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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 24, 2015
Next in our sermon series on fairy tales, Rev. Meg explores the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” What does this story say about sharing? Manners? Entitlement? Home invasion? How welcoming are we called to be? Are we Goldilocks or are we the bears? And what does all of this have to do with Elijah of the Old Testament?
I was raised by a father who trusted the government. I was a teenager when Watergate happened, and I remember him saying “The President would not do something like this without a good reason. You can bet he knows more than we do about secret things, and I’m sure his reason for doing this was related to something we’re just not in a position to know.” My mother did not trust the government. She had grown up in India, and told us that you had to leave gifts for the mail man or he would “lose” your mail. Talking to the police one afternoon, she asked them “how late are you open?”
“Lady, this is the police station,” they said. “We’re always open.” She loved studying the American Revolution, though. In ninth grade had a history teacher from Great Britain who told us the Boston Massacre was when scared 17 year old British boys got hurt by angry Colonials who put big rocks into snowballs and were lobbing them at the British boys. Who opened fire. My mother was hopping mad about that one. I think she called the school, even though she was a teacher and generally disapproved of parents complaining to the school about teachers.
My father’s three other siblings were politically more radical. My Aunt Ruth, the Episcopal priest who taught in Dallas at Perkins Seminary, refused to put her social security number on anything. Not at a doctor’s office, not on a loan application, never. She gave me dire warnings about doing it. The other sister, Aunt Dorothy, lived in Nicaragua for a while after the Sandinistas took power, working as a Spanish-German translator. My dad shook his head over both of them and said they had been duped by the Communists.
I had college professors who’d been duped by the Communists as well, and they taught us about how the US government had supported certain corporations playing Goldilocks in South and Central America. Once they started lining it out for us, it was hard not to see corruption everywhere. We were taught about the origin of the term “Banana Republic.” It’s a contemptuous term for a country where the government is a puppet dictatorship set up for the enrichment of the dictator and the companies for whom he works. The United Fruit Company was frequently accused of bribing government officials in Central and South America in exchange for their support of the giant banana plantations. They were accused of exploiting their workers, paying negligible taxes to the governments of those countries, and working ruthlessly to suppress land rights for the people who farmed the land of those countries.
Latin American journalists sometimes referred to the company as el pulpo (“the octopus”), and its exploitation of workers was used by the communist activists to illustrate the concept of capitalist imperialism. Senator, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in the Eisenhower administration, was a stern anti-Communist. The more you learn, though, the more his motives seem cloudy/complex/corrupt. His law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, negotiated the land giveaways to the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Honduras. His brother, Allen Dulles also did legal work for UF and sat on its board of directors. Allen Dulles became the head of the CIA under Eisenhower. Both Dulles brothers were on the UF payroll for 38 years. Conflict of interest? Henry Cabot Lodge, who was US Ambassador to the UN, owned a big chunk of UF stock; Ed Whitman, the UF public relations man, was married to Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary.
Cohen, Rich (2012). The Fish that Ate the Whale. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. p. 186.
The company claimed that they needed large tracts of extra land that they didn’t plan bananas on just in case of hurricanes or blight. Through close involvement with the government, they managed to keep the government from distributing land to farmers who wanted a share of the banana business. This creation or augmentation of government corruption, encouraging service to US interests, led to writer O. Henry coining the term “Banana Republic.” The United Fruit Company dominated regional transportation networks through its International Railways of Central America. UFCO branched out in 1913 by creating the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. They improved ports, built schools for people who worked for them. They discouraged the building of highways in order to support the railroads.
In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government was toppled by U.S.-backed forces armed, trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. (see Operation PBSUCCESS).
UFCO (the only corporation at the time to have a CIA code name, was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and the newly overthrown government’s land reform included the expropriation of 40% of UFCO land.
We don’t have time this morning to go over all of the instances in which our government has destabilized other countries, whether trying to do something good or making those places safe for US business interests.
The US has been Goldilocks in many bears’ homes, grabbing what we want, breaking things here and there, then bribing the bear governments to make it legal for Goldilocks to keep coming in and taking whatever she wants. We have not been very good guests. In looking after the interests of the shareholders of some corporations, we have destabilized the homes and homelands of many people around the world.
