When I read these readings each year, they tend to run together. I lose track of where I read what. Which gospel is it this year? Luke. OK. Right. So, what just happened?
But when I sit down to read the context of the gospel, it comes to me fresh, like I’ve never read this story before. If I don’t back up, this “cleansing of the temple” could be the same one found in the other three gospels.
But backing up, it sounds different.
As I reminded us yesterday, Jesus doesn’t just show up in Jerusalem like a kid back from college looking to raid the refrigerator. This chapter in Luke sets up a really challenging motif.
Jesus has come as the son of humanity to seek and save the lost.
Not as a king to rule humanity.
Nor as a conqueror to claim power.
Or the divider and destroyer of lives.
But he offers the people an alarming parable which sounds like the opposite! A crazy thing about a nobleman and his slaves and ruling and casting people out to their deaths. Then he turns around and walks to Jerusalem.
The Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday is cast in Luke’s gospel in stark relief to the picture Jesus is painting. A painting which more matches the cruelty of kings than the generous Messiah they’ve come to know.
But Jesus can’t keep up the facade. He has a role to play—a pretend king with a royal army composed of fishermen and outcasts. Clearly, the most terrifying people he could find. The street theater of the Triumphal Entry breaks when he sees Jerusalem.
The Tribute
This beautiful tribute Jesus offers to the Holy City brings tears to his eyes:
“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!”
Not silence [the stones will shout!] not violence [that isn’t peace!]; those things that make for peace. Love, compassion, trust in one another. And openness, humility, generosity.
They are hidden now. Not because God wants them hidden. But they refuse to see what is truly before them.
Now it’s a play, the parts already cast. The nobleman has gone searching for ever greater power and Jesus has come to him like a slave; the mina wrapped in cloth.
If only they could see.
The wages of peace are much cheaper than these costs of war. War that will rain down upon them all when this very city will be destroyed.
At the Temple
When Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, it comes with so little flair. No whip and less indignation than the other versions. This telling in Luke is slim, almost perfunctory.
He drives them out and occupies the space for days. And the people rejoice—spellbound.
The foreboding threats are muted by the people’s affection. None of them aware of the strangeness to come. The true role Jesus was born to play.
In Luke 19, we get a disturbing image that casts Jesus in a whole new light. That is, if we haven’t been listening up until now.
a love that transcends revolution Palm Sunday | Luke 19
When the gospel reading begins as this one does:
“After telling a parable to the crowd at Jericho, Jesus went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.”
I want to know what that parable was! Doesn’t that seem like an important part of the story?
I went back and read it. And it’s one of those occasions when you kind of wish you hadn’t.
So, of course, I’m going to read it to you!
But first, Zacchaeus
At the beginning of Luke 19, Jesus arrives at Jericho and he’s getting the crowds all riled up. And a filthy rich man, the chief tax-collector wants to see Jesus but he can’t. He’s too short. This is that favorite story of Zacchaeus climbing the tree.
What’s most important about Zacchaeus is that his being the chief tax-collector makes him the chief sinner in this community. But even he can have a change of heart. Jesus hangs out with him when the Temple leaders wouldn’t.
We keep seeing an image of Jesus practicing an uncommon relationship to the outcast for a Jewish religious leader of his time.
Now listen carefully to the words of Jesus here. He says:
“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
The Son of Man comes to seek out and save, not cast out and destroy. Remember this.
Second, that’s a weird last statement before heading into Jerusalem.
Third, and this is the most important, what the heck is Jesus trying to say? Because he just said “the Son of Man came to seek and out and save the lost.” Then he tells a story about a nobleman who seeks out royal power to become a king and then exercises it. A story he tells to people who keep trying to give him royal power to exercise.
So where do we even begin?
1) Royal Power
In this parable, Jesus describes a man of great power in his country going to another country to receive greater power. He deputizes ten of his slaves to exercise his power while he’s gone.
“But the citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, “We do not want this man to rule over us.””
They send people to this greater royal authority to say “Don’t give this guy more power over us! We hate him!”
It doesn’t sound like Jesus and it doesn’t play out like it is Jesus.
This is a terrifying story with a disturbing thesis. That a powerful man, who has already enslaved other people, seeks more power to exploit all in his charge.
Perhaps here is where we remember what the faithful are taught about kings. And we remember those previous words of Jesus:
“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”
Jesus is not a nobleman, but the son of all humanity.
2) Son of Humanity
Jesus associates himself with this title, son of humanity, not the noblest member of humanity. He preaches the last shall be first and first shall be last, not the last shall be laster and the first shall be firster.
