Preached on the Second Sunday in Lent (Year C), March 16, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35
All of the people I really, truly care about could fit into this room.
Maybe that sounds like a dreadful thing to say. Among billions of people around the globe, I care about one or two hundred, that’s it?! But — it’s true, and no offense, I suspect it’s true about all of us. The people each of us really, truly cares about could probably fit into this room.
Of course I care about the people of Ukraine and Russia, Gaza and Israel, Sudan and South Sudan, Taiwan and China. I care about our unsheltered neighbors, and people in peril across our nation. I care about countless refugees, so many of them children, who groan under the heel of massive injustice and inequity. I care about animals incarcerated in factory farms, too. I care about ocean creatures plagued by toxins and plastics. I do care.
But who do I really, truly care about? Can any of us honestly answer this question? If you look up “Dunbar’s Number,” an anthropologist will tell you that we typically only care about a couple hundred people because evolution selected for humans who built village-sized kinship networks to survive. Robin Dunbar says the number of manageable primary relationships for most of us is about 150… roughly the seating capacity of this room.
When we form these primary relationships, we are working on the first, most basic level of moral development: our need to overcome the problem of “Me versus Us.” “Me” is important – I am important. Infants and young children have to gain consciousness of their own selves, simply to survive. There’s even a theory of moral egoism, which says that acting in one’s own self-interest is the morally right thing to do.
But “Us” is important, too. “Us” brings us into the wider moral arena. We are individuals, but to thrive, to escape narcissism and nihilism, to finally be happy, we need to join, and we need to help take care of, an “Us.”
This Lent we are meeting on Wednesday evenings to talk about “Me versus Us” in the context of – or by the light of – Christian ethics. And to make that dry-sounding topic more interesting, I’ve chosen to show clips of the sitcom called “The Good Place,” starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. It’s a high-concept show with dizzying plot twists, following a woman named Eleanor who dies and goes to the “Good Place” – a version of heaven. Eleanor soon discovers that there was some sort of terrible cosmic accounting error, and she’s not supposed to be there.
As our beloved antihero Eleanor adapts to the awkward dilemma of accidentally gate-crashing heaven, she decides to learn about ethics. She figures that if she can clean up her act, maybe she can earn a legitimate place in paradise. Maybe she can actually belong.
(Sidebar: note well that this is not a Christian vision of heaven. We Christians know that none of us can earn a ticket to heaven, even if we tried. We also know that we don’t go to heaven as much as heaven comes down to us, a gracious gift of the risen Christ.)
But back to “The Good Place.” In one episode, Eleanor is bitterly disappointed to learn that a social group she joined was disbanding. Their time together had reached its end, and everyone was about to go their separate ways. Eleanor is startled by this loss, and raises a big fuss. She angrily ruins a celebratory cake and stomps out.
One of the people in the group, Simone, notices Eleanor sulking behind a tree. They get to talking. Eleanor begs Simone to help her understand why she freaked out, why she lashed out. “Can you tell me why I did that in there?” Eleanor pleads. Simone replies, “I mostly do clinical research in neuroscience. I don't really specialize in temper tantrums. Maybe you need a child psychologist. Or a binky.” Eleanor says, “That's a solid burn. I deserved it, I did. But please, can you help me? Why did I do that?” Simone sighs, and then she says, “Okay, here's my guess.
“As humans evolved, the first big problem we had to overcome was ‘me versus us.’ Learning to sacrifice a little individual freedom for the benefit of a group. You know, like sharing food and resources so we don't starve or get eaten by tigers, things like that… The next problem to overcome was ‘us versus them,’ trying to see other groups different from ours as equals. That one, we're still struggling with. That's why we have racism, and nationalism… What's interesting about you is, I don't think you ever got past the ‘me versus us’ stage. I mean, have you ever been part of a group that you really cared about?... [This] is basically the first group that became part of your self-identity. And now that's breaking up, you're feeling this new kind of loss, and you're scared of going back to being alone…”
So: if Simone is right, there are two categories we need to master, to develop into moral, ethical human beings (and if developing into moral, ethical human beings isn’t the point of church, I don’t know what is). The two categories of moral development are “Me versus Us,” and “Us versus Them.” And Simone’s definitely right that “Us versus Them” has mostly been a disaster for the human race.
