Fred Phelps and housework – I’ve been thinking about both in these early days of Lent and what they might have in common. I thought about this just yesterday, after hearing the news of Mr. Phelps’ death while I neatly folded laundry and scrubbed the kitchen sink.
Keeping a tidy house makes me happy. I’ve realized lately one of the reasons why. A tidy house distracts me from all those other areas of my life that are decidedly untidy – my neurotic worrying, half-hearted disciplines, and unanswered emails, among many other bits of quotidian clutter. I prefer gazing at my neatly arranged sock drawer rather than pondering a messy psyche.
That preference sometimes turns outward. The latest political sex scandal, the disgraced celebrity, the stupid comment from a pundit – at least I’m not that messy!
Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church have done some truly despicable things, most visibly by picketing ordinations and funerals with hateful placards. That over-the-top vitriol, so easily dismissed as ludicrous, can also easily mask the far more subtle but no less corrosive rhetoric from otherwise respectable clergy and churches.
“Love the sinner, hate the sin” sounds better than “God hates fags,” but the former has done just as much damage – probably more.
Likeable religious leaders and credentialed experts exercise far more influence over impressionable teenagers and social policy makers than readily identifiable fringe figures like Mr. Phelps. Focusing attention on the overt messiness of Westboro Baptist Church can distract us from noticing what lurks around in the ostensible tidiness of mainline institutions. Cloaking anti-LGBT rhetoric with pastoral concern leaves destructive shame in its wake.
Lent takes courage. This season invites all of us, individually and collectively, to ponder what most of us try to avoid – our own clutter. That avoidance has a long history and a legacy of truly distressing effects. I offered one way to think about that legacy in my recent book, Divine Communion. There I suggest that our longings for intimacy and communion are most frequently interrupted by unaddressed shame. I put it like this:
I find it helpful to define shame as alienation from our own bodily goodness. When left unaddressed and allowed to fester, this alienation can spiral into an inward collapse on the self and breed ever greater isolation. “Alienated bodies” can exacerbate troubled interpersonal relationships but also wider social disintegrations, violent hostilities toward those deemed “other,” social policies that stratify and divide communities, and even environmental degradations. Expanding circles of shame, in other words, often operate in scapegoat-like fashion to expel the “other” from community—or nailing that “other” to a cross outside the city gates.
I avoid thinking about my own lingering sense of bodily shame by cleaning the house. I wonder how often our churches, our communities, and this nation do the same thing.
Lent isn’t about finally “getting things right” or berating ourselves for mistakes. It is about turning our gaze directly toward the messiness of our lives and finding God there – the God who seeks intimacy and communion with us. Finding our whole selves in that divine embrace will give us fewer reasons to inflict our own wounds of shame on others. This, it seems to me, is the profound hope of the Lenten season and the Easter promise toward which it points: God raises the Wounded One from death.
OK — Jay “gets it” !!
Thanks for a simply beautiful sermon!
i love this!