Category: Theology

Holy Solidarity: Lent & Liberation, Part 5

Trayvon Martin. Adrienne Rich. Shaima al Awadi.

I’m taking these names with me into the Christian Holy Week that begins this Sunday. I suspect that the first two names are far more familiar than the third. So here I offer some observations about all three and then why they help me to engage with Holy Week for the sake of profound social change.

Trayvon Martin

The blogosphere is bloated with important, scandalous, insightful, stirring, and stupid posts about this tragic event (and if you don’t what this about, read about it). I won’t try to add to the bloat here except to say this: I can’t remember the last time I was this disgusted by the so-called “criminal justice” system in this country. As many others have already noted, just imagine if Trayvon had been white and George Zimmerman black. In that scenario, and less than a century ago, Zimmerman would already be dead – lynched. (Just go back and watch the wonderful film Places in the Heart.)

White supremacy is a deep poison in U.S. history and culture. It won’t be extracted but by sustained force of will, honesty, and deep conversion.

Adrienne Rich

If I see one more obituary headline about this amazing woman describing her as a “feminist poet,” I’m going to run from my house screaming into the streets (much to the annoyance of my neighbors). So when’s the last time you saw a description of T. S. Eliot as that “white poet”? Ever see Ralph Waldo Emerson described as that “male writer”? I bet you’ve seen Langston Hughes described as an “African-American playwright.”

A standard-issue human being is white and male. Everyone else needs a label. Until that stops, justice will be elusive and human flourishing will languish.

Shaima al Awadi

Just last week an Iraqi immigrant and mother of five died from injuries inflected by a severe beating in her El Cajon home (in San Diego). At the scene there was a note warning the family to “go back to your own country.” El Cajon police said they are investigating the possibility of a hate crime. (The “possibility”? Really? Give me a break.)

So, you haven’t heard about this case? I hadn’t either until it leeched into my FaceBook feed nearly unnoticed (read some more here). Then I did some digging. Shaima al Awadi actually worked for the U.S. Army, translating, helping, consulting about Islamic culture. Where is the news media on this story? Where is our collective FaceBook outrage? Do we hear or see virtually nothing about this because she was a woman and also not an “American”? Probably. Sit at the intersection of white supremacy and male privilege and all this makes horribly twisted sense.

Shaima was beaten, apparently, with something like a tire iron. And she died from those injuries. How can any of us stand this? How can we go on living in such a xenophobic society, such a white supremacist, such a patriarchal society?

Of course, those are just three names, three human beings, among countless others few if any of us will ever know who endure the ravages of white male privilege every day. I can’t possibly try to “solve” all this. Who could? But here I’ll offer some brief reflections about why I find all of this important as I enter into Holy Week. I pray that this will inspire fresh ideas for action.

Christians will remember in this holiest of Christian weeks that Jesus faced a critical choice, quite literally a choice of life and death. He belonged to a rich and vibrant religious tradition that offered a number of options for his mission. He could have, for example, chosen the path of a Levitical warrior to liberate his people by force from Roman occupation. I say “Levitical” warrior because the culture of tribal warfare from which that biblical book arose was constructed on an economics of masculinity in which topping one’s enemies – with violence, if necessary – demonstrated covenantal faithfulness.

But Jesus chose instead to follow the path articulated by the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. In that book, the Levitical warrior becomes the “suffering servant,” and rather than topping one’s enemies, that servant leads all the nations instead to God’s holy mountain where they learn war no more and beat their swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4).

In the gospel according to John, that choice is described as nothing less than the glory of God. Resisting the violence of imperial (read “white”) male privilege and choosing instead a deep solidarity with all those who are oppressed by such violence is, for John, the quintessential revelation of divine splendor.

In the light of that glory, recommitting ourselves to ending white male privilege is a recommitment to saving this planet from the ravages of imperial patriarchy. How could that not mark a week that Christians insist is “holy”? I should surely hope that Christians the world over would find that kind of path as marking our way toward Easter.

Divine Solidarity: Lent & Liberation, Part 2

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40).