The nobleman’s actions are the antithesis of the message of Jesus. Jesus doesn’t seek more power, but he sheds it and spreads it. He doesn’t seek to consolidate wealth into the hands of the powerful, but to share it among all the people. He doesn’t enslave the powerless, he empowers them with the very grace of God!
This nobleman isn’t Jesus! And he isn’t doing the will of God! It doesn’t sound anything like God; but it does sound like Herod. This parable is about someone else! Someone who doesn’t do the will of God.
3) Slaves
Then there are all the other clues.
God’s grace is about freeing the captive, not keeping slaves and encouraging them to exploit their neighbors. Here’s another: Judaism condemns the taking of interest. The whole action of the parable revolves around expecting and rewarding interest-taking. We reap what God sows, we don’t steal what others sow!
Huge red flags need to fly here.
So what do we make of this backward parable told by the would-be Messiah? The man they tried to crown? A story of slaves and exploitation, of stealing money and granting more power to the powerful?
Maybe this is the final exam.
Or maybe this is what he has to say.
The 2nd Coming…of the Maccabees
In verse 11, it says that Jesus told this parable
“because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.”
He taught them about abuse of power because HE was near Jerusalem and they thought it would all appear suddenly.
Because they thought it would make sense to seek foreign power and march into the capital for battle.
We get this backward teaching because we still struggle to see why it’s backward.
Jesus enters Jerusalem humbly on a colt, not a warhorse in the pageantry of a Roman Triumphal Entry. But also with a confused army eager to start another Maccabean revolt. And by the end of the week, he’ll make sure a couple of people show up with swords to sell the image.
Jesus walks into Jerusalem knowing that it isn’t just the state conspiring against him. The religious authorities conspire with them. For a revolt is the ultimate symbol of “unrest” none of the powerful want. But the blood-soaked freedom is what the people hunger for.
So Jesus comes, not to confront Rome or Judaism or the Temple, but the very power that would rather destroy its opponents than show mercy to its people.
Of God
So let us return to the question: what is Jesus trying to say?
What will happen by the end of the week isn’t of God. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that’s true. Only what happens in the end, in the resurrection, that’s of God.
If you’ve listened and watched; followed along and made mental notes. It was all right there for us from the beginning.
Who God comes to and partners with. The unlikely partnerships and the relationships with the outsiders. They even make a disciple out of Zacchaeus. And those unlikely recipients of miracles and the prodigious displays for the sake of all.
Teachings which return our attention to the fundamentals and entreat our hearts to love more generously the oppressed and condemn more directly their oppressors.
And the constant call to establish a new jubilee: to transform economic systems, restore those who have lost their lives and give new life to those who never had one; and to bring low the noble men who exploit their power and dignify the exploited.
If we take all of that with us into Jerusalem, we can see how power crucifies and destroys and the temptation to power over others corrupts our hearts.
So if we’ve paid attention; if we’ve learned anything; we also know that we need to go in anyway. That eventually we will all have our own crosses to carry.
Following Jesus in, we can see what power does to those who stand up to it. And where the power to sustain us in the midst of it really comes from.
We carry our history with us. But the true difference is how we see the future.
To talk about the time of God, Douglas uses Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as demonstrating what this means.
King deftly combines the two visions of faith in the stand-your-ground-culture war:
1) America’s faith in itself
2) Black faith in the freedom of God.
These two visions are “warring souls” as the former represents a vision of a justified self-defense. It is the very preservation of privilege and cherished whiteness. And the other is the simple idea that God calls for the oppressed to be free.
King uses the inherited narrative of American exceptionalism as mandating equality.
The idea that a lack of knowledge dooms us to repeat our history is born out, both in the repeated rise of stand-your-ground cultural backlash, but also in the protests from the prophetic black tradition to be included in the American myth. “To be sure, as we have seen, the idea of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” was never meant to extend to white bodies.” (220-1)
King draws us to our moral foundations, to regard our moral memory, moral identity, moral participation, and moral imagination to bring forth the central argument of God’s conviction.
That we know our history, let go of the signifiers of superiority, and participate in God’s work of transforming the world. Perhaps most importantly, we’re called into a moral imagination, which doesn’t get stuck in the unrealized past, but participate in the hope for a yet-to-be-realized future.
The time of God, therefore isn’t a protected present of a justified past, but a hopeful future manifest in our present work.
Reflection
Michael Brown’s body
There is a way that cherished whiteness can’t help itself. Something about it compels it to jump-the-shark of acceptability and justifiable reasonability. It just can’t help it. It has to signal its oppression.
Like “spectacle lynchings,” the need to communicate the protection of whiteness as a mechanism of enforcement reveals the argument is groundless.
The leaving of Michael Brown’s body in the street for hours and the lazy pace of police movement to deal with the crime scene was beyond a caricature. But it is also revealing of the hope Douglas raises throughout the book, and especially in chapter 5: that we confront a culture of death with God’s tools of life.
