white supremacy – Peculiar Faith

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

A remarkable array of momentous conversations, epic arguments, and tender lovemaking happens around the dinner table—all those “kitchen table conversations,” as politicians like to call them, that bring families together in good times and crises alike.

The Table sits at the heart of biblical accounts of the Gospel and at the very center of Christian worship for all the obvious reasons that come quickly to mind, and also the subtle ones that shape all those moments of shared meals: food, in short, is necessary for life.

The story many of us heard yesterday from Luke, the story of encountering the risen Jesus as a stranger (24:13-35), comes with the added benefit of sounding terribly queer—I don’t mean it’s an LGBT-related story (necessarily), but that it scrambles expectations and refuses tidy conclusions (the risen Jesus, after all, vanishes from the dinner table before anyone can even gasp and he refuses to be contained). I used it for the preface of my book Peculiar Faith (from which the name of this blog site is derived) and it never fails to both console and unsettle me.

Reading and reflecting on that story again this year, I was suddenly reminded of the iconic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Few probably imagine Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy as a Gospel-story tableau—least of all those actors themselves—but doing so brims with critical insights. Race, gender, and sexuality all appear so clearly intertwined by pushing Luke’s story into that film, and in ways that lend some much-needed cultural flesh, as it were, to an Easter hope.

Recalling the film’s plotline, Tracy and Hepburn are hosting a dinner party at the request of their daughter, who wants them to meet her fiancé. How lovely! But prior to that party they didn’t know that their daughter’s fiancé was Black. Their daughter also invited her fiancé’s parents—her future in-laws—to the same dinner party, and they didn’t know that she was white!

The movie portrays both families as socially liberal, generally speaking, and mostly supportive of tolerance and equality in that mid-twentieth-century middle class way. But then they must confront their own stubborn and deeply rooted biases when those social issues are suddenly part of their own family.

It’s remarkable, actually, that this film was even made at that time. It was released in the same year as the landmark Supreme Court ruling “Loving vs. Virginia,” a unanimous decision that overturned bans against “interracial marriage.” That was not terribly long ago—in 1967 I was six years old!—and prior to that ruling, it was illegal in sixteen states for a white person to marry a black person; you could go to prison for doing that.

These state statues were generally clustered together as “anti-miscegenation” laws (an arcane way to register one’s disgust at “mixing” otherwise pure races) and it’s important to note that these laws were not evenly enforced. It was considered much more scandalous for a Black man to marry a white woman than the other way around.

Why would that be? Back then (still today?), it was widely assumed that a husband exercises final authority over his wife, and it was culturally repugnant to suppose that a Black person could ever have that kind of authority over a white person.

These racially-gendered dynamics also help to explain why so many Black churches have been reluctant over the last few decades to embrace marriage equality for gay couples. That seems odd at first until one recalls the long history of using marriage as a tool for white supremacy, stretching all the way back to institutional slavery and into Jim Crow segregation.

Given that history, anything that even carries a hint of destabilizing the Black family is treated with suspicion by Black churches—and quite rightly so, and with that hint comes the poignant reminder of how inextricably interconnected race, gender, and sexuality are, and always have been.

When I first started delving into these forms of social analysis, I confess: I was impatient with them. It just seemed terribly convoluted, even unnecessarily complex—until I returned once again to the tools for biblical interpretation. Modern social dynamics are not any more complicated than the established rules for proper meal sharing in first-century Mediterranean societies, and indeed, those ancient patterns easily rival today’s expectations for dinner party etiquette in “polite society.”

It matters, in other words, when Christians gather to hear the wonderful story from Luke about the journey to Emmaus to recall that table fellowship was one of the ways to monitor and maintain social order in that first-century world—and Jesus was constantly disrupting that very order.

In that world, who is “allowed” to share food and fellowship at the same table was determined through a tightly orchestrated flowchart of cultural categories filtered through religious regulations and purity codes. Those determinations were rooted in biological family, of course, but much more: social and economic status, and also ethnicity and proper religious observance.

Traces of those many rules and regulations show up in the constant scandal Jesus caused by eating with prostitutes and tax collectors—and also the invitations he accepted from Pharisees and Sadducees—and also in the parables he told about wedding banquets and dinner parties, which included the anxiety about wearing the proper outfit and not messing up the seating arrangement at the head table!

So, guess who’s coming to dinner!

Someone who shows us a more excellent way of being human with each other, and of building thriving communities devoted to justice, and perhaps at the root all of that, of finding oneself loved fully, exactly as we are—no caveats, no conditions, no green card required, no proof of insurance necessary, no credit check, no references needed, no passport, no driver’s license, not even a baptismal certificate! you are embraced at the Table just as you are.

Guess who’s coming to dinner!

It’s a stranger, someone we don’t recognize, someone outside the standard social conventions and the rules of proper behavior; someone to break us free from whatever holds us back from abundant life—including our own resentments and insecurities.

The key to Luke’s story is hospitality—those disciples on the road to Emmaus decided to extend hospitality to a stranger, to invite him to dinner, urging him to spend the night with them at the inn. Hospitality breaks through the boundaries set by social norms, and that’s exactly when they recognize the risen Jesus: when he is at table and breaks bread with them.

While I often find myself distracted by the many tasks associated with genuine and effective hospitality, I need to remember always that hospitality in essence is a posture of love. Hospitality sometimes springs from love; sometimes hospitality creates new forms of love that weren’t there before; and sometimes hospitality renews a love that had grown old.

The God of love—the God who is love—welcomes each and all of us fully to the Table, so that we can in turn welcome others, without condition, in love and for love.

This is Peter’s point in the portion of his first letter assigned by the lectionary yesterday (1:17-23). Now that you have embraced the truth, he writes, the truth of God raising Jesus from the dead, be sure to live like it. You have been born again, so live like you mean it, he says, and practice mutual love—love each other, especially when it’s hard—love, love, love each other.