One would hope that U.S. politicians currently seeking to mandate unwarranted vaginal probes without a woman’s consent don’t actually imagine probing Jesus. Neither do I suppose that they imagine deporting Jesus when they strike a hard line on “illegal” immigration that separates mothers from their children. I’m sure many of them don’t see Jesus when they look at single mothers of color, or the women who speak only Spanish who just happen to be cleaning their congressional offices.

But the Gospel actually demands that those politicians do see Jesus in each of those moments. It demands the same thing from all of us.

I believe at least one faithful rendering of the Gospel is this: Jesus practiced radical solidarity. I believe this also means that God continually practices deep and sustaining solidarity with God’s whole creation. The Lenten journey of following Jesus toward the cross and an empty tomb invites us to adopt that very same discipline of divine solidarity.

Traditionally, the first Sunday of Lent (this weekend) features the gospel story of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. I’ve heard many sermons and read many commentaries on that story, but I’ve never encountered one that interprets that story through the lens of male privilege. We’re long overdue.

(If you don’t know that story, pause and read Luke 4:1-13; the one assigned for this weekend is Mark 1:9-15).

Tempted in three crafty and subtle ways to exercise the power that comes with male privilege, Jesus chose instead to follow the path of divine solidarity:

  • Famished and tempted to turn stones into bread, Jesus chose instead to stand with the poor, who have no power to make bread suddenly appear on the table for their families (Luke 4:3-4).
  •  Tempted to seize the kingdoms of the world for good, Jesus chose instead to stand with all the socially marginalized who have no voice in the corridors of imperial government (Luke 4:5-8).
  • Realizing his physical vulnerabilities, Jesus was tempted to test his divine safety net. But he chose instead to stand with all those who have no recourse to guarantees, who can’t afford to test anyone or anything because the risk is too great (Luke 4:9-12).

The gospel writers don’t make it explicit, but the first hearers of this story would readily have known this: the least powerful in each of those cases in the first century were women. The same is true today, especially women of color.

It’s women who struggle most to provide bread for their children (see the WIC site on this); it’s women who can’t ever seem to earn equal pay for equal work (think this is old fashioned? thinks again and read here); it’s women the world over who have virtually no access to the corridors of power that would save them from the state’s killing machine (the global situation is dire, just read here) – or even from coerced vaginal probes.

But I refuse despair. Peculiar as this may sound, I refuse despair because of my Christian faith and because of the Gospel. After Jesus resisted the power that comes with male privilege, the rest of the story bears ample witness to the remarkable result: women as agents (John 4:1-29); women as confidants (Luke 10:38; John 11:5); women as teachers (Matthew 15:21-28); women as die-hard comrades when it mattered most (John 19:25); women as the first witnesses to God’s victory over death (Mark 16:1-6).

Following Jesus through Lent must mean at least this much: listening closely to women’s voices and attending carefully to the dignity of women’s bodies. For men (especially white men), it must mean more: using our (white) male privilege to practice divine solidarity and, with it, to create a new world – a world of thriving and flourishing for all.

Now that’s a Lenten discipline all of us could, quite literally, live with.

Divine Dignity for All — Married or Not

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (a federal court) just issued a theological statement on February 7. Christians might want to take note. This is what they said: “Proposition 8 [which stripped same-sex couples of their right to marry] serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

The phrase, “to lessen…human dignity” is the theological statement I have in mind. To be clear, I don’t mean that this is only a theological statement; it can easily be a completely secular, non-religious statement, too. But it is also a deeply theological one. Jews, Muslims, and Christians (among others, I imagine) readily claim that every human being is created in the “image and likeness” of God. Well, how much more dignity does anyone need than that? (My friend and colleague Susan Russell has a great post on her blog about human dignity, both religious and constitutional.)

Human dignity, in all its many forms and applications, seems in rather short supply these days. Do we really believe that people living on our streets without homes or food are treated with “human dignity”? Do we really believe that immigrants forced to clean our toilets and pick our fruit but are vulnerable to deportation at any minute are viewed with “human dignity”? Oh, the list goes on and on.