We preserve the humanity of the victim and call to account those actions with deprive his dignity. And, as I said at the time, we focus on the body.
The Value of Knowing
Several years ago, I was struck by the experience of reading Diana Butler Bass’ A People’s History of Christianity. Over and over again, she would tell the story of people of faith who were killed for what they believed. Each case was a person simply ahead of their time. All throughout history, victims suffering for belief, only to see their faith normalized within the next century.
This sense of tragedy, has not led to mass revelation, however. But it would seem, continued support for the status quo. A misremembered history constantly repeated, not only by the powerful, but the fearfully disempowered. This is both tragic and completely unacceptable.
But accept it, many of us do.
Douglas offers two different streams of thought. These are not streams which run against each other. They aren’t parallel or perpendicular. They are streams which can run together and can run away from each other.
These streams are not enemies, nor are they balanced. They aren’t in and yang or providentially maintained. They are two different streams: one filled with those who impose oppression and the other filled with those longing for equality.
Most important though, is that only one stream pretends to run in isolation. Only one stream acts like it is superior to the other. It is the older brother stream (of the Parable of the Lost Sons) and the stream which sows division by its nature.
Knowing this history and what the powerful do to that history is freeing. It is knowing the very freedom of God. And it is the kind of compelling freedom we’re eager to share.
One of the most pervasive myths about faith is that it requires certainty and rigidity. But this idea doesn’t work all the way down.
Faith isn’t founded on certainty, but on belief in light of uncertainty.
So for example, what am I saying when I say to one of my children “I believe in you!”?
Of course, I do literally believe you exist. That’s a given. But I’m also not actually communicating that notion at all. I’m saying I trust in what you can do.
Full stop.
Now here are some other things I’m not saying.
I know for a fact that you are about to hit a home run.
You are always great at all the things — absolute perfection!
All of the outcomes are predetermined by your greatness.
I can claim with authority every aspect of your being.
When a parent tells her children that she believes in them, she is making a specific kind of truth claim—not all of the truth claims. Or he is claiming a specific kind of insight into the wealth of truth that is his child.
This is the true foundation of faith: trust.
The Christians
Recently I saw a production of The Christians by Lucas Hnath at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis.
The Christians wrestles with the charismatic challenge of being the church as a people with fidelity to the movement of the Holy Spirit and building a physical church with physical people.
Told through the ongoing struggle over whether or not hell exists and the economic forces of megachurch culture, the play attempts to reveal the complexity of wrestling with this interconnected reality of trust in the intangible and trust in the people.
The production was incredible and deeply effecting. And I said afterward, the play itself is exactly what I would have written 10 years ago.
But I wouldn’t write it now.
What the play captures brilliantly is the diversity of thought and the intense confusion of belief. It questions the altruism behind our motivations and breathes deep resonance into the challenge of keeping a church together. It shows the dangerous reality of holding firm to belief when the Spirit of God seems to be pulling us apart.
But the thing it never tries to do is measure the difference in the pain its characters experience or truly wrestle with its most dangerous element: reactionary anger. In sharing the individual pain of its five main characters, it humanizes them all. But it also equalizes them.
The precipitating action of the play is a pastor’s sermon. One in which he speaks to a traditional theological position—but it runs counter to a particular teaching of the charismatic church. The central action proceeds from this through a reactionary anger that seems to drive an inevitable division.
It is a familiar posture. From Luther’s “Here I stand, I can do no other” to the sincerely-held belief of today’s religious exclusionism, we easily render the drawing and crossing of a line. But then what? What great witness to the certainty of Christ is found in retaliation?
Unfortunately, the play doesn’t wrestle with the narrowness of trust or the hermeneutic which justifies this division.
Christians have never had a singular belief, but we’ve made a common confession broad enough to include the wide variety of belief systems.
From the beginning, we’ve fought about what it means to be a “real” Christian. In a way, there’s nothing new with this formulation. But it isn’t a terribly helpful one, either. Most efforts to exclude members of the faithful tend to backfire and create new problems.
But underneath the division is that fundamental tension between the desire for a rigid clarity and the messy reality of belief. That it is far more like that sense of believing in your kids than it is belief that your kids exist.
Belief, at its root is about trust. This is why the truth claims in the breadth of Scripture describe, not merely what God is but how God behaves. Learning what God keeps doing for all of creation isn’t simply a checklist for doctrine, but the affirmative depiction of who we are called to trust. And what that trust looks like.
What it looks like is community.
Over and over, getting together in a spirit of love to eat, to pray, to learn. With people like us and not like us; those in prison and those free to walk the earth; those who are sick, disabled, poor, immigrant or in any need. This is the divine community.
