym class, there was the typical cast of characters – the group of big bullies who everyone stayed away from, and most people just avoided getting tangled up with. But in his class was this one scrawny little redhead kid, who was the stereotype of an easy target. As you might expect, the group of bullies decided to zero in on him. But little did they know that he had been studying martial arts since he was a young boy, and so when this group of bullies started in on him, nobody saw it coming. In Alan’s words, he watched as this kid roundhouse kicked his way out of this group of attackers; Alan said that that day, he learned never to judge anyone based on what you see. It’s a natural human tendency to make decisions about other people before we really know them – we draw lines in the sand, we put people into boxes so we understand them through our own worldview. We more easily relate to people once they’re in certain “categories” in our mind. Sometimes it’s all in good fun. We say things like “Oh you’re such a Brooklynite” or “you know how musicians are” or “of course it’s the clergy, always stirring up trouble.”  In Armenian culture, even though we are a century removed from the villages in Ottoman Turkey where our grandparents were born, we still joke about inherited traits like a gift for music or the tendency to be a party animal that are old stereotypes of the people from these different villages. Some judgments we make about people aren’t as good-natured. Perhaps without even being fully aware of it, we make judgments about people based on things like their race or ethnicity, religious affiliation, class, education level, or gender. We assign certain levels of intelligence, capability, leadership acumen, and strength, based on biases we’ve inherited and biases that are all around us. The constant work of becoming beloved community is the continued confrontation and dismantling of these thought patterns – and the humbling part of that work is that the more we dismantle, the more work we realize we still have to do. Sometimes – and I would even dare to say often – these judgments happen within the body of Christ. I remember when I was a teenager, in my rather conservative Armenian church, one day as a well-dressed, beautifully coiffed woma