Here’s one more item on the dignity list: There are many people who (to use Christian language) exhibit the “fruits of the Spirit” in their lives but who do not feel called to marriage. In countless ways, these “unmarried” ones contribute to the mission and ministry of the Church and to the common good (remember that?) of our society. So, yes to the dignity of marriage for all; and yes to the dignity of those whose relationships just don’t fit that model but are precious gifts to the Church and to the wider society nonetheless.

It really is possible to keep insisting on the dignity of every human person and supporting the dignity of marriage at the same time. Let’s call it spiritual multi-tasking. To suppose we can only talk about one thing at a time is to relegate all those supposedly “secondary” concerns to, well, secondary status.

I recently floated more deliberately an idea that I hatched a year ago to put some of these observations into practice. I call it “Dalantine’s Day.” It’s my modest attempt to affirm that there are many different kinds of relationship from which we all benefit in countless ways and which don’t rely on romantic pair-bonding. The deep intimacy of close friendships, for example, or the affection among colleagues, or the activism of neighborhood groups, or single parents raising children, or children caring for elderly parents, or those particular moments of extending hospitality to a stranger, or relationships of care with non-human animals of all kinds.

All of those various relational configurations are actually lauded by biblical writers, but few would realize it by listening to the religious rhetoric on both the “right” and the “left” today. Both sides perpetuate the idea that the most dignified form of human relationship is marriage. How many churches, I wonder, celebrate any other kind of relationship in their liturgical lives and ritual practices?

We can do better. The peculiar faith of a peculiar gospel people can do much better. In my view, achieving same-sex marriage is a worthy, laudable, and completely Christian cause for celebration, because it’s about justice, fairness, equality, and of course, love. But if we don’t say something more, then we religious folks are falling far short of the standard that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals set for us all yet again on February 7: human dignity.

Relics, Revelation, & Oscar Wilde

Old things are, well, old. If they’re especially old (read “useless”) they become relegated to the status of “relic.” These days, what really matters is what’s new and therefore better or just whatever is “next.”

The obsession with everything new is a challenge for just about every religious tradition as those traditions seem to care mostly about what sits rather far back in the history slipstream. But what if “relic” might mean something more than just “old”?

Some ancient Christians took great care to preserve artifacts, bits and pieces, and other random traces of particularly revered people (“saints”) in their communities. Some of these relics are supposedly wonderfully preserved in the altars of various cathedrals and basilicas around the world.

Now that’s pretty peculiar. And quite honestly, I never really got why any of that vaguely superstitious stuff should have any part in Christian faith. But all of that changed on a trip to France some years ago, about which I was reminded last month when I read about one of my favorite tombs in one of my all-time favorite cemeteries: Pere Lechaise in Paris. The tomb in question is Oscar Wilde’s (and yes, he’s buried in Paris; I mean, of course he is – where else?).

If you’ve never visited the cemetery, you must. And if you’ve never seen Wilde’s tomb, it’s a wonder. An enormous winged angel based on Egyptian/Assyrian mythological creatures. But what was much more interesting to me were all the tiny little pieces of paper crammed into the nooks and crannies of the sculpture; the greasy stains left by thousands of handprints; the lipstick smears deposited by admiring kisses.

The little pieces of paper were notes. Most of them were variations on a single theme: thank you for your courage; you saved my life; bless you for making my life possible. (And yes, I had the audacity to pry out those notes and read them – but at least I put them back.)

I sat on the bench opposite that tomb on that first visit for quite some time. I was deeply moved by what I saw and felt. Some people were crying. Others told ribald jokes and had a good laugh. A few slipped still more paper in the cracks – and some did so quite surreptitiously.

Watching all this and thinking about Oscar’s plays, his essays, his biting wit, I suddenly had a sense of him as a real person. He really wasn’t just a wonderful literary fiction or some phantom from a Victorian past. Oscar Wilde was a flesh-and-blood human being just like me; in fact, he was lying ensconced in a tomb just five feet from where I sat. I was transfixed.