This struggle isn’t new. From the beginning, Christians have tried to figure out what to do with putting our faith into practice in light of what we believe about God.
The most pervasive heresy, isn’t the one we talk about the most. It isn’t Arianism and it has nothing to do with the nature of Christ.
Our favorite heresy is Donatism: the belief that Christian clergy must be perfect for the sacrament to count.
Donatists believed they couldn’t take communion from anyone they thought wasn’t good enough. Of course, they could choose who was good and who wasn’t.
While this practice was condemned as heresy by Augustine, it is totally our favorite option. He’s too political. I’m gone! or She may cite historical precedent but that just sounds stupid. Real Christians hate those people.
Since the Reformation and its counter-protest, Christians can’t get enough of this self-validation by exclusion. It’s our new crusade to protect the faith in purity, certainty, and fierce divisiveness. It justifies our protection through destruction.
We needn’t wonder why Donatism is so popular. We need to better recognize why it’s so dangerous.
If we take seriously what belief truly is, then we must recognize the one thing it can’t do.
It can’t solve unsolvable problems.
In one of the “gotcha” lines in The Christians, the pastor is asked if the need to be tolerant means we have to be intolerant to the intolerant. And he has to say “Yes!”
It comes off as hypocritical, illogical, and immoral. But the question isn’t actually fair! It is a paradox. It presupposes true tolerance is impossible. But it’s even worse in the asking.
Asking this question doesn’t only prove the need for intolerance of a sort. It equalizes it all! Being kicked out of the church becomes equal to walking out. Preaching exclusion becomes the same material as preaching inclusion. In seconds, an open invitation to everyone is treated like an offense to half the population.
Before we’ve blinked we’ve come to allow “welcome!” to mean “get out!”
In such a world, how can we even speak?
This is not the simple manifestation of a literal reading of scripture or the adherence to a historic faith. It is intentional and specific: another front in a war declared on our neighbors.
This divisiveness is exposed as a new invention and the contrivance of a people refusing to see the practice of faith as a necessary part of possessing faith.
Thank God literalism and division isn’t our only option. Nor is it what counts as THE Christian option.
An Imperfect path
A more constructive option is to build community together across divisions and disagreements. It has the authority of scripture and tradition. And more than anything, it has historically and logically been the greater norm for centuries.
Because Christianity isn’t only defined by a belief that God exists or in the saving grace of Christ. It is reflected in how we address the complexity and paradox of life. Not simply with a certainty that we have the right answers. But trusting that everyone, even those with whom we disagree, are graced by God.
Believing in a Christ who can make that happen takes way more guts and faith than the condescending rants of political hacks. It’s actually the harder road to walk. But it’s one my faith compels me to walk because I’ve seen the grace found only on this path.
The grace in the eyes of saints and sinners, imperfectly seeking God and practicing an imperfect faith.
making the question about being right leads us to do wrong Lent 5C |Luke 15, John 12:1-8
It never occurred to me the story would end in death.
I thought it’s ending was left open like the door. The reason is so simple. We knew what he’d do. But need the hope that he wouldn’t. Maybe he’ll change his mind.
Of course I know we did the story of the Lost Sons last week. But I want to start here because it connects us to where we’re going.
A Father and His Sons
So this is how the story operates internally. A wealthy man has two sons. One leaves and the other stays. The younger risks his life and the elder plays it safe. This dynamic is very familiar.
In the first half of the story, we get the depth of love the father has for his son. There is so much emotion in the first half. But in the second, we get a whole lot of different emotion. Jealousy, anger, frustration, disappointment, fear.
The older son storms out, growling at his Dad I worked like a slave for you. And here, the parallel between the father’s actions toward the two sons comes into stark relief. The father goes out to them—an uncommon act. For the younger son, it’s to welcome; for the elder it’s to beg.
And then the story ends. We don’t know what will happen. But we do know, don’t we? Because we know the way that people work. We know the son doesn’t come back. He’s too angry. Just like his little brother, he’ll walk away, treating his father as if he’s dead.
But because we don’t read that, we don’t experience that together, we know there’s another possibility. There’s hope that the son will be restored like the younger son was restored.
That’s what I always thought. Because that’s how the story works internally. But then I came across another idea. Maybe the story implies a different ending.
Demanding
Luke 15 begins this way:
“Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”
Jesus tells this story about a father’s mercy toward a sinful son and a moralistic son to an audience composed of those very characters.
And all the present conflict in the story is generated by the older brother. He’s angry at his father for celebrating. Jealous over the seeming unfairness. Refusing to get over his brother’s abandoning of the family.