And lest that Petrine text sound dusty, Spencer Tracy’s character is basically channeling St. Peter in the final and impassioned monologue Tracy delivers at the end of that 1967 film.

As he reflects on having welcomed strangers into his home for dinner, the enduring love for his dear wife becomes even more vibrant (Hepburn has tears welling in her eyes), and the love for his precious daughter illumines everything, and he then declares that love is indeed stronger than any social bias.

Luke would heartily agree: Love put those disciples together on that road; and then love opened their hearts to hear the words of a stranger; and then love moved them to extend hospitality to that stranger, whose presence at the Table reveals once more that love itself is even stronger than death.

Luke’s story—and every queerly disorienting Gospel story about the risen Jesus—pushes me always to remember the very heart of Gospel proclamation: there is only love in the heart of God.

Declare and repeat, often; cross-stitch it, frame it, and post it above your computer if need be. It’s the truest thing in the Universe: There is only love in the heart of God; nothing else, absolutely nothing but love, and this love—poured out on the world in Beloved Jesus and the Abiding Spirit—this love inspires forgiveness, reconciliation, and the kind of healing that leads to new life.

And not even death can stop it.

Standing at the Crossroads of Healing

Today, Ash Wednesday, Christians begin the annual Lenten journey toward the Cross. While always important to note, this year it seems especially vital and indispensable to say as clearly as possible that this journey does not glorify pain and suffering, nor does it imagine violence as saving.

To say the same thing but differently: crucifixion was a first-century tool of state-sponsored terror—it is quintessentially that from which we must be saved. The image of Jesus on that cross is the image of God in solidarity with us, all of us, on a path toward new life.

I stumbled upon yet one more way to say the same thing in a compelling blog post by Jon Paul Sydnor: crucifixion was a crime, and we must stop seeing this act of performative cruelty as salvific. For Sydnor, “The crucifixion is the wound; the resurrection is the balm.”

Those insights have a long way still to go before they sink fully into my bones and muscles. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian tradition that told me (in both overt and subtle ways) that I’m tainted, depraved, and mostly if not wholly bad—being a burgeoning gay boy didn’t help. The cross of Christ was our only hope at appeasing the wrath of the God who made us. (Don’t try to make sense of that sentence; it doesn’t make any sense at all.)

The struggle to embrace the “way of the cross” as none other than the “way of life and peace” (as the Book of Common Prayer would have us do in the Collect for Monday in Holy Week) is not particularly helped by the Sunday lectionary, which will give us a set of texts this week that can feel like a relapse into a religious addiction: the putative “fall” of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and St. Paul’s apparent framing of that story as the origins of “original sin” (Romans 5:12-19).

For these reasons and more, I’m so grateful for the “Crossroads of Healing” initiative here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, our shared effort to host gatherings and events at the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This initiative emerged from our commitment to name and address the wounds of race, gender, class, and sexuality in an ecological frame, and especially for the sake of healing toward thriving.

I’m particularly grateful for this initiative as we begin Lent and reflect on the multi-layered imagery of the Cross. Or, as we might note, Christian communities have especially appreciated the image of a cross at intersectional moments. Rather than just one meaning, the cross of Christ carries many modes of interpretation, including the reassuring hope of divine healing for the wounds of separation, isolation, and the violence of oppression.

This initiative has heightened my own awareness of how Christian faith and culture create various intersections as race and gender (especially in this patriarchal society of white supremacy, which describes the United States from its very founding) intertwine with the Cross, and all for the sake of interlaced liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

But really, what does all of that mean for the first Sunday in Lent and those trigger texts from the lectionary?

We spend nearly as much time on visual art in my parish as we do with Scripture and the Prayer Book. All three have been woven together in ways that prove remarkably insightful and life-giving. Preparing for this year’s Lenten journey, for example, I spent some time with the work of Nigerian artist Olamilekan Abatan; his mixed media piece “Adam and Eve” will certainly accompany me this year on the forty-day journey through Lent.

The complexity of Abatan’s painting echoes and magnifies the complexity of the story itself—for some, this painting could introduce complexity into a biblical story that is usually treated in rather simple (and therefore misleading) ways. The first and most obvious thing to notice, and in rather stark contrast to many visual depictions of Adam and Eve in Western art, these figures are Black, and clothed in ways that might suggest they are African. This makes contextual sense given that Abatan is himself Nigerian, but it also makes scientific sense given that our human species originated on the continent of Africa.

There are other layers to notice here. Adam and Eve are poised on the brink of eating the forbidden fruit. Look closely and you will see something unusual in Eve’s lap—a laptop computer made by Apple. It’s a wonderful double entendre evoking the longstanding cultural assumption that the “forbidden fruit” was an apple even though the kind of fruit is not mentioned in the biblical story.

Still more: might Abatan be inviting us to wonder whether modern technology is a kind of “forbidden fruit”? The biblical storyteller refers to that fruit as coming from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in that sense, do today’s technology devices give us too much access to knowledge? Or perhaps deceitful knowledge is the problem. Or maybe the technology itself—just like the fruit in the original story—is the problem because it creates a distraction from relationship as it pulls apart the intimate couple in this story. This echoes an important way to frame that third chapter in Genesis—as a rupture in intimacy, the breaking of relationship, and the dissolving of trust.

More than only these insights into that ancient story, the artist himself and his approach to the work provide intersectional touchstones—crossroads of healing, as it were—for just such a time as this. Abatan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997 and has emerged as a leading figure in what some have called the “hyperrealist” scene in contemporary African art; he blends Western sensibilities with elements of African visual culture, and he also mixes media (wax fabrics, charcoal and pencil, and acrylic paints, for example).