Wilde’s tomb helped me understand better why Christians, both ancient and contemporary, might care about relics. It’s important not only to see something but also to touch something, to caress it, to plant something of yourself in that “thing.” But it’s not just a “thing.” It’s some kind of highly-charged, vibrating thread that connects all of us, now, to all of them, then, and thus links all of us together in an unimaginable future.

So I wrote my own note on that visit to Pere Lachaise: “Oscar, you were insufferably arrogant. Thank you for giving me courage to be myself.” I slipped it in a crack near one of the wings. I cried a bit.

Would you like to do that some day? Alas, you cannot. Late last year, Oscar’s descendants decided to have his tomb cleaned and to erect a seven-foot glass barrier around it. No more touching. No more kissing. No more greasy hand stands or smeared lipstick. No more note-tucking, no matter how surreptitious.

How sad, and what a shame. To me, touching it mattered. Placing something of myself in it mattered. Watching others do the same mattered.

That moment was, for me, a moment of incarnational renewal. Physical stuff matters. Matter matters. And what a great reminder during this season after the Epiphany on the Christian calendar as we lurch our way towards Lent. God gets our attention best with the world of matter, with touchable things, with flesh – or with outlandishly carved stone.

Epiphanies are, by definition, new. But they can be prompted by old things, by relics – especially if you can touch them and kiss them.

Holy Flesh!

As the Twelve Days of Christmas come to an end, I offer here, first, a multiple choice question, and then a poem.

First, the question – human flesh is: a) a commodity to trade and sell for profit; b) ineligible for food, housing, or medical care if it’s the wrong color; c) unworthy of basic civil rights and dignity if it’s involved in same-sex sex; or d) a divine revelation.

The Feast of the Epiphany, which we mark tomorrow on the Christian calendar, celebrates option “D.” That still qualifies as an epiphany after all these many centuries since the birth of Christ precisely because options “A,” “B,” and “C” seem quite reasonable for far too many people today.

The ancient sages (those “wise guys,” as I like to call them), who traveled from their home country while following a star, did not make their journey in search of an institution, a text, or even an idea. They went in search of a flesh-and-blood infant.

The magi may not have understood precisely who it was they found (frankly, I don’t either – do you?) but that doesn’t matter. The star’s light declared the wonderfully and amazingly peculiar, something that can, even today, spark a revolution: human flesh is divine.

If more of us actually believed what Epiphany declares, I dare say the world would change. The world would change not just because of what people might perceive about Jesus but also and even more because of what all of us would perceive about each other: In our flesh, in yours and mine, the holy shines forth.

And now the poem. This is another of my attempts to bring some of this into verse. (This particular poem also appeared a wonderful little collection of Advent and Christmas poetry edited by L. William Countryman, Run, Shepherds, Run!) A blessed Epiphany to all, and may it change the world!

 

A Silent Promise

Light comes back

as it always does

just before Christmas Day

like finding a treasured keepsake

forgotten in attic recesses

and I start to think about Hoovering up

brittle evergreen needles,

fingering the stubborn ones

out from a wooly carpet’s fibers.

 

Light comes back slowly

tracing an ancient arc

across the winter sky

and I kneel on hardwood

straining to scoop up

a stray ornament

from a dusty corner

just out of reach

with sunlight

dappling my vision.

 

Light comes back

with a promise

silent as the stars –

This simple, tender flesh

covering our hands

wrinkling our knees

layering our faces

shall be seen

revealed as a divine gift

for this world

indeed, an epiphany.

Unspeakable

It’s a word we usually use for the horrific, all the atrocities, the truly abhorrent – “unspeakable.”

I remember very well watching the Merchant Ivory film Maurice many years ago when the young, gay Oxford student (or was it Cambridge?) was sitting in his Greek tutorial. As the students sat there dutifully translating Plato, the tutor suddenly interrupted one of them and said, “omit reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” (We all know what that was!)

I was an out and, I thought, proud gay man when I watched that film. But that scene made a lasting impression. What I do (or want to do) is “unspeakable,” really? I can think of lots of other things that qualify for that description – suicide bombers, genital mutilation, genocide, starving children – but two people of the same sex loving each other is not among them.