But all of that is over; it’s past. The mercy is present, celebration is beginning, and the whole town is gathering for a feast. This is when he leaves, when he breaks the family. He demands to be right, to be in charge, to have his way because he’s always been good. He is the rich young ruler.
This parable is illustrating the response of the religious to the grace of Christ. And the reaction is not pretty.
In a sense we know exactly what this older brother doesin the end. We know it because we know what the slaves – the Pharisees and scribes –did. It isn’t a happy ending.
Allow me to write the parable’s ending according to how the events of Luke unfold:
The father entreats his older son with open arms. The older son, in blind fury, picks up his shovel and bashes his old man to death.
That’s what happens in the Gospel. The Pharisees and scribes hated the grace of Jesus so much they conspired to kill Him. That is where older brother living takes you. It forces you to hate gracious Jesus.
Christ was not killed by a mob, he was killed by moralists. Like this older brother.
This is the price of moralism. Of being so good we need to be right. We become willing to kill what we love. We’ll break our communities, stab our friends in the back, conspire to destroy.
We could do the same with Martha’s resentment, were it to grow, where that would lead her. Not only to anger and bitterness, but to death.
Regarding the poor
So now we arrive at this morning’s gospel, plopped in the aftermath of the much bigger story in John’s gospel: the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
Imagine the gratitude in the siblings’ hearts. How much every dinner would become an opportunity for celebration. And how eager for the Passover they must be. God has liberated Lazarus! He has brought him out of slavery, unbound him from the wrappings of death, and restored him to life! Let us celebrate every moment!
And yet somehow Mary knows what is coming. Somehow, Jesus’s death is apparent to her because she anoints his feet for burial, preparing him for the walk to the place of the skull.
The author tries to let us off the hook, however. As he introduces the moralistic protest
“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
undercutting the challenge by turning Judas into a thief. So obviously he isn’t asking an honest question.
But the question remains, especially as we twist Jesus’s words about the poor being with us into an inevitability and a justification for ungenerous behavior.
The exchange itself, inviting us, tempting us into moralism. Declaring what’s good and condemning what we think is bad. The older brothers who don’t know what to do with our emotions.
Nearing Jerusalem
These two stories bring us to the outskirts of Jerusalem. They bring us to the place of confrontation. Not just with the ruling authority, but with the authority which rules our hearts.
Next week we’ll enter the city with palms in hand to celebrate the king’s entry through the gates of power. It’s a day of hosannas and joy. But for those of us who know what awaits inside the city, it is a day of sadness and confusion. How are we supposed to feel?
The clue is in the stories themselves.
The joy wells up in the father, just like in Mary and Martha because they have all experienced a miracle: the dead has been raised.
This is the power of God.
Love, down from heaven, out from heaven, dwelling within and among us creating heaven of earth. Love surrounds us. And keeps us. Love envelopes us. And entreats us. Go! Love the death out of this world.
For next week we’ll walk into the darkest nights, convinced these are humanity’s most godforsaken times, believing we are alone. Believing death will inevitably consume us; maybe even that we deserve it.
We don’t, of course. None of us does.
These two stories reveal that fiction and condemn the sin of hate. They remind us that God’s love is generous and full of hope. It reduces the powerful and raises up the lowly so that we all may be one!
These are the praises we sing! Not that we shall conquer or that the new king will rule us fairly or according to merit. But with the fullness of love, boundless beauty, and unwavering audacity to bring slaves and sinners to the same table with the powerful and the peasants; to even restore the dead to life.
We enter Jerusalem knowing that this is what God does. This is the way of Christ.
So then, even we can face a culture of death knowing it is not of God. And knowing what is.
We must relate to the cross. It is not a 2000-year-old tragedy to mourn, but an icon of infinite tragedies we encounter in our own world. Like lynchings, we paint our weakest as predators and reward those who kill them.
This sin stems from exceptionalism—we make the Us v. Them paradigm and then bemoan the “need” to enforce these boundaries.
Boundaries Jesus breaks intentionally.
“In fact, that Jesus was crucified signals his prior bond with the “crucified class” of his day.” (174)
Jesus raised up the lowly and brought the powerful low to equalize the people.
None is surprised when the powerful feel threatened. Nor should we be in their response: crucifixion. To protect their cherished property of exceptionalism, the powerful are willing to kill. Because it is also our sin.
The purpose of Stand Your Ground laws is to remove the penalty from killing. This doesn’t reflect the nature of God, then or now.
“The God who freely grants life is not a commissioner of death.” (181)
The Crucifixion isn’t a display of the power of God. It was particular people with a particular fear of losing power that crucified Jesus for expressing the equalizing love of God.
God didn’t utilize the culture of death to defeat death. But the resurrection reveals the nonviolent transcendent freedom of God.