In addition, Abatan frequently places African figures in classical European poses, using the painting techniques of historical masters like Caravaggio, which tend to evoke Western art but with the “African human” moved to the center of the frame rather than the margins or unseen entirely. He sometimes replicates the style of a religious icon, as in the piece he calls “Black Lives Matter.” The pose, the gesture, and the clothes, not to mention the halo, all suggest an icon of Christ; the use of an African figure as well as the title of the piece can make that assessment a bit disorienting, but the Latin words on the open book held by this African man would seem to confirm the guess: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” One’s own cultural context and history make all the difference in how one reads this image—and what it evokes. Is a Black/African Jesus, for example, the “way to life” in a society trapped in the dynamics of white Christian nationalism?

Even this brief synopsis of Abatan’s life and work makes me wonder about my own reading of history, and the kind of engagement with Scripture I tend to favor, and the way I retrieve theological traditions for pastoral and priestly work: what have I consigned to the margins that might rightly belong at the center? Whom have I overlooked entirely in the texts or visual images of my theological education? More pointedly, how much of my Christian faith relies on having omitted key figures or moments or places (whether intentionally or accidentally)?

Questions like these are not about finding fault or assigning blame for anything; to the contrary, they seem more like assembling the pieces of a treasure map—what kind of riches have we never known in our own traditions because of the restricted views we have lived with for so long?

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

That question alone always makes me glad to observe Black History Month (and all the entanglements and intersectional complexities that go with it); every year I learn something new to intertwine with my own perspectives, not only about Black history but also about my own story; and I appreciate something in fresh ways not only about other traditions, but also how communities of faith can interlace these multiple traditions for a truly rich and “mixed media” witness to a better world—surely these are the “crossroads of healing” toward which we might actually be glad to journey in this Lenten season.

Practicing the Politics of Sabbath

Yesterday we launched more fully into “ordinary time”—this long green season after Pentecost designed to order our lives in the Spirit—and we did so with a commandment: “Observe the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Deuteronomy 5:12).

Not exactly a compelling launch, I have to say. And I should also note how easily I just ignore that particular commandment, as if it doesn’t really matter. I am also frequently perplexed by its prominence in biblical stories, including the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use Sabbath observance as an occasion to describe the ministry of Jesus.

In what we heard from the lectionary yesterday (Mark 2:23-3:6), Mark puts the Sabbath right up front in his account of the Gospel, in the second chapter, where the tensions between Jesus and the religious establishment are already running high. Mark’s first chapter includes no fewer than four mentions of Jesus confronting demonic forces.

So there’s a power struggle emerging early on in Mark—not, we should quickly note, between Jesus and Judaism (the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is always lurking around texts like these). No, the struggle is between the full flourishing of human life, on the one hand, and all the various forces hell-bent on destroying human life on the other.

Mark makes that power struggle explicit by framing it with a healing story—a moment when someone is brought back into thriving on the Sabbath. Mark also declares Jesus “Lord of the Sabbath”— the very essence of divine lordship, in other words, is cultivating abundance and healthy vitality.

But again, why use Sabbath observance to make this point?

The passage from Deuteronomy suggests an answer by relating the law directly to the Exodus from Egypt; the God who liberated God’s people from slavery is the God who commands Sabbath rest.

The Israelites, no longer trapped in a system that determines their worth based solely on what they produce, must now learn how to live as free people—a freedom in which they enjoy inherent value, regardless of what they produce.

One commentator makes this point quite nicely: after God’s people are taken out of slavery, Sabbath rest “takes the slavery out of the people.” And not just the Israelites alone, but all the people and even all other animals—old, young, rich, poor, citizen, foreigner, resident alien, stranger and outsider, oxen, donkeys, every herd of livestock, all of them creatures of the same God for whom the Sabbath was made!

Modern Western people certainly do not think of ourselves as “enslaved.” Yet how many of us nonetheless base our value on productivity? Along with the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index, labor productivity is one of the primary factors in judging the health of the U.S. economy.

In today’s economic system—no less than the system of slavery in ancient Egypt—the value of a human life is measured by how much it produces. This system in turn measures the value of Earth based on the material resources we can extract from it.

All of us, and Earth herself, need the Sabbath, and to adopt it as a spiritual discipline with social, economic, and political consequences. Jesus, not merely a teacher of Sabbath discipline but actually “Lord of the Sabbath,” liberates us from any system that would shackle our dignity or denigrate our inherent worth. This matters today, and rather urgently.

In this first week of LGBTQ pride month, I’ve been reflecting on more than forty years of being out as a gay man. Think about what the world was like in the early 1980s; that’s when I came out. Now, more than forty years later, still to this day, whenever I enter a new social situation of any kind, I always assess the risk of being out, and whether it’s worth it. Even where I currently live, supposedly an “LGBT resort town,” it doesn’t always feel safe to be out.

LGBT people need a Sabbath rest from that anxiety, and gay men really need to remember that most of the animosity toward us is actually rooted in misogyny, a deeply embedded cultural distrust and denigration of all things feminine, of women.

Every woman in nearly every part of the world today is very well familiar with this. Every single woman has experienced at least one moment, and likely more, of profound uneasiness and even fear in a public space just for being a woman; more than a few feel unsafe even at home.

Women need a Sabbath rest from that constant monitoring of their surroundings; it’s exhausting.

White gay men then need to remember (which I learned from my Black friends) one of the continuing mechanisms of white supremacy in the modern Western world: feminizing Black men—not only are they not white, they aren’t even manly.

Living not only in an LGBT resort town, but in a region that is 99.9% white, it’s painful to realize that my Black friends would not feel particularly comfortable visiting this lovely shoreline region. To be clear, I’m not actually worried that any of the people I know here would pose a physical threat to people of color. The point, rather, is that we live in a cultural system that trains us, all of us, not to trust those who are different from us.

We all need a Sabbath rest from these racial suspicions and ethnic divisions—they are tearing us apart.

And that’s the politics of the Sabbath we all need to practice. When we do, when we actually try to observe the Sabbath each week, we’re not just trying to follow a rule. We are rehearsing and preparing for the great Sabbath Day still to come.

