In Anothers Shoes - The Rev Judith Medeirosos - 6-13-2025

Reading - Luke 10:25-37 read by Jane Pierce

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Reading is from Luke chapter ten, verses twenty five through
thirty seven. On one occasion, an expert in the law
stood up to test Jesus teacher. He asked, what must
I do to inherit internal life? What is written in
the law? He replied, how do you read it? He answered,

(00:22):
Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your strength, and
with all your mind. You have answered correctly. Jesus replied,
do this and you will live. But he wanted to
justify himself, so he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

(00:42):
In reply, Jesus said, a man was going down from
Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. They
stripped him of his clothes. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm missing
part of this. And along the same road when he
saw the man, he passed by the other side, so too,

(01:03):
a levite. When he came to a place and saw
him passed by on the other side, another man saw him.
He took pity on him. He went to him and
bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he
put the man on his own docky and brought him
to an inn gave him, gave him money to the

(01:26):
innkeeper look after him, he said, and when I return,
I will will imburse you for any expense you may have.
Which of these three do you think was a neighbor
to the man who fell in the hands of robbers?
The expert in the law replied, the one who had
mercy on him. Jesus told him go and do likewise.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
He made me believe in myself. He made sense of
my tears and all the pain I carried for the
sake of the world, when my parents found me to
be too much, too compassionate, too emotional, too challenging of

(02:33):
the status quo. He said, I made sense even now.
The haunting melody of the film, with the marble rolling
by a child's treasure trove, reaches deep into my soul
like an ancient siren, calling me back to a forgotten memory,

(02:58):
a memory of what it means means to be fully human.
Atticus Finch the Father and to kill a Mockingbird. He
helped me make sense of a world, a world torn
apart by racial discrimination, riots, and the Vietnam War. Atticus

(03:25):
Finch stood tall, calm, wise and confident. When I spent
a summer with black inner city kids, loving them, watching
over them, calling them mine. The same summer that my
mother sat in utter dismay on off front steps and

(03:45):
said to me, why do you have to be with
those people? Why can't you stay in your own backyard.
The world broke my heart as a child. Well, let's
be honest, it's still breaking my heart. But Attochus taught
me humility and compassion. He taught me that it was right,

(04:11):
absolutely right, to love my neighbor as myself, despite my parents,
despite my aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, even childhood friends.
He gave me the courage to be different. But more,

(04:33):
he gave me the courage to risk being hurt and rejected,
misunderstood and ostracized. You never really understand a person till
you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.

(04:55):
That's what Attokus Finch said to his daughter's Scout, and
in every turn of that story he is doing just that.
I don't think there is a finer literary character that
has ever been writ than Harper Lee's Atticus Finch, whether

(05:20):
it's sitting on the porch swing having a heart to
heart with Scout, defending Tom Robinson, a black man falsely
accused of raping a white woman, or offering comfort and
gentleness to Boo Radley, the infinous neighborhood recluse. Attochus is

(05:41):
almost always inside somebody else's skin. It's what makes him
a truly great man, his quiet courage, unfwarded by all
the hell that breaks loose around him. Still it takes
my breath away way the films black and white scenes

(06:04):
spoke a truth louder than any movie or any book
I have ever read or seen. James McBride, author of
The Color of Water, said it was the first time
a white writer spoke of issues of racism in a

(06:25):
complicated and sophisticated way. Scout had to be both a
kid on the street, of ware, of mad dogs and
spooky houses, and also of how this beautiful vision of
how justice is supposed to work in all the creaking
mechanisms of a courthouse. Scout saw the world through a

(06:48):
child's eyes, but with an adult's understanding. In nineteen fifty seven,
Harper Lee, thirty one, a young woman born in the
deep South of Monroeville, Alabama, wrote a manuscript entitled Atticus,

(07:09):
and it became a literary and film phenomena that we
now call To Kill a Mockingbird. She was overwhelmed with
the response. Over five thousand copies of the first edition
sold out overnight. She won the Pulitzer Prize and practically
every other literary award out there, and the film adaptation

(07:32):
by Horton Foote won three Academy Awards that year. To
Kill a Mockingbird split open the world of generational racism.
It examined in a deeply personal and intimate way the
damage done to our society, our community, our people by dehumanization, segregation, racism, poverty,

(08:02):
and white supremacy. Did you know that, next to the Bible,
To Kill a Mockingbird is the book most people own
fifty million copies in fifty years. Published in nineteen sixty,