There’s one more thing I would add to the list of the truly unspeakable, and Christians will celebrate it this weekend: the Incarnation of God’s Word.

Both Christian theology and Christian worship tend to be rather wordy. So much so that it’s easy to forget that those “shepherds abiding in their fields by night” did not rush to Bethlehem to find a doctrine. Or that those three eastern sages didn’t follow a star from their distant homeland in search of a book or an institution. The angels who startled those shepherds and the star that guided those sages announced instead the birth of a flesh-and-blood human being.

John’s gospel declares that God’s Word made all that is. But when that Word wanted to get our attention, it chose human flesh to do it. When God “speaks,” the speech is flesh; wonderfully, beautifully, irreducibly unspeakable.

To be clear, I love words. I love speaking and I love writing. But there are some moments, some things, some occasions that simply defy speech. They are quite literally “unspeakable” – not because they are horrific, but because they transcend entirely our verbal skills. I mean: the gentle touch of a lover; the soft embrace of an elderly parent; the poignant weight of a dog’s head resting on a lap; that twinkle in the eye; children skipping rope; the taste of freshly whipped cream on the tip of a tongue.

To that list I would add this: the incarnate word of God.

I will continue on in my vocation as a theologian by speaking and writing lots of words, but I will try always to say that what matters most cannot be spoken. It can only be lived, encountered, touched, and loved in the flesh. That’s what this weekend is all about.

For some years now I have tried to break out of my prose world at least once a year and try my hand at verse, hoping that perhaps poetic speech might evoke better the remarkably unspeakable moment that Christians try to celebrate at Christmas. Poetic speech is, of course, still speech. But it does carry a bit more potential to transcend the prison of words than prose does.

I believe the Occupy Wall Street Movement does something similar. It’s one thing to write letters to Congress. It’s quite another to pitch a tent and incarnate one’s protest. Perhaps Christians can learn something from that impulse, which is actually quite ancient. When John declared that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, the Greek means more literally, “pitched a tent among us.”

With all of that in mind, I offer here my 2011 attempt to break free of prose, even for a short while, and pay homage to the unspeakable. With this offering come my very best wishes to all for, at long last, peace on earth and good will among all people in this holiday season!

 

(Pre)Occupied

Few have been this preoccupied with tents

since you recklessly pitched one among us.

I would have chosen something more stable,

not quite so porous and vulnerable,

safe, secure, readily significant,

and missed the whisper of evening breezes,

the restless susurration of canvas,

and that one appearing in the shadows,

light flinting off flesh in a fading sun,

fireflies dancing in the night,

rousing my longing

to step into your own

luminous darkness.

I Would Choose to be Gay, with God’s Help

I don’t know whether being gay is a choice; and neither does anyone else. So why does this matter so much in our faith communities and for our social policies? Why in the world should the most important things about us be the things we did not choose?

The answer to those questions is at the heart of our worst moments as human beings. Africans didn’t choose to have darker skin, but Euro-Americans enslaved them anyway. Women didn’t choose to be born as women, but men have ensured their second-class citizenship for centuries. I didn’t choose to be born white and male, yet untold benefits attach to my skin color and gender identity.

What about sexuality? Polling data consistently show that most Americans would support full civil rights for lesbian and gay people if sexual orientation is not a choice. That’s probably why Newt Gingrich recently insisted, in characteristically bizarre fashion, that being gay is a choice, just like choosing celibacy to be a Roman Catholic priest. (Read about that here.)

What, exactly, is Newt’s point here? If his point is that we should deny civil rights to people who choose certain ways of life, is he suggesting that we should deny civil rights to Roman Catholic priests? That is, of course, ludicrous. So why is it not equally ludicrous for lesbian and gay people?

Poor Newt isn’t the only one confused about this. Evangelical Christians have been shifting their rhetoric on sexuality over the last few years. Many of them now admit the possibility that being gay or lesbian is not a choice but rather something like a congenital birth defect. (Here’s just one example.) We shouldn’t condemn those born with a heart murmur, or Down’s syndrome, or autism, or (alas) a sexual orientation to people of their same sex. Oh, those poor people; they deserve our pity and compassion.