In Christian traditions this is sometimes called the “Eighth Day,” not the first day of creation, as if we’re starting over with a blank slate, nor only the seventh day of temporary rest, but rather God’s own Sabbath Day, the very purpose for which God made the world to begin with.

That is the Great Day when no one is afraid; that day when everyone feels loved and safe; that day when no one has to be anxious for the future because it is God’s own Sabbath “without end,” as Augustine said many centuries ago.

We start to believe this, and we come to trust in it, and we find that Great Day shaping how we live and reordering our relationships and infusing our civic engagements with prophetic urgency when we practice Sabbath rest on a weekly basis.

That’s why God commanded it. That’s what it means to keep the Sabbath “holy.”

When we do this together, when we help each other practice Sabbath politics, we cultivate our shared hope for that great Eighth Day of Sabbath Joy still to come.

The Courage to Be…Seen

The pain must have been debilitating. She had been living with it for a long time, at least twelve years. Gospel writers referred to her condition as a “hemorrhage”; they are likely describing frequent and uncontrollable menstrual periods, which would have made such a woman ritually unclean, and thus forbidden to appear in public.

Many Christians heard her story in church this past Sunday, from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9-13, 18-26). The story features not only physical but also social pain—a woman who is isolated, without the comfort of friends and family. Both Mark and Luke, who also tell this story, note that she had spent all her money on multiple physicians, and no one had made her any better—so she is perhaps also a poor beggar.

And so this woman, who has run out of options, alone and dejected, reaches out as Jesus passes by, just to touch the fringe of his garments with a bit of ludicrous hope.

Consider what those details mean. She was probably crouched down by the side of the road; she wasn’t supposed to be seen and she certainly should not have approached a group of prominent men—not only Jesus and his disciples but also the leader of the synagogue and his companions.

And so she reaches out—in desperation, yes, but also with courage. Touching Jesus could have led to severe social consequences for her, and still she reaches out.

As many commentators have noted, the good news in this story is not only this woman’s physical healing but also and even more so the restoration of her dignity. Jesus made her visible with respect, brought her into the center of attention, not for shaming but to heal her shame. He does all this not merely tolerating her presence but actually praising her as an exemplar of faith.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, her story is paired with another poignant story—the one about the young girl who has died, the daughter of a religious leader in the community.

By pairing these two stories, these ancient writers show us something about faith. In each of the three versions of this story, Jesus says to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

Given what she has just done, the meaning of faith here is not “certainty” but rather bravery. “Daughter,” Jesus could have said, “your courage has made you well.”

It is a bit strange but no accident that Jesus refers to this woman as “daughter.” Remember, he’s on his way to the home of a religious leader whose daughter has just died—these stories are intentionally intermingled.

Recall how often Jesus is getting into trouble with the religious authorities—“eating with tax collectors and sinners.” Just like this woman who reaches out with courage for healing, so this religious leader, heartbroken over his daughter, breaks ranks with his colleagues and courageously begs Jesus for help.

Paul Tillich, the great mid-twentieth century theologian, urged us to see faith as a form of courage, what he called the “courage to be.” For Tillich, the life of faith is a life in which we accept our own acceptance by God and thus live boldly, defying all the “principalities and powers” that would rob God’s creatures of their dignity and respect. I would add this: faith is also the courage to be seen, especially when we are made invisible by others.

It matters to think about such things during this LGBTQ Pride Month. We should note carefully that the Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBTQ Americans.

We are witnessing today an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation in state houses all over the country; more than 75 such pieces of legislation have been signed into law this year alone, which is more than double the number from last year.

This frightening trend is unfolding right where I live, in my own backyard. A far-right takeover of Ottawa County government by Christian Nationalists is making both queer people and people of color more than a little nervous. And along this otherwise “progressive” shoreline in West Michigan, I just recently overheard a conversation among some business owners in Saugatuck—an LGBT resort town. One of them said to the others, “I’m glad they spend their money here; I just don’t want to see them.”

It is high time that Christian communities ramp up our commitment to deeper solidarity with those who are unseen and kept invisible, whether because of sexuality, or gender, or race, or economics; all of these social categories are intertwined with each other. To see those deep interconnections would in turn help us to read stories from the Bible as not merely about ancient Mediterranean societies but also about us, all of us.

St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century about the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. He invited us to see in the daughter of the religious leader a symbol of the ancient Israelites—who were being reborn and coming to life—while the woman with a hemorrhage stands for Gentiles, all those who are declared “unclean” on the margins of God’s people and who are now welcomed and embraced.

Gospel stories about healing are never just about the person being healed. They are also about the reader, about us. We are the ones who need to live right now with the courage to be in a world that is otherwise risky and frightening.

We are called to live this way not only for ourselves alone but also for all those who cannot imagine such courage for themselves—the gay teens who wonder whether suicide wouldn’t be better than a lonely life; women who live only as the objects of male scorn in a patriarchal society; people of color crushed under the weight of white supremacy.

Quite honestly, modern Western society has been in a “state of emergency” for centuries now unless you just happen to be a white, straight, cis-gender male.

Living courageously—living with faith—offers visible signs of hope to the unseen, coaxing them into a Gospel light.

This, I would venture, is a compelling way to read the story of Abraham’s calling in Genesis, which many Christians also heard this past Sunday morning. “I will bless you,” God says to Abraham, so that you will be a blessing to others (12:2).

Surely this is an enduring rationale for the existence of the Church—to receive God’s blessing for the sake of blessing others. And especially today, to be a place of compassion and safety where the invisible can be seen and loved. The time to do this is now.

Jehovah Jireh! God Will Provide a Different Way to Live

These are strange days, an unsettled time of deep anxiety, and yet also, perhaps, a time of emerging potential for a different way to live on this planet, and with each other, and with so many other creatures of the same God.

