See Something, Say Something

1 Samuel 10:17-24

The story that I want to share is a true story, a story that found me this week and stopped me dead in my tracks…

This happened thirty years ago. Ben Calhoun was seven. His younger sister was two. They were shopping with his mother at the Century Foods grocery store in their neighborhood in Milwaukee. As tends to happen with two year olds, Ben’s sister started to melt down. She decided she was tired of walking. She demanded that she be carried. She began pitching a fit. Ben’s mother did what most of us have done in similar circumstances: you shop as fast as you can, desperately hoping to get out of there.

Out of nowhere, a man walked up to his sister. He stood right over her. He started shouting at her, “Stop it! You stop it right now!” He stomped his foot right next to her, seemingly for the sole purpose of scaring her. “You stop it now!’

Ben, his mother and his sister were all taken aback. His mother explained to the man, “She’s two. She’s having a tantrum.” The man ignored Ben’s mother and kept screaming at his sister, “You’re too old to be having a tantrum.” Even more frighteningly, as they left the store, Ben and his mother saw that the man was intent on following them. In fact, he followed them all the way to their car. Ben’s mother jumbled with her keys, just wanting to get out of there and get away from the man.

For a second, it wasn’t clear what the man would do. As he got closer to them, he began shouting something new: “You people need to discipline your children!” At this point, grownup, Ben, shares something new with us: his mother is Chinese American. His father, who wasn’t there, is a white guy. Before his mother could get the car opened, the man caught up with them. This ruddy faced white man who already loomed over Ben’s 5 foot, 2 inch tall mother, puffed up his chest, got right into her face and yelled, “You people need to go back where you came from!”

Ben’s mother froze. Ben was terrified. He thought the man was going to hit his mother. In that moment, he had that experience kids have of seeing something happen in the world of grownups that you have no power over. Ben noticed the look of panic in his mother’s eyes. That’s when he really thought they were in danger.

Grownup Ben chose to tell this story to his own son when his son turned seven. When he told the story, though, he downplayed the parts about how scared everyone was and how menacing the man was in the parking lot. That didn’t seem like the most important part to convey. What he was careful to tell him was the story of what happened next.

There was a young guy who was working for the store that day, just an awkward teenage boy. He was collecting carts in the parking lot while the man was coming after them. He was way smaller than the menacing man, both in height and in build. However, to seven year old Ben, that boy might as well have been super man. That kid gathered himself and yelled at the man, “Leave her alone!”

That day in the parking lot for Ben was his first encounter with the invisible trap door that always seemed to loom for his family, simply because of how they looked. At the most unexpected times, without any warning, someone could challenge whether he and his family belonged at all. In an instant, the rug could get pulled out from under them.

The truth was that other than telling this story to his son, Ben has never told it all that much. As he grew up, it seemed to have less and less contemporary resonance. He assumed that the man’s sentiments were still out there in the world but the influence of such thinking seemed to be shrinking. That kind of prejudice was on the wane.

At the same time, Ben always assumed that should he choose to tell the story, certainly, the meaning wouldn’t be complicated. It seemed patently obvious that the man was wrong. It was the stuff of which after school, television specials were made, the kind of specials in which the moral to the story was obvious even if you were only a couple of minutes in. He remembered learning in school that America wasn’t just a melting pot, it was a stew—a place made better by all the diversity.

Ben never thought he was wrong about any of this until this summer. Now, for obvious reasons, he is thinking about that day in the Century Foods parking lot once again. People who don’t happen to look like the ruddy faced white guys of this world are once again being told, “Why don’t you go back home?” That message is being delivered in such public ways that Ben worries that somehow such a message is the new normal, after all.

The odd thing is that Ben never thought that his story would be perceived as political—something that would be divisive to tell. He never thought that someone would hear his story and think, “Oh…you’re one of those guys.” He never thought that was possible. He just figured that the vast majority of people who heard the story would find the behavior of that puffed up, angry man to be entirely unacceptable.

When he decided to start telling his story again, he checked with his mother first. He wanted to make sure that they agreed on the details. He wanted to check the facts. They agreed. His mother went on to tell him a bit more of the story, too. It turns out that because of the choice that the teenage boy made, she has shopped for decades now at Century Foods. Five years ago, she stopped to talk to the manager. She told him the story of what happened that day. In particular, she told him the story of the brave boy whose name she never knew. She wanted the manager to know how grateful she was that this unknown clerk chose to speak up. She wanted the manager to know exactly why she was such a loyal customer.

What I’ve been pondering is that ruddy faced white guy? How did he conclude that it was okay to behave how he behaved? Thirty years ago, who was his example for that kind of behavior? And who are the people nowadays who are buying into the notion that such behavior is acceptable now?

Last week, I told you the story of the beginning of our ancestors in faith, how they started as a ragtag bunch of slaves, how they were led into the wilderness and learned to follow and trust God, how God brought them into the Promised Land and how almost immediately, they felt less and less need for God. One of the underlying ironies and profound sadnesses of the story of those ancestors is that they went from being a people who were homeless and wandering to being a people who were profoundly suspicious of anyone who was a stranger. They became that way because leaders, formal and informal, taught them to believe such things.

This is the danger of having a king. As Solomon warned, a king will always take advantage of his power. However, at an even deeper level, what the king will always do is work to define an enemy—a “them" who help us to be an “us.” The king fosters division, not harmony, strife, not shalom, because the threat of “those people” makes the rest of us rally around the king’s protection. Fear is the means by which a king manipulates the kingdom.

We don’t live in a world of kings and queens, right—other than those lovely royals in England? However, lately, on all sides of the political spectrum, we seem to act as if we are looking to elect, not a president, but a king or a queen. Our candidates promise things that they cannot deliver, especially in a world in which the legislature seems hopelessly gridlocked. The rhetoric of our election invites us to fear our neighbors. The majority keeps forgetting that the minority is in fact just as much of a part of this great nation as any member of any majority.

The real danger is the way in which all sorts of uncivil behaviors from all sorts of calculating, manipulative people may simply turn the green light on for uncivil behaviors by genuinely crazy people. We really need to ask ourselves some questions. How many times can we allow unacceptable speech to go unchecked before such speech becomes the new normal? Are we as willing to question someone’s speech if they are part of our “tribe” or do we just wait to jump on someone who is different? How much fear of one another can we ingest before fearing our fellow citizens poisons our nation? Hate and fear and prejudice offer such easy, black and white answers in a complicated world. How do we raise our expectations, not just of our politicians and our political discourse, but of ourselves?

Ask yourself, what would have happened to Ben and his mother and his sister if a teenage boy who was collecting grocery carts in the parking lot had not raised his voice? What would the story be that Ben would tell? How would the ruddy faced white guy’s story have been different if his conviction that he was perfectly within his rights to hate had gone unchallenged? I’m as likely as the next guy to not raise my voice—all for the sake of preserving some peace that doesn’t actually exist. What if all that is preserved by not speaking is the place of bigotry in our world?

Samuel swallowed hard and said to the people, “Here’s your king!” They got what they wanted. Saul was such a piece of work, it turned out they got what they deserved.

We don’t need a king or a queen. Leaders with a sense of humility and a willingness to work together to get something done would be fine. We don’t need the thought police. Rather, we need to recover what it means to respect each other simply because that’s what it means to have a modest sense of integrity. We need to spend less time judging each other and more time listening. Occasionally, we might actually need to speak up.