Now let’s go back to this room, which as I said can probably fit Dunbar’s Number, the 150 or so people I really, truly care about. In this room, we work on “Me versus Us” quite a lot. We walk down to that pool of water, where we wash (or is it drown?) new members into the one Body of the risen Christ. We come up to this Table, where the one bread is broken into many pieces, reminding us that we are many but also one. Church helps lots of people work on “Me versus Us.”
But what about “Us versus Them”? Church is supposed to work on that, too, but our record in that category is much less impressive. Crusades and holy wars, schisms and excommunications, white supremacy and cultural genocide… for many bloody centuries, Christians have badly misunderstood our own tradition, or maybe never understood it in the first place.
Jesus never stops talking about “Us versus Them.” He works on it all the time. He startles the establishment by sitting down next to people who have no hope of entering the Temple — they’ll never get into the Good Place — because they have a disqualifying physical problem, or a rap sheet, that places them firmly in the “Them” column.
This morning, when we hear Jesus weep over the wayward, rebellious city of Jerusalem, we hear his concern about “Us versus Them.” Jerusalem is supposed to be the city on a hill, the city that gathers all the nations. God promises Abraham that he will eventually be everyone’s ancestor. When Jesus prays over Jerusalem, his chosen image of paradise is a mother hen gathering her brood of chicks. Humanity solves the “Us versus Them” problem by taking every single human person out from under the “Them” label. We are all chicks. There may be countless religions and cultures, but there is one brood.
I admire that image, and in fact I have it in my office, a gift of the leadership at Grace Church Bainbridge Island. They gave me an icon of Jesus Christ, but instead of the usual image that comes to your mind when you think of an icon of Jesus, it’s a hen with her young, and the hen is adorned with the cruciform halo of our Lord and Savior.
But Jesus is not really breaking new ground here. His hen-and-chicks image fires the imaginations of countless Christians, but Jesus knows his Bible. He knows about our ancestor Abraham. Jesus knows that these teachings have been taught before.
Today’s reading from the book of Genesis opens in the most ho-hum “here comes a Bible story” way imaginable: God says to Abram, “Do not be afraid.” What else is new? Every time we open the Holy Book, God, or one of God’s messengers, seems to be saying to someone, “Do not be afraid.” We finally may stop hearing it altogether.
But the “Do not be afraid” line is particularly important this time. When God says “Do not be afraid” this time, Abram doesn’t have all that much to be afraid of. He was wily and wealthy, hardly a wallflower or scaredy-cat. He had just rescued his nephew and secured the possessions of his extended family. He had wealth and social status to survive his lack of a child. He has demonstrated clearly his mastery of the “Me versus Us” problem. Abram knew who he really, truly cared about.
But here’s the kicker. Rabbinical interpretation of the passage says that Abram’s great fear in that moment, the fear that led God (not just some angel, but God) to say, “Do not be afraid,” was that he might have killed innocent outsiders in his successful rescue attempt of his own kin. When saving his nephew, when taking care of his own, Abram feared that he might have killed someone from outside his group of 150 beloved people.
In other words, our ancestor Abram had mastered not just “Me versus Us,” but also “Us versus Them.” He recognized the image of God in every human being, not just his own kinfolk. Every human being. Innocents and enemies. Even the people who abducted his nephew. Everyone. And this insight plagued him with fear – fear that his own righteous anger might have hurt an innocent outsider.
What would this world be like if all the descendants of Abraham lived more fully by his example? Our circles of care would expand beyond this room. Our concern for the innocent would encompass the children of other groups, of other peoples, of our enemies. We might even open our hearts in empathy for our most wicked foes, those who enrage us with their recklessness, their invasions of other countries, their heedless disregard for the sacred earth. We might lament how lost and damaged they have become, even though the image of God, twisted and distorted as it may be, continues to dwell in them. We might, well, we might long to gather them as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.
We are Abraham’s children. If we want to start expanding the number of people we care about, we should follow his lead and start with the innocents, but be quick to take seriously our own capacity to harm others when we’re protecting our families and allies, or protecting our own individual selves. Abram could have been quite selfish, but he made a better choice, a braver choice. When we cultivate true concern about our own impact on others, God is there with us to dispel our fears.
I pray that in memory of, and in honor of, our most extraordinary ancestor, God will give us eyes to see God’s own image in every single human person.