I have in mind of course this frightening coronavirus pandemic—which is far from over—and the ongoing ecological crisis that threatens countless species (including our own), and also the renewed urgency to address the longstanding pain and trauma of systemic racism fueled by white supremacy in this country. Still more, we are near the end of Pride Month, and today, June 28^th, is the 51^st anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which many mark as the beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to notice how the biblical texts many Christians heard today from the lectionary might stitch together these various markers of this current moment. I’ll begin with where I want to end, with the wonderful phrase from the story in Genesis: “The Lord will provide.”

Abraham said that, and it’s the name he gave to the mountain where he was preparing to sacrifice Isaac, his only son. At the very last minute, God provides a ram for Abraham to offer instead of his son (Genesis 22:1-14).

sacrifice_isaac_caravaggio_1602 — “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” Caravaggio (1602)

I’ll return to that story, but first do notice some things about the other two texts for today, beginning with the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Frankly, hearing a passage from Paul during Pride month, especially from his Letter to the Romans, is a bit like pouring a diabolical salt in a religious wound. As you may know, the first chapter of this letter has been a source of great pain and anguish for gay and lesbian people; it has often been cited by those who wish to condemn and exclude LGBT people.

I strongly suspect Paul himself would be truly horrified by such a hateful use of his letter; at the very least, using it that way is a bit ironic given that one of Paul’s purposes in writing this letter is to critique the self-righteousness of the gentile Christians in Rome, and an overarching theme of the whole letter is to praise the God who shows us a wildly extravagant grace and divine generosity in Christ.

So I’m wondering if we might take that stress on grace and map it to what we heard from Matthew’s gospel about a hospitable welcome. It’s a deceptively simple little passage, and also a powerful one about mission, which is something Matthew seems to care quite a lot about.

Matthew’s Jesus is sending out his disciples to do the work of ministry and what we just heard is part of the instructions he gave them. Anyone who welcomes you, he says, welcomes me, and those who welcome me, welcome the one who sent me (Matthew 10:40-42)

This posture of welcome—and I can’t help but use this image—this daisy-chain of welcome sounds infectious. I’m sure you’ve experienced something like this when the energy of a welcoming hospitality feels contagious and it spreads in the community—but here it is for life, not death, for breathing not suffocating.

Welcome, hospitality, grace, generosity—these infectious characteristics of a faith community are so important in a society like ours today where so many have experienced religion as hurtful, damaging, and even lethal. Here, in this passage, Matthew frames ministry itself with the hospitable embrace of God, a welcome that is encountered in the unconditional welcome offered by God’s ministers.

This sense of divine grace and generosity offers a much-needed framing for the story about Abraham and Isaac from Genesis. It really is a troubling story. Does God really demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, his only son, the son he loves so much?

No, it turns out, God does not demand it. Set aside all the troubling bits for a moment about God testing Abraham in this story. Please, do not fail to notice that God interrupts that act of sacrifice and provides a ram instead. That’s why Abraham calls the mountain where this happened, “The Lord will provide,” or as I heard that phrase growing up in my Evangelical Christian home, Jehovah jireh!

That’s a rough, Anglicized vocalization of the Hebrew phrase in this story. In Hebrew, what we see translated as “The Lord will provide,” is just two words. The first is what’s known as the Tetragrammaton, or the very name of God revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai; to this day, Jews generally don’t try to pronounce that name—it’s not entirely clear how one would pronounce it, actually, but they don’t try mostly out of a sense of piety, of deep respect for the Name itself. So instead they substitute “The Lord” wherever God’s name appears in the text, which many English translations today also do.

The second word, yireh, actually means “to see.”
God sees.
God will see to it.
The Lord will provide.
Jehovah jireh.

This phrase became much more important to me than I ever imagined it would when I came out as a gay man as a young adult. That same Evangelical tradition made clear that I was faced with a significant choice: either sacrifice my sexuality for my faith, or sacrifice my faith for my sexuality, but I couldn’t have both.

No, that’s not true. Jehovah jireh. God will provide another way.

Remarkably, I believed this as a young adult—and thank God I believed it because many who don’t end up taking their own lives, even to this day.

I believed God would provide another way to live, a life in which I could love Jesus and still be gay. Lo and behold, God’s grace is even more wildly generous as I managed to live a life far richer than even that; I became a better Christian because I’m gay, and that has shaped a wonderful fruitful life of writing, teaching, preaching, and activism.

So whenever religious leaders and faith communities insist on sacrificing their own LGBT children for the sake of doctrinal purity, we can say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever politicians insist that our elders and grandparents must be sacrificed for the sake of the economy—remember calls for exactly that at the beginning of this coronavirus pandemic? Whenever we hear that we can and must say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever multinational corporations insist on sacrificing entire ecosystems to ensure profits shareholder value, we can say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever the institutions rooted in systemic racism insist on sacrificing black and brown bodies we must rise up and say No! Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way for us to live together in peace and with justice.

It turns out that God provides another way by inspiring white people to do our homework and become better allies for our siblings of color; and by inspiring economists to come up with different models for sustaining our common life; and by inspiring whole communities to rally around their most vulnerable members to protect them from viral infection; and by inspiring straight, cisgender people to march with us queer folk in pride parades, and accompany us to wedding banquets, and to honor whatever gender anyone wishes to manifest in the world.

Jehovah jireh—God provides all these other ways to live, and more, for the sake of thriving, flourishing life, and not just for some but for all.

The world is hungry for that reassurance, for that good news, for even just the possibility that religious traditions are up to the challenge of this present moment. Indeed, people are desperate to learn how to tap into the deep wells of faith, hope, and love.

Let us encourage each other as people of faith with those words of an ancient faith: we may not know what the future holds, and indeed, we have no idea what the future will bring. But somehow, someway, God will provide.

welcome_rainbow_church

The Lamb of God in the Beloved Community

“Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

Many of us heard that familiar declaration in church yesterday; John the Baptist said it about Jesus, not once but twice in the appointed Gospel passage (John 1:29-42). Some Christians hear it every Sunday at the Eucharistic table.