(08:22):
just before the civil rights explosion, this brave book has
been called an act of protest from which many people
at the time to courage and comfort. In a recent
documentary called Haboo, substantial and well known authors, artists, civil

(08:47):
rights leaders, and ministers of the day spoke about how
this book impacted their lives as young people. What it took,
said Oprah Winfrey, the kind of courage that took, and
the kind of inner wisdom and compassion that it took

(09:10):
for her to understand what it is like to be
in somebody else's skin. She interpreted the feelings of Tom
in his dignity and stance, in a way that you
knew she had stood in his shoes, she had sat

(09:33):
in that courtroom inside his skin. That's pretty remarkable for
that time. For little all Harper Lee to have the courage,
the courage to do that, well, that's pretty damn brave.

(10:00):
His final statement before the jury, Atticus calls us to
be courageous in doing the right thing. He peels back
layer after layer of the darkness that is so ingrained
in us that we dare not dare not disrupt it,

(10:23):
but disrupt it he does. He says, gentlemen, the witnesses
for the state have presented themselves to you to this
court in cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted,

(10:47):
confident that you would go along with them on the assumption,
the evil assumption that all negroes lie, that all negroes
are immoral beings, that all negro men are not to
be trusted around our women, which you, gentlemen, know, is

(11:13):
a lie from the courtroom with the black folk in
the balcony and the white folk down below, to a
jail house with a singularly brave man with a single

(11:36):
light against a raucous crowd, to a band of curious
children discovering the true worth of people through their father's eyes.
Atticus Finch made me believe anything is possible if I
am just brave enough to face it, and face it

(12:02):
we must. At the close of the jury's announcement guilty,
and of course we expected it, but still it breaks
our hearts. The courtroom has grown silent. Atticus Finch has

(12:23):
defended Tom Robinson and lost. Why because he's black? Why
because he made the mistake of feeling sorry for a
white woman and helped her out when she asked, he

(12:45):
walked inside her skin. The lower court has cleared, and
we watch as Atticus quietly picks up his things and
starts to walk down to exit the courtroom, but up
in the balcony the black folk and also attices his children.

(13:13):
The black folk begin to stand one by one. Stand up,
Miss Jean Louise. The preacher says, to scout, stand up.
Your father is passing by. Journalist Rick Bragg in the

(13:42):
Hayboo documentary said, young men that grew up on the
wrong side of the issue that dominates this book, they
started reading it and the next thing, you know, Oh,
it's not just held their interest, it's changed their views.

(14:11):
That's pretty damn well, that's almost impossible, but it happens.
To Kill a Mockingbird is on a list of banned books.

(14:34):
Can you imagine that it is on the list because
of the depiction of rape? As if teenagers don't know
what rape is, As if they don't know what it
feels like to be judged for the color of their skin,
or their gender identity, or even how much money they

(14:57):
come from, as if they don't know that people are
raped every single day. By dehumanizing stigmas, what I saw
in Atticus Finch was a person willing to give up

(15:21):
everything to protect the dignity and the rights of another
human being, to stand in solidarity with a man others despised,
to risk his very own life to protect the life
of another just because it was the right thing to do.

(15:50):
I saw a man alone sitting outside of a jailhouse
in the middle of the night, protecting the life of
that black man that they would both make it through
the night. I saw someone standing up to all the
injustice that I saw in the world, and with tears

(16:14):
streaming down my face, I knew I could too. Who
is my neighbor? The lawyer asks, and Jesus tells him

(16:35):
the story of a Samaritan, a person despised by joos.
He tells the story to a community who believe that
there are no good Samaritans, no good Samaritans. He tells
a story about racism and prejudice that makes every everyone

(17:00):
stop in their tracks. He tells the story of an outcast,
a solitary, courageous man doing the right thing in a
sea of wrong. There's a soft spot on each and

(17:27):
every one of us, not seen by the naked eye,
invisible at first, but clearly visible if we look for
it with our inside eyes. It's a label of sorts,
not sewn into the collar of our clothes or on

(17:48):
the front of our shirts, but sewn into our hearts.
By God. It can become torn, tattered, faded, but it
can never be fully cut off. There will always be
a smidgeon of it rubbing against the collar at the

(18:09):
back of our necks. It's there to remind us, who
we are meant to be. It's a dangerous, life threatening word.
It reads neighbor Amen,