The challenge for Christians is to see the redemptive power embodied by the resurrection in light of the terrible violence of the crucifixion.
“This is the meaning of the resurrection. It is not a theodicy to explain or make meaning out of a death. Rather, the resurrection restores life to those who have been crucified.” (192)
Like Jesus, we don’t confront a culture of death with its tools but build the kin-dom with God’s tools for restoring life.
Thoughts
Us vs. Them
Exceptionalism necessitates an Us vs. Them dynamic. It creates and enforces one. It creates boundaries to say who gets to be within the boundaries of exceptional and who does not.
And further, one cannot be exceptional if others are not. As we explored in earlier chapters, the pressure to condemn those who are not exceptional like we are seems embedded to the very nature of exceptionalism.
The ancestor of our present construct we call “whiteness,” Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, likewise creates dualism and rejects equality. It is a direct affront to the idea of multiple viewpoints because it necessitates a winner and a loser, a stronger and a weaker, an oppressor and a victim.
Those who buy into it will naturally try to always find themselves on top, rather than the bottom. Of course, the natural antidote is to see our common condition and express equality. It requires leveling the playing field as Jesus does. Not only from the bottom, but from the top.
The woman at the well couldn’t come to Jesus because she would be killed for it. His Jewish male exceptionalism was severely protected. But he could come to her. It would take multiple such transgressions to get Jesus killed.
Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism rejects the redistribution of wealth for this reason. It rejects any raising up of the poor because it sees every attempt at equality as an act of aggression toward a system which protects their superiority—whether that protection comes from the myth of blood, culture, or merit. The sense of necessary superiority is greater than any sense of justice.
The Interviews with Lauer
Douglas illustrates how the narrative of black guilt and white innocence plays out in full view for us to see. Her telling of The Today Show interviews with Trayvon Martin’s parents is deeply revealing. Not just for the specifics of how we interact around race, but for white blindness to our sin.
In the parents, we see incredible wisdom and foresight. Despite the tragedy that was pushed into their life, they recognize that their son continues to be victimized, even in death. They see the way his whole life is being erased and replaced with a stamp of disapproval: like meat past its expiration date.
They are expected to arrest their pain and mourning to sympathize with the killer. Even as their son’s life is being erased, Lauer expects them to participate in giving new life to his killer.
It all seems profound—from my whiteness. But clearly they could truly see what was happening. They could see what exceptionalism does: it covers its tracks. It hides behind selective journalistic decisions. And it makes the pursuit, stalking, and killing of a boy by a large man into a time to talk about race neutrality and legal consistency. All while erasing the victim’s family and its story.
The very move never done when the victim is white.
Hyper-individualism
Stand-your-ground culture is sinful by definition. It creates an Us and Them through “exceptionalism” and breeds an unsympathetic response to tragedy. It is hyper-individualistic and rejects the fundamental character of relationship that is necessary to even have a relationship with God.
Stand-your-ground culture nurtures individual sin, but it also nurtures systemic and structural sin.
“There is no getting around it: stand your ground is a reflection of a culture of death. It degrades humanity and destroys life.” (195)
Salvation (like the kin-dom itself) is not simply a future eternal after death, but a revealed actuality in life. It is about freedom from slavery and oppression in the here and now.
Our hyper-individualism and the sin of exceptionalism are intertwined and serve as another justification through obfuscation. It allows us to say but I’m not racist! or but I’m doing my part without any responsibility for the whole community.
This thinking was used during Reconstruction to split the poor over race to prevent them from organizing. And it is used today by industry to split us and prevent us from seeing a common need for ecological reform.
And most deviously, it helps us nit-pick our common moment, certain of our own exceptional belief, that diagnosing a singular problem will yield a simple solution. When we do it. Everybody else has really bad ideas that will never work and should shut up for a minute and listen to us.
In the first half of the book, we explored the stand-your-ground culture. In the second half of the book, we’ll explore the hope that comes from God.
1) an Exodus of Liberation 2) an Exodus of Conquer
Douglas show that for black Christians, the story of exodus is a story of liberation. But for Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, the exodus is a blueprint for Manifest Destiny.
The persistence of black faith is bound to its roots in the freedom of God. That God’s nature is freedom and God’s movement in human history reflects that freedom.
In theological terms, this means that God has a transcendent relationship to humanity. So God is free of human definition and particularity. It is also related to the ancestral African belief in the Great High God in which God is not dependent on human action, but encouraging of it.
Because God’s nature is freedom, therefore black bodies are created to be free.
So for black faith, connecting to the liberation in Exodus is consistent with God’s preference toward freedom. While imperfect, it provides a more honest hermeneutic. For the natural connection to the story is to a people in need of liberation, rather than to blood lineage of favoritism.