It’s worth noting that John did not say, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away your individual mistakes.” I don’t mean to discount our individual lives. I do mean to consider what this claim about Jesus might suggest about a concept of sin that was much more common in ancient Mediterranean societies than in our own day.

I’m referring to what modern Western people often have great difficulty in grasping—the notion of social, communal, or shared sinfulness. When John refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he does not mean just the sum total of our mistakes as individuals; he likely had in mind the sinfulness of the world.

This actually does matter for us as individuals, but for reasons that grate against the individualism of the modern West. The near-constant refrain about individual accountability in the contemporary Western world is usually made without any reference to the social systems that shape our individual choices, decisions, and actions.

All of us are deeply entangled in economic, cultural, and institutional structures that form us and train us to live and think in certain ways. These constitute our “world” of behaviors and interactions, and we can be grateful for how such a world instills patterns of civility, kindness, even “good manners” (remember those?).

That same “world” of social conditioning, however, often favors some at the expense of others. Those who benefit from these institutional structures rarely had any hand in creating them even while they reap a reward from them; these structures and patterns of relating actually predate all of us, like “original sin.” This is what social theorists try to notice concerning patriarchy, or heterosexism, or white supremacy.

What kind of “world,” then do we inhabit here in the United States? The poet Mary Oliver responded to that question by imagining what future generations might say about us, and wrote this (from her 2008 collection, Red Bird):

We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people) for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say…that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Martin Luther King, Jr., did not believe such things about American society in his own day—that its heart was small, and hard, and full of meanness. The fact that he did not believe it back then—in those days of whites-only lunch counters and police dogs and bombs that blew up little girls in Sunday school—that King did not apparently believe such a society was small of heart and mean actually takes my breath away.

Some would say he was simply foolish and naive; indeed, Malcolm X said as much about him. But Martin Luther King, Jr., was not foolish, or naïve, and he wasn’t optimistic about this society, either; but he was hopeful, which is often an occupational hazard among ministers of the Gospel.

A “hazard,” because hope does not always feel very comfortable, and it can make us say things and do things that can look quite silly or foolhardy to others.

Hope can make us insist, as King said, that all of us, both black and white, are “bound together in a single garment of destiny.”

Hope can inspire us to imagine, not the defeat of our enemies, but their conversion through love.

For King, the whole universe of God’s creation is moving toward a single goal, what he called the “Beloved Community.” King drew inspiration for that image, in part, from American philosopher Josiah Royce, who argued that “Church” is not optional but is actually an essential component of Christian faith. Why? Precisely because the problem Christianity tries to address is not how individuals get to Heaven, but whether genuine healing is possible for our deeply fragmented lives. Heaven certainly mattered for Royce, but we get there with others or not at all—which is exactly why the Apostle Paul turned so often to the image of the Body of Christ with its many diverse members.

This brings to mind King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which was addressed directly and exactly to people like me—white, liberal ministers. I find myself inspired and moved when I listen to King wax eloquent on the Washington Mall about his “dream,” but I squirm when I read his letter from jail.

king_abernathy_shuttlesworth — After defying an injunction against protesting, King, with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy (center) and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (left) were arrested and put in solitary confinement in a county jail in Birmingham, AL, on Good Friday 1963.

Those white, liberal ministers to whom King wrote were the ones who appreciated King’s work but wanted him to slow down, the ones who sympathized with “the race problem” but worried about what the solution would cost, the ones who condemned individual acts of racism but failed to understand how institutional systems made racism itself all but inevitable.

King had been exploring those themes for some time. In a speech that he delivered the year prior to writing that Birmingham letter, King outlined the “ethical demands of integration,” by which he meant much more than “desegregation.” King certainly applauded desegregating schools and places of business, but this was hardly sufficient for a path toward the “Beloved Community.” It is certainly useful that the process of desegregation can be legislated and regulated, but this just outsources justice to institutions whose hearts have not changed.

What’s needed instead, he argued, is integration—a social movement of the heart that leads toward the always unimaginable intimacy with people who are not just different from us but also those who have opposed our own thriving, even with violence.

“Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

The Lamb who not only forgives sin, not only atones for sin, but takes it away.

Would we recognize the world without its sins? Would we even find such a world desirable? Do we prefer a world with its familiar sins to how strange and disorienting the world would be without them?

To whom does the “we” refer in those questions? At the very least, it refers to well-meaning white liberals, like me. In that same gospel passage from yesterday, people like me heard a hint of what following Jesus entails—nothing less than an identity remade in a world transformed.

The hint came from what Jesus did when he first met Simon, Andrew’s brother. Jesus gave him a new name: Peter.

mlk_beloved_community

Hearing a Dog, Seeing a Human: Crossing a Border with Jesus

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped…”

I kept returning to those words from Isaiah (35:6) as I prepared to preach on a set of challenging biblical texts this week.

Reflecting on that prophetic promise, it occurred to me that there are some things we actually do not want to hear very clearly or that we wish he had never seen at all.

It has been troubling, to say the least, to hear overt forms of racism in this country the last eighteen months, both on our city streets and at the highest levels of government. Even more distressing in some respects is to see with greater clarity how those eruptions of ire tap into a long tradition of racial bias, a corrosive thread running throughout American history.

white_nationalist_charlottesville — White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, 2017

A hair-raising account of this appeared just recently in the New York Times. There I learned about Charles Henry Pearson, an Australian academic of the late nineteenth century, who warned that white men would soon be thrust aside by black and yellow races. He urged a concerted effort to defend particular parts of the world against such encroachments so that the “higher races” can live and increase freely, for the sake of their “higher civilization.”

I was dismayed to learn that Theodore Roosevelt was rather fond of Pearson’s work, and was actually in communication with Pearson, assuring him of the “great effect” Pearson’s defense of the white race was having on “all our men here in Washington.”

Dismayed and then disgusted by the reminder of Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to preserve “white civilization and its domination of the planet,” a posture that led W. E. B. DuBois, in those early decades of the twentieth century, to describe the emergence of what he called “the new religion of whiteness.”