But I don’t want anyone’s pity for being a gay man. There’s nothing pitiable about being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. To the contrary, I think being gay is really quite fabulous – everyone should try it!

I may have born this way (nod to Lady Gaga) or I may have made choices along my life’s path that made me this way. But it really doesn’t matter. Given the choice, I would choose to be gay all over again, and always with God’s help.

So what does God have to do with this and why am I writing about this now, in this holiday season? Newt’s latest comments may have spurred me on, but this topic is actually perfect for Christmas, and here’s why.

Christmas is the celebration of God choosing to embrace humanity by becoming one of us. Now, this is at least peculiar if not downright queer. Why in the world would God choose to do something so outrageous?

The answer is deceptively simple and profoundly life-changing: God loves us. More than that, God desires us. God is rather crazy about us. God can’t get enough of us and everything else God made. God is totally into what God created. God is so into it that God decided that becoming one with us would be a great idea. Divine desire compelled God to do the unimaginable: become human.

So I want to thank Newt Gingrich for clarifying that Christmas is all about choice. It’s about God’s choice to live in solidarity with us. It’s about our choices to live as authentically as we can in light of God’s love and deep desire for us. It’s about the amazing choices that God and humans make to join earth to heaven in a vision of thriving and flourishing life for all on this planet.

Yes, Newt, choice matters. You might think about why it does when you go to midnight mass on December 24th. Because of God’s truly peculiar choice, we see God’s glory in the flesh, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

Got Hope?

Will the world end if the Euro zone collapses? Will it end with rising sea levels and global droughts? Has your world already ended with prolonged unemployment or a foreclosed mortgage? Where do you find hope in a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams?

These are perfect questions for tomorrow, the first Sunday of Advent.

Advent marks the beginning of a new Christian liturgical year. On the first Sunday of this season (“New Year’s Day”) most lectionaries recommend, oddly enough, apocalyptic biblical texts for worship. So the New Year begins not at the beginning but at the End, with the second coming of Christ (not the first) and the end of the world as we know it (cue music from R.E.M.).

So stop shopping (for now), stop stressing over Christmas decorations and ponder the theme for tomorrow that sets the tone for the entire liturgical year to come: hope. What do you hope for? How does your hope shape the way you live? Does it make a difference? Where do you find what you need to replenish your hope?

Let’s be more specific: Should anyone place any hope in the U.S. political system these days? In our financial markets? Do you have any hope of being able to retire? Of having social security checks? Feeding your family? How about the Occupy Wall Street movement? Is that hopeful to you?

Questions like that make it seem far less peculiar to begin a new year with the End. I believe there’s a profound connection to tease out between how Christians navigate the liturgical year and how we think about the world around us. Advent brings this vividly to light.

Tomorrow, the Church will launch again into the great cycle of observances that take us from incarnation to epiphany and on into passion, death, resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit. That cycle takes roughly six months. And tomorrow sets the tone for the whole thing: What, finally, do we hope for from all this?

Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, once described that great cycle like this: “The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us.”

Reading aloud that one sentence in every Christian congregation each Sunday morning for a year (to ensure that every member hears it) would transform the Church more fully into the world-changing community it’s called to be. Why? Because I think most people consider themselves, at best, “tolerable,” maybe loveable (if God is the one loving), but very rarely desirable.

Williams appears to have realized this too and insisted that God’s desire for us means, quite simply and profoundly, that the Church’s job is to ensure that people see themselves as desirable and “occasions for joy.”

If the Church really did that, it would change the world. How could we ever let “desirable occasions for joy” go hungry and homeless in our streets, or turn them away at national borders, or deny them health care? How the Church worships can and should shape how the Church lives in the world.

But what about all that apocalyptic, world-ending stuff that bubbles up in Advent? Actually, all sorts of “worlds” come to an end quite regularly – personal worlds and relationships, the worlds of social institutions (banks!?), economic empires, a computer’s operating software. “Worlds” as we know them are never permanent. It’s really not so surprising that they end.