In contrast, Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism is built on a belief of chosenness of culture and blood. This theology is really quite inconsistent with the exodus story. Anglo-Saxons weren’t in the exodus story. So there is no theological or blood connection to the chosen people in the story.
What the exodus story does reveal, however, is how “God chooses to be in the world” which is to give preference toward freedom, not justification for desire.
Lastly, the limitations of basing our faith on exodus are obvious. The last word should not be the genocide in Joshua or the letters of Paul, but should be found in the redeeming and liberating character of Jesus.
Reflection:
Torah’s Non-Ending
A few weeks ago, our lectionary gave us a piece of Deuteronomy. It begins with instructions:
“When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.”
They are to take the first fruits to the priest for sacrifice and then proclaim God’s freeing power. Then:
“You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.”
And it continues in verses not included in the lectionary, making a regular offering
“giving it to the Levites, the aliens, the orphans, and the widows, so that they may eat their fill within your towns,”
Listening to this passage after reading the first chapter of Stand Your Ground drew me to the non-ending of Torah. The conquering and slaughter comes in Joshua. The Books of Moses, the heart of the inherited faith, ends with the promised land in sight.
It ends with instructions on how to be a community in this new land for them to possess.
Instructions which assumes that there will be people for them to share with.
The very language of Deuteronomy seems to have, at best, a complicated relationship to the conquer theology of Manifest Destiny. One reason is that it presumes the liberated people would have neighbors in the land from outside the tribe they’d feast and eat dinner with.o
The Exodus Today
Douglas describes the place of black bodies in a culture of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism in light of the exodus: a story of liberation and promise.
She names the paradox of the liberating nature of God in the unliberated black bodies of our culture. The presence of the unliberated groaning to be freed reveals the spirit of God in the midst of struggle and the ungodly character of servitude.
From black leadership during reconstruction and civil rights to those leaders of modern movements including Black Lives Matter, the connection of African Americans to liberation in the exodus is pretty direct.
I would think then, that the call for liberation today would mirror the challenge of the liberated Israelites; just as the hardened hearts of many whites to maintain an exceptional worldview mirror the challenge of the Egyptian.
As a product of whiteness, what ways have I let my heart harden to the plight of others? And when have I let the lies of Pharaoh enflame my fear of the other?
In the first half of the book, we explored the stand-your-ground culture. In the second half of the book, we’ll explore the hope that comes from God.
When we get together for our Bible Study each Wednesday, we gather around a table and hand out the inserts we use on Sunday mornings with the lessons. We start by praying the collect. Then we read the First Reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament. And then the Second Reading from the Greek Scriptures, which we call the New Testament. Then we read the gospel.
And when we got to our second reading this week from Paul’s first letter to the followers of Jesus in Corinth, I had a pretty visceral response. I said somewhat rhetorically, Is there any way we could not read this one on Sunday?
It’s the million little things that mess with our faith; the assumptions about each other and about God, that make readings like this one hard for many of us to hear and believe.
And as we bring our time to a close each week, I ask: What would you preach? What is the Word revealed to you this week?
While those gathered think I’m mining them for material, I don’t think they fully understand that I mean it. That there’s a Word here looking to be released in them. That Jesus is to be proclaimed by all of us and we’re all totally capable of doing it. Thoughtfully and graciously.
This time, though…
This time, I had that moment myself, of not knowing what to preach. I was sitting right there with them going Oh man, look at this collection of readings. And I felt very uncommitted to anything.
But as I drove home, thinking through each of the readings, I remembered my standing rule. It isn’t an always rule, but its a pretty close to always rule:
If you don’t want to read it on Sunday morning, then that’s what you’ve gotta preach on Sunday morning.
So there it is. That’s what we’re doing.
Getting Lost
Let’s start with the obvious. There’s all sorts of junk in here we could spend our time getting excited about. Most of it is found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, often called the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses.
There’s a lot of fun stuff in here, like the water coming from the rock or the part about the snakes. This is all fun, but we don’t need to dig through it like it’s buried treasure. Or as if this were some sort of secret conspiracy like in National Treasure and we have to go all Nick Cage to decode the treasure map on the back of the constitution.
Paul doesn’t name them so we can obsess over them, like they will reveal a secret so much as connect Jesus to the tradition. That’s his point.
Since the people he’s talking to in Corinth have way less history with this stuff than he does, Paul’s just running his mouth off and listing all the things and the people are just smiling and nodding and going Yes, all the things! because how are they supposed to know any better?
But Paul is actually trying to communicate something deeper than that. He’s trying to say that in all of this stuff, all these grand moments with the divine, and in all these times when God was with the people, that’s the Christ at work in the world. Like he’s saying This is a deeper story! Don’t get lost in the other stuff!
