The Zanforb Incident

Galatians 3:28

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

1 Corinthians 12: 12 & 27

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ... Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

(This is a sermon for the campers at Camp Bishopswood in Hope, Maine.  It's a wonderful Episcopal Church camp and I am honored to have been asked to lead the end of week Eucharist this week! The theme of the week is privilege.)

So, I heard you all have been talking about privilege this week so I know you’ve been discussing the Zanforb Incident.... Wait, you HAVEN’T been talking about the Zanforb Incident... you know, the planet Zanforb?  None of this sounds familiar?  How could you have been talking about privilege and not talk about Zanforb?  You’ve talked about Zanforb in school though, right?  NO!  

Oh, man!  Well, if you haven’t ever heard of Zanforb before I guess I need to back up a bunch from what I was going to talk about tonight and go back to basics... Are you SURE you’ve never heard of Zanforb?  You’re not just messing with me, are you?  This isn’t some camp prank is it?  Alright then...

Zanforb is a planet in our galaxy.  Back about six million years ago the ancestors of the Zanforbians crawled up out of their red ocean and began to evolve over millions of years into the beings they are today.  At the same time on the other side of the planet, the ancestors of the Zanforbos did the same thing.  

Pretty much everything about the Zanforbians and Zanforbos are the same... same two brains, same number of tentacles, same beautiful blue-green shiny scales (I can’t believe you’ve never heard this before!) same gills and fins... all the same.  The one difference is that the Zanforbians have THREE eye stalks and the Zanforbos have two.  So, over time they both groups got smarter and learned to make fire and tools and stuff.  They learned how to milk the BoBo bird and turn it’s purple milk into the cheese they use to build their homes.  (I thought EVERYBODY knew this stuff)  Eventually they built ships and sailed around their planet and met one another.  Believe it or not, everything with that first meeting went great!  The eye stalk thing wasn’t a big deal to them and they all lived together in peace and harmony.  They lived on the same canals together.  They worked and played with one another and they all dealt with the hardships of their world together in the same way.  The main hardship they all faced, of course, was that the BoBo bird cheese they all used to build their houses was HIGHLY flammable!  Their homes were always catching on fire and melting into a puddle of burnt, stinky, purple, cheese... BoBo bird cheese really stinks when it melts.  (I really did think everyone knew this stuff!) 

Then one day a Zanforbian, named Ethyl, invented a fire fighting robot.  No one had been able to do this before, but Ethyl, using the third eye stalk on top of her head, was able to program a robot that flew around her house and put out the fires on the cheese before they were able to spread!  It was a HUGE advance!  Ethyl tried to adapt the robots so they could be programmed with just two eye stalks but couldn’t make it work.  Before this invention, both the Zanforbians and Zanforbos spent about half their non-sleep cycle time, tracking, capturing and milking BoBo birds and then making the cheese and rebuilding their homes.  After Ethyl’s robot came out, the Zanforbians could spend all that time they USED to spend catching, milking, cheese making and building, NOW doing something else.  That meant they always had more Zooblobs (their form of money) and no longer lived in constant worry about their houses catching fire.  In a word, they had privilege.  Over the next couple of hundred sun cycles, the two groups grew apart.  The Zanforbians began to assume that this was just how things were supposed to be.  

But all that changed at a summer camp one evening.  George (a Zanforbian) and Betsy (a Zanforbo), were looking up together at their three yellow moons and they had a revelation.  What if Zanforbians used their third eye stalk to control the fire robots to watch Zanforbian houses AND the houses of their Zanforbo neighbors?  

At first the adults they told thought it was a silly idea.  What if the robot was putting out a cheese fire on a Zanforbo house when a Zanforbian house caught on fire!?  They thought there was NO WAY this could work, but George and Betsy asked a simple question (on Zanforb the kids often asked the best questions).  How often do two or more purple, stinky, cheese houses melt down on the same canal on a single night?  The Zanforbians, you see, were afraid of giving away their privilege and having less security than they had come to enjoy.  

BUT, after some research, it turned out that a double meltdown hardly ever happened... actually there was only one ancient legend of that happening which was known as “The Great Melt-O-Rama” but in the modern world it just didn’t happen.  Well, there were some hold outs, Zanforbians still afraid to share their privilege.  They had a special flag and said some hateful things out of fear, always thinking that by sharing their privilege they would be less special than they were before.  But in spite of the flag and the fear and the hateful words, soon, a few brave Zanforbians started sharing their privilege with their neighbors.  They programmed the fire robots to watch both their houses AND their neighbor’s houses equally!  And it worked!  Soon, the Zanforbos’s houses weren’t melting down all the time and they too had the same extra time, wealth and peace of mind that their neighbors had.  

This is the wonderful lesson of the Zanforb Incident.  They learned that when privilege is shared everyone does better!  Like God’s love, sharing privilege does not leave the share-er with less, but actually makes more for everyone!  The beings from Zanforb learned what the Apostle Paul was trying to teach us in the lessons for tonight and in all the stuff he wrote... that God makes no distinctions... male, female, Greek, Jew, black, white, gay, straight, two eye stalks or three... God intends for us to all be connected... using our gifts with one another so that we might all experience the lives of joy God created all of us to have... It turns out, God created each and every one of us to be vital, beloved and amazing parts of the Body of Christ… and we are!   

Oh, there’s one more thing I should probably tell you since you’ve never heard of Zanforb before.  You see, once both the Zanforbians and Zanforbos were working together with that extra time, wealth and security on their tentacles, they were able to discover that faster-than-light space travel was possible.  But they also learned that the only way to control space ships at that speed was to use FIVE eye stalks!  Working together, Zanforbians and Zanforbos could visit other planets in the galaxy... but living and working apart they would just stay stuck forever!  

Oh, one last thing… they also learned that working together, they could use their combined eye stalks to control an electronic camouflage device so they could visit other planets and look exactly like the creatures from that world.  It is ALMOST a perfect camouflage.  ALMOST.  If you know what to look for, can always tell if a person you are talking to is ACTUALLY from Zanforb and not from earth because the electronic camouflage device has one, unique, quirky feature... It always makes a camouflaged creature from Zanforb appear in a black shirt with a white collar!   DUN DUN DUNNNN!!!!