What is surprising is how people manage to live with hope in those world-ending moments. For me, I can’t do that alone. I need a community and I need regular reminders about where true hope can be found. That’s what Advent is all about.

I find it helpful to remember that the word “apocalypse” (which we usually translate as “revelation”) has its origins in a rather ordinary Greek word that referred to a cover, like the lid on a jar. Put a prefix on the front and a verb ending on the back and you get apocalypto, which ancient Greeks probably used every time they opened something. It just means “to take the lid off.”

I believe revelations happen all the time. I believe the Apocalypse unfolds constantly. I believe the advent of Christ is ongoing, not isolated to a moment 2,000 years ago, nor to a far-distant future we cannot see. Everything about life, our relationships, our struggles, our dreams, and fears can “take the lid off” God in our midst. That’s when hope happens, and it changes us so that we can change the world.

May all of us find ourselves desirable this Advent season and treat one another as occasions for joy.

All the Saints or Just the 1%?

I love All Saints’ Day. I wonder if all the saints do, too.

I imagine many “official” saints of the Church as a bit cranky about their saintly ecclesial status. Many of them were critics, and sometimes severely so, of religious authority (what we might call today the “loyal opposition”). Others railed against poverty or injustice or put both their reputations and their lives on the line for the unwanted and throw-aways of their day – often to the chagrin of their own religious leaders.

Achieving “sainthood” was certainly not why any of them did what they did. And that makes me wonder whether the process of canonization more often resembles domestication. By calling someone a saint, whether religiously (the apostle Paul or Francis of Assisi) or culturally (9/11 heroes, war veterans), a community can regulate how that saintly story is told. The story can be tidied up, scrubbed clean of the troubling bits, or “spun” to advance all sorts of institutional goals, and all for the sake of, well, sanctity.

But “sanctity” according to whom?

Sanctity is related to words like “sacred,” “holy,” and “hallowed” (Halloween!) and more generally to the idea of being “set apart” from the ordinary, the routine, and the expected. Or more simply, holy things are peculiar. Holy things and peculiar people are set aside for sacred purposes. But what counts as “sacred”?

Saint Paul argued vigorously for the inclusion of Gentiles in the early Christian Church, people who were certainly not “holy” by the religious standards of his day (see Acts 15). Saint Francis of Assisi loved animals, but he also loved the poor and all those considered “lepers” – those who were certainly not “holy” by the religious standards of his day.

Saints seem to push on the boundaries between the sacred and the secular, challenging their communities to see God’s amazing grace stretching well beyond where anyone thought it could go.

I love All Saints’ Day for all the peculiar stories of heroic courage and selfless love and even miraculous powers that fill Christian history. And I love All Saints’ Day for the stories of those who realized that doubt is an important part of faith, and those who didn’t always know precisely the right thing to do but but who acted boldly with hope nonetheless, and those who weren’t afraid to love extravagantly, even at the risk of scandal.

Faith, hope, and love – these aren’t the marks of just a few special people. These belong to the whole people of God, to all of us, to all the saints. And the greatest of these, Paul wrote, is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).

And I love All Saints’ Day for one of the biblical texts assigned for worship on this day, which comes from the Revelation to John. Yes, that biblical book can be troubling in some respects, but for me, this wonderfully peculiar passage makes up for all the rest:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ (Rev. 7:9-10).

Saints are not just the religious 1%, nor are they the vast 99%. In the end, saints are all the familiar ones we know, the ones we’ve never heard of, and you and me – a vast multitude no one can count, who boast not in their own faith, or hope, or even love but declare only the amazing grace of God.

Claim that sainthood for yourself on this wonderfully peculiar day.

Behold, the Lamb of God

Troy Davis may have been innocent, but that’s not what makes his execution this past Wednesday night morally outrageous. Capital punishment itself is a disgrace in any society that thinks of itself as “civilized,” and even more so for a society that claims Christianity as a dominant influence.