Goldilocks is the story of a bad guest, who takes and breaks and doesn’t observe boundaries.
Here is the story I’d like to pair with Goldilocks, the story of a great guest.
From The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology. Yona Sabar. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ©1982), 153-54.
http://www.yale.edu/yup
Once upon a time there lived a husband and wife who were very poor and had nothing at all in their house. The wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to a son at ten o’clock at night, but she had nothing with which to wrap the tender babe. The poor father groaned and cried, “We have no clothes, not even some wool, to cover the babe, and he may die by morning.”
Suddenly a man appeared, stood at the entrance to the room, and said, “Peace be upon you! Do you have some straw to lend me? My wife has just given birth, and we have nothing to lay the child on. He may die of the cold.” The couple replied, “We are very poor, but we do have some straw. If you want it, please take it.”
The man took his cloak, (the Hebrew word is tallit, “prayer shawl” or “cloak”) filled it with straw, thanked the couple, and went off. As he stepped outside he threw the straw down next to the door, but the couple did not notice. After the stranger had left, the husband said to his wife, “Look how rich we are! There are people who do not have even straw, and we are rich compared with them.”
In the morning the husband got up, went outside, and found there many silver and gold dinars. He called his wife and said to her, “Look how much silver and gold we have behind the door!” They realized then that the man who came at night to ask for straw was none other than the prophet Elijah, of blessed memory, and that the straw had turned into silver and gold.
The husband went to the marketplace and bought the necessities for his home, and the rest of the money he hid away in a vessel, saying to his wife, “Let us flee from this town, for its people are wicked and jealous. If they learn that we have become rich, they will slay us.”
So they fled to a town where no one knew them, and there they asked, “Is it possible to build here a fine, good house?” A man replied, “I have such a fine, good house. If you like it, well and good; if not, do not buy it.”
The couple decided to buy the house. In the evening they went to look at it. As they walked through the rooms, they noticed a bulge in one of the walls. The wife touched it with her finger, and behold, the stone moved from its place and revealed an opening in the wall full of silver and gold. The husband said to his wife, “Look, God has granted us even more than before.”
The next day the couple were about to talk to the landlord, but he said to them, “I am the same man to whom you gave straw, and I changed it into gold. That gold was the good luck of your son. This house is your own good luck, and the bulge in the wall is your wife’s good luck. May you live in happiness and good fortune. please know that I, the prophet Elijah, am blessing you.” Having finished his statement, the prophet Elijah ascended in flight to heaven. We have been asked to provide sanctuary for a guest.
There is nothing like a genuine call to ministry to snap things back into focus. By now you will have heard that we have been offered the opportunity to take a Guatemalan LGGBT activist in and provide her with sanctuary until her deportation order is lifted. She is eligible for a U-Visa, since she has been helpful to police here in prosecuting a crime. Her lawyer missed a paperwork deadline, so she spent seven months in detention before her partner (also undocumented, and a trans-person) could raise the money for the required 15,000.00 bond.
She must appear for deportation by June 11. The police must document her help in order for her deportation order to be rescinded, but that might take as much as 90 days, after the Juke 11 deadline. I’m giving you my best interpretation of the story as I currently understand it, as of this writing.
The request for sanctuary was brought to us suddenly. The Board of Trustees had a rich and soul-searching discussion, the sense of which, at the end can be summed up quoting one Board member. “If we don’t do this, then what DO we do?”
As Presbyterian colleague, Jim Rigby said to me as we talked about this situation, it is hard to be prepared fully when the “prophetic moment” presents itself, the moment when you are asked to walk your talk. “Your church said ‘yes,’ and then figured out how to do it. That makes you a prophetic church. Other churches say ‘Let’s figure out how to do this’ before they say ‘yes.’ That makes them traditional churches.
Much more will be communicated, and a conversation will begin among us about whether we want to just do this once or become a Sanctuary Church like so many UU, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Quaker congregations did during the ’80’s. Please research “The Sanctuary Movement,” if you’d like to know more. This is a well-educated, smart and delightful civil rights activist we have a chance to support. Although we surely are not of one mind about immigration issues, we can step up and protect this one new friend.
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