Who Speaks for Whom? Why? When?
If Brown captures the violent coercions of the Black catechized, then Stowe particularly shows how catechisms manipulate the most vulnerable of all—a young child.
Topsy, who had stood like a black statue during this discussion, with hands decently folded, now, at a signal from Miss Ophelia, went on: “Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the state wherein they were created.” Topsy’s eyes twinkled, and she looked inquiringly. “What is it, Topsy?” said Miss Ophelia. “Please, Missis, was dat ar state Kintuck?” “What state, Topsy?” “Dat state dey fell out of. I used to hear Mas’r tell how we came down from Kintuck.” St. Clare laughed. “You’ll have to give her a meaning, or she’ll make one,” said he. “There seems to be a theory of emigration suggested there. (Stowe “Topsy”)
Here Topsy, a little slave girl who cannot read becomes the amusement of the hour for those who can. Of her owner it is said, that: “St Clare took the same kind of amusement in the child that a man might in the tricks of a parrot or pointer” (Stowe “Topsy”).
These passages say much to us pastors and teachers who would serve Christ in and through His church.
Let us, as Stowe, see humanity. Let us really see the human condition. Let us be
happy, and often haunted by what we see. Then let us seriously, deeply, consider what we will do in response to that vision.
For those of us who would dare to speak a word for God on Sunday, and a needy world on Monday, let us remember that we must carefully earn the right to speak. Hermeneutics is primarily an extension of our hearts made right.
Let our words lack authoritarian resonances. Let us labor to only reflect the most anciently received Gospel, and refuse to recreate it in the socially expedient image of our own ideologies.
Let us serve others with perennially purified hearts. Let us quickly eradicate ulterior motives too often disguising themselves as ‘servant leadership’. Let us simply serve others. Let us serve others, simply.
Let us remember the upside nature of God’s realm. The least are the greatest; the greatest the least.
Let us best remember others by first remembering ourselves: we too are the vulnerable. Christ alone is beautifully believable, and it still requires a cross to show it.
Let us, recall that when God came to earth and studied us, He did it by wearing our skin. His Good News—and ours—is only for the vulnerable. It is only the vulnerable who can truly understand it.
Let us, therefore, work in the spirit if the Episcopal liturgy of Lessons and Carols, being always reminded of “the things that rejoice His heart”: the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love” (Lessons and Carols 2013.)
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