So let’s dig into that.
I Will Be There
The main story of Torah, of the Pentateuch, is the Exodus. And its central figure is Moses. A boy, saved from genocide and raised in the kingdom as Pharaoh’s own son. A Hebrew boy with an Egyptian name.
And as Moses grows up, he feels lost and alone. He isn’t Egyptian, but he isn’t really Hebrew either. He’s an outcast desperate to be included among the other outcasts.
So when he has this encounter with God in the burning bush, it’s a whole lot of ummm…are you talking to me? Moses argues with God, asks for proof because there’s no way they would believe Aaron, let alone Moses Come on!
And God says tell them “I Am Who I Am.” Which is a beautiful, reassuring puzzle of a phrase which sounds both profound and meaningless to postmodern ears. But I’ll tell you, it’s way better than that.
Everett Fox points out that English really struggles to capture the scope of this phrase. He translates it as “I-will-be-there-howsoever-I-will-be-there.”
God isn’t just naming God’s existence or even permanence, but God’s presence and reassurance to be with them in all the junk ahead.
I will be there. I will be there. And I will be there howsoever I will be there.
Then? I’ll be there. When? Then. Where? There. How? However I choose to show up.
You don’t have control over me. But I promise to free you and be with you and never truly leave you.
Red Sea? There. Check. Stick around? Cloud by day and fire by night. Check. Different forms. Always present. Check and check.
Adding Christ to the story
When Paul pulls Christ into this story, it isn’t to change the story at all. Because God said that God would be there howsoever God would be there. And God threw all of us for a loop with Jesus.
So all of those reasons why I didn’t want to read this excerpt from Paul’s letter to the people in Corinth are because we so get stuck in the mental gymnastics of metaphysics and theology. We get trapped in our heads!
The question isn’t whether or not God makes up tests, because we all get the same assignments from the teacher. Towers don’t fall on bad people and God doesn’t push them over. Jesus couldn’t say that any clearer.
But we test God all the time.
We take on the Adversary’s role in the Wilderness. Prove you’re there, God. Change my life. Give me what he has. Make it so I have what she has. Steal this cancer from her body and make him walk again. All of this is on you, God!
We put God to the test the way the people put Jesus to the test. And the same way so many good Christians put Paul to the test. Every last word that must be God’s!
That line we tell each other about God not giving you more than you can handle is comforting, but it isn’t theologically true. Nor does Paul actually say that. And it isn’t what he is after.
God isn’t giving you pain. That’s not how it works. That’s not who God is.
And this is why we have the story.
God brought the people to Egypt to save them from the famine, but Pharaoh enslaved them. Then God freed them. And even when the people misbehaved, God stuck with them.
They tested God, not the other way around.
Freedom
God is about freedom, not slavery. Hope, not nihilism. Love, not hate.
This is the part of the equation that still makes us go, but… No buts.
It is metaphysics and dualistic philosophy that demands a balance and a neutral arbiter. It demands a God in control of every action and who must be held accountable for the evil in the world.
But that isn’t God. And it doesn’t come from God. It comes from humans with ideas about a just world of eternal equal balance. We’re doing that! We made that up!
And we test God at every encounter; throwing scripture in God’s face and saying what do you have to say for yourself! This isn’t from God. It’s from us.
That testing of God has always been from us.
From Moses at the bush to the Psalmist demanding God crush his enemies to the later epistles cutting apart the community and saying God wanted it that way.
And then all of this junk that came after.
The Jesus Wars against the heretics and between each other to the crusades to imperialism and manifest destiny. To slavery, Jim Crow, anti-semitism. And the constant stream of laws which encourage bias and demean people for being LGBTQ, disabled, poor, unemployed or underemployed, or children.
Every time we make people prove how deserving of salvation they are? This isn’t God. And it isn’t for God. It’s us playing God. Testing God.
This is how we perish, getting what we all get: the status quo death of an oppressed people oppressing each other. Damning us all by damning each other with exclusion.
We plant fig trees, then when they don’t produce, we tear them down. Throw them away. Call them useless, evil, broken. Cast them out because they aren’t the right kind.
And yet Jesus is there, like a gardener.
Nurturing, healing, hoping, reassuring, begging us to give them another chance.
God will be there howsoever God will be there.
That’s the promise. And the proof.
A promise to be there with us. In God’s way. To free the enslaved and heal the afflicted. Not as a divine backstop in case we’ve screwed up, but as our partner and inspiration. As we turn around and become closer to Jesus.
Freeing as God frees, loving as God loves, being present as God is present.
Being there. Here. Free. And striving until all are free. Free of hate and free to love. Making peace and becoming the children of God.
Preparing for the harvest Jesus is planting.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