I read that piece from the Times while thinking about the passage many Christians heard this week from the letter of James (2:1-17). Quite frankly, I’ve been never been a fan of that biblical letter, and I often agree with Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer who apparently wanted to rip James out of the Bible entirely. But I read James differently this past week, perhaps like I’ve never read him before.

As you may know, those who have trouble with the Letter of James usually complain about not finding any grace in it. That was Luther’s objection, or what’s called “works righteousness,” the idea that we can earn our salvation through good works. But I don’t think James had anything like that in mind.

To the contrary, James is not the one denying divine grace in this letter; it’s those he writes about, the ones who treat the rich and powerful as if they are better than the poor and weak—they are the ones who deny grace. Those who play favorites, make distinctions, show partiality—they are the ones who fail to live their faith. Your faith might as well be dead, James writes, if you don’t treat everyone as equally graced by God, equally loved.

James pushed me this week to ponder favoritism itself, its corrosive, even violent effects, and how it manifests in the notion of “higher races.”

Why do human beings do this? Not all of us make such gross distinctions, of course, at least not publicly, but many do and it would seem many more are increasingly willing to do so openly. But why? Why classify and categorize and make such harmful distinctions?

At least one among many possible reasons occurs to me: we don’t really believe in grace.

Deep down many are convinced—because most of us were taught—that love and affection, even dignity and self-worth must be earned, and earned, and earned yet again.

For some, the fear of not measuring up can make the idea of a superior race seem quite attractive indeed—especially if you yourself could belong to that superior race, just by being born.

I am not proposing a singular origin for racism, nor a simple cause-and-effect mechanism for the complexities of white supremacy. I am, however, urging Christians to consider these cultural dynamics in the context of our faith. Just as James, I believe, would urge us to do.

In a world that is constantly forming us in the fear of unworthiness, shaping us with the anxiety over inferiority, dividing us—often violently—between the chosen and the damned, we need continually to be re-formed by love, nourished by a feast of divine grace.

Perhaps Mark’s Jesus can help (Mk 7:24-37). I mean, the Jesus who called a foreign woman a “dog.”

Let me quickly note that I, personally, do not consider it an insult to be compared with a canine. Given the types of human behavior we see displayed daily in the news, I would be quite happy to be thought of as dog-like.

That said, the current occupant of the White House has made clear on Twitter that “dog” is definitely not a compliment, especially when applied to women of color. The same could and should be noted about this nameless Syrophoenician woman in Mark who begs Jesus to heal her likewise nameless daughter, a woman who is compared to a dog begging for scraps of food.

Note the details with which Mark describes this scene. It takes place in the region near Tyre, a city well north of Jerusalem, farther north than the Galilee, definitely not a purely Jewish city, but one with deep Hellenistic influences. “Phoenician” names that region more particularly, and the “Syro-” marks the even larger region of Syria.

Mark is evoking a long history of land being carved up by various empires and kings, a history marked with border disputes, conquest, animosity, and violence.

syrophoenician_woman And then—as if this were not obvious—Mark notes that this Syrophoenician woman was a “Gentile,” or a better translation might be simply “Greek.” Not Jewish, in other words.

Sounds to me like a postmodern hybridized identity forged in the crucible of an occupying imperial force residing on contested borders with all sorts of socio-political intrigue and religious anxiety. This ancient text could have been ripped from the pages of the New York Times!

Even more so if we add a bit of economic class to this mix. Typical portrayals of this woman resemble a peasant, or someone at least lower in socio-economic status than Jesus. One biblical commentator, however, has argued against that usual grain of interpretation, suggesting instead that this unnamed woman could have been of significant means.

The combination of the proximity to Tyre and her Syrophoenician ancestry recalls the story of Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah in the first book of Kings. There we read about Jezebel, a Phoenician princess condemned to be eaten by dogs—which puts a rather unsavory spin on those scraps falling from the master’s table.

In short, Jesus and this woman occupied vastly different spheres, worlds apart, and this difference was laden with value. Mark makes this clear by tossing in that reference to dogs—the difference between Jesus and this woman is as vast as that between species.

We can recognize these dynamics quite easily by looking to the U.S. border with Mexico, where children of asylum seekers are housed in cages.

Perhaps the point is made best by noting that this woman doesn’t even have a name; she’s a geopolitical marker, an ethnic designation, a gendered manifestation of religious rivalry.

Borders convert human beings into categories—silenced and invisible.

Even Jesus needed some time to hear this woman clearly, to hear and see the human behind the border.

But he did hear her, eventually, and her daughter was healed.

It’s not just accidental, a bit of random chronology that leads Mark to place another story of healing right after this story of a nameless, foreign woman. Whatever divides us, fragments us, keeps us from hearing the grace of God—all of this wounds us, individually and collectively. And we, just like the man Jesus encountered, need healing.

Blinded by ancient prejudice, unable to hear beyond the walls of hatred, the voices of oppression muted by socio-political forces hell-bent on dividing us—we need to hear again, and then again, and still more the good news of the Gospel: God’s grace extends to all, no birth certificate or passport or green card or bank account or pedigree required.

Christian worship matters in a world carved up with borders, a world of nameless humans seeking to be heard and seen, a world where dogs become ciphers for human disdain and derogatory rhetoric.

friendship_park_communion1 — Eucharist at the California border with Mexico.

Christian worship matters in such a world when we gather around the Eucharistic table, and for a deceptively simple reason:

When we eat well, we see and hear better.

When we gather at the Table of divine grace, we see ourselves and each other better.

When we feast on grace and love, we see ourselves and each other better, though this can be difficult, especially when we hear the voices of our own racial bias and see our own complicity with forms of discrimination.

And that’s exactly the point of grace and love—to notice all those hateful borders that divide us, and then work together to tear them down.

And that’s the work, James would say, that makes our faith lively.