I won’t rehearse here the well-worn arguments as to why capital punishment qualifies as: a) morally suspect if not ethically abhorrent; and b) an ineffectual deterrent to crime. (If you’re unconvinced about either point, I recommend spending some time here.)

Rather than only moral and practical problems, capital punishment should raise profound theological questions for Christians. Those questions begin by remembering that Jesus was unjustly accused of capital crimes and executed by the Roman Empire.

Many Christians, however, tend to skip over that socio-political reality and reflect instead on the doctrine of atonement, or why Jesus “had” to die as the “Lamb of God” for the sins of the world.

Many self-identified liberal or progressive Christians reject entirely that kind of doctrinal overlay on the crucifixion of Jesus. But we might still find some peculiar bits in that doctrinal history worth considering today (and that history is quite diverse) and how it might still speak effectively to our situation today – including the appalling practice of capital punishment in the United States.

Here I’ll mention just two among the many points to ponder for a peculiar faith today:

The first point to ponder is this: why are human beings so blood thirsty?

One response to that question, and a profound one, has emerged from the work of Rene Girard, a 20th century French historian and philosopher. And that work has prompted a great deal of insightful theological reflection on the role of violent scapegoating in the formation of any human community. James Alison’s theological work is the best example of this (and it’s rather complex, so go pour yourself some coffee, sit in a comfy chair, and read more about that here).

The shorthand (and thus inadequate) version of Girard/Alison is just this: human societies pour out their inherent violence on representative figures – the “scapegoat” – who bear the brunt of what would otherwise be uncontainable social chaos. Without scapegoats, there would be no “society” at all.

The Paschal Mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus (the divine scapegoat) thus offers the possibility of finding a way out of this endless cycle of violence. How that is so requires much more space than a blog to describe. But even naming that possibility, it seems to me, can shed some much needed light on the mechanism of scapegoating in the practice of capital punishment.

And the second point to ponder is this: why are human beings so blood thirsty?

Yes, that’s the same point as the first one. But it admits more than one response. Another response comes from an intriguing theologian, Robert Neville, who teaches at Boston University; I am also privileged to count him among my friends.

Bob’s theological work is amazingly broad and deep at the same time, yet I keep rereading one of his many books, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement. In that book, Bob devotes a chapter to the symbol of Jesus as the “lamb of God,” and more particularly as the lamb who was slain.

I can’t possibly describe fairly Bob’s profound insights here (any more than I could Girard’s or Alison’s above), but I will offer this: We will never appreciate the symbol of Jesus as the “lamb of God” until we acknowledge our collective “blood guilt.”

As Bob acknowledges, modern western people recoil at the idea of “collective” anything let alone something that sounds as barbaric as “blood guilt.” Yet Bob persuaded me. Consider just two among a host of examples.

First, if you have ever taken a train across the U.S., you did so thanks to the indentured servitude and some deaths of Chinese immigrant laborers, who built the railroad.

Second, if you are in any way benefiting from contemporary American industry, technology, and agriculture, you are indebted to the institution of African slavery on the American continent.

No further examples are necessary – if you’re reading this blog, you are drenched in blood-guilt. How can you bear it? What will erase it, if anything? Can you even stand to think about it? Most of us can’t, so we don’t. But the guilt persists.

Bob then suggests ways that the symbol of Jesus as the slain Lamb of God might address our collective blood-guilt, which I can’t summarize adequately here (I’m working on a way to do that!).

All of this matters as for the peculiar faith Christians claim to adopt and especially when we consider and (I hope) mourn the execution of Troy Davis. He is just one among far too many scapegoats in contemporary US society. Troy Davis is just one among far too many instances of our collective blood-guilt as human beings. Questions of innocence, guilt, evidence, and due process are actually irrelevant. What matters is why any society would collectively kill someone.

Christian people should not do so. Period.

So, why are human beings so blood thirsty? The sad answer is this: We are human. The good news in response is this: the symbol of Jesus as the Lamb of God who was slain might yet transform violent human culture into a culture of life. If so, then Christians might actually find a compelling if not a peculiar way to talk about salvation and redemption.

For the sake of all those still on death row in this country, may it be so.