Once I can label you, I can stop listening. Or at least that’s how we tend to act isn’t it?
Because apparently once you know someone reads _____ you know everything about their story.
Black or white, Christian or Muslim, liberal or conservative, straight or gay, emergent or Reformed, suburbs or hipster – the goal is to know where someone fits.
If you fit in the category I’d label myself as I can stop discerning because “we’re on the same team”, if you fit in another category I can stop listening because you are wrong or other.
As if those labels do any justice to people’s lives and the stories behind them. As if once I know what team you are on I know about your loves and losses, painful days and great joys, hopes and dreams, failures and second chances.
Labels end the conversation, usually before it even begins.
But in some ways Christianity is a faith beyond labels. In the letter to the Galatians Paul tells us that in truth “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Those core ways that people in Paul’s world defined themselves, the Messiah deconstructs all of them. Our identity is not found in labels, not the labels we give ourselves or the labels we are given by others.
Labels are a way to not listen, to not hear the voice of the other. Jesus calls us to tell each other our stories, and in doing so see how we are one not because we share a label but because we share in his Story.