Officer Krupke and Our Social Disease

I watched the film version of West Side Story for the first time on television in my early teens. I loved everything about it and I also encountered something new that puzzled me.

In a scene roughly half way through, members of the Jets street gang sing a parody of their experience in the juvenile justice system. Action sings about being arrested, going to court, being sent to a psychiatrist, and then to a social worker.

“Hey,” he declares, in response to the social worker’s diagnosis, “I got a social disease!”

I had no idea what that meant and it scared me. Was it contagious? What are the symptoms? Would I be arrested by officer Krupke? I thought the police were my friends!

I now know more: All of us in the U.S. live, and move, and have our being in a society of hostility and violence. From militarized police to “total destruction” presidential rhetoric, from hate-speech rallies to brutalized transgender people just trying to pee and a circulated memo at a major technology company about the inferiority of women, we – all of us – have a debilitating social disease.

As I noted in a recent sermon on white supremacy (published here), most of us want to isolate troublesome individuals, the “radicalized” foreigner, the disgruntled teenager, the psychotic co-worker. Few of us want to examine or even acknowledge our shared psychosis. The problem is not a few bad apples in the barrel; the problem is the barrel.

Or perhaps the television commercial for Palmolive dish washing liquid from my youth says it best: “You’re soaking in it.”

I’ve been struck recently by a number of studies and articles on chemical addiction, especially the low success rate of twelve-step programs. I have some good friends for whom Alcoholics Anonymous has been life-saving and life-changing; they are the exception. Twelve-step programs have a “success” rate of between 5 and 10 percent.

Meanwhile, I know more and more family members, friends, and colleagues who are “self-medicating,” whether by over-drinking or with anonymous sex hook-ups or binge eating or just increased isolation. I, too, drink too much and struggle with nicotine addiction.

I am convinced: treating addiction as an individual’s problem to overcome misses entirely the root of the problem. We, all of us, have a social disease. And only a social response will offer and lasting hope and healing.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the exploding homeless population – and our many failed attempts to address this problem – renders our social distress in visible bodies. Armando Sandoval coordinates “homeless outreach” programs for BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit district. He named our social disease rather pointedly:

“The issue is societal. It’s not BART, it’s not SFPD [the police], it’s not the justice system, it’s not the public health or mental health departments. It’s everything.”

Deeply embedded in all this – “infected” – most of us have trouble seeing the precise character of our plight. The following is my attempt, in outline, to “see” it, not for my own healing, but our healing. As ancient Christians insisted about salvation, my healing is inextricably bound up with yours. We have to work this out together, the diagnosis and the treatment.

My brief outline is in three parts: a personal encounter with our shared dis-ease; some theological theory; a bit of spiritual practice from Jesus.

Apocalyptic Hazing
Like many others, I was shocked recently by the revelations of violent “hazing” at Wheaton College in Illinois, my alma mater. Five Wheaton football players stand accused of doing felony-worthy things to a fellow student. The details are contested and fuzzy and still being adjudicated. Still, I responded with fury and outrage on social media; I ranted; I remain dismayed by the school’s response (a slap on the wrist or just a “pat on the head” for the accused).

Why did I have such visceral responses and why did I rant so much? At least two reasons.

The first feels like “Matthew Shepard PTSD.” The original reporting of what happened last year at Wheaton included a description of the student being stripped, tied to a fence with duct tape, and left there overnight. Nausea washed over me as I read this, ripples of dread and deep sorrow. The image evoked with uncanny resonance what had happened to Matthew back in 1998, even under very different circumstances.

matthew_shepard_fence2 — The fence where Matthew Shepard was left to die.

The second reason reaches back to my childhood, echoes of being bullied by the jocks in grade school and Jr. High for being a sissy and acting girly. I read the story about Wheaton, plastered with a photo of hyper-masculine football players in their uniforms. It shuttled me back to those agonizing moments when I was pinned to the ground by a group of jocks, hardly able to breathe. I can hear their taunts: “Did you bring your dolls to school, faggot?”

No one is born dreaming of torturing a young man like Matthew Shepard. No one just “naturally” throws sissy boys to the ground as they walk home from school. These things are learned – not just from “bad” parents, or “failed” schools, but in the crucible of a violent society laced with toxic forms of masculinity and seasoned with white privilege.

My African American colleagues have taught me this over the years: in a society drenched in white supremacy, everyone is racist, no exceptions. We all live with a social disease expressed with multiple symptoms.

My visceral response to the (latest) Wheaton scandal qualifies as apocalyptic for that very reason, as the word “apocalypse” suggests: it reveals what has always been there.

Theological Theorizing: The Domination System
None of this is new. It’s actually quite old. The texts of the Christian Testament in the Bible are shaped by living under the imperial thumb of the Roman Empire. This isn’t just dusty history, but a frame for noticing that thumbprint on our lives right now.

The late biblical theologian Walter Wink offered a compelling way to read first century gospel accounts through the lens of what he called the “Domination System,” a system employed by every imperial power, whether ancient or modern.

[The system] is characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all … from the ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana, to feudal Europe, to communist state capitalism, to modern market capitalism.

Diarmuid O’Murchu brilliantly (in my view) applied Wink’s diagnosis to the stories of demon possession in the gospels. The loneliness and isolation of the “possessed,” O’Murchu notes, mimics precisely the effects of living under the Domination System.

The gospel accounts hint at this, O’Murchu writes, as “evil spirits represent unmet needs. The spirits inhabit the inner empty shell caused by feelings of inferiority, unworthiness, disempowerment, torture, pain, and alienation.” Don’t most of us feel one or more of these things just looking in a mirror first thing in the morning?

But we can’t treat these symptoms as if only individuals suffer from them; the symptoms point instead to a social disease shared by all.

O’Murchu proposes a path toward healing marked by the “companionship of empowerment.” Exorcism is only the first step; healing means, finally, restoring relationship. Think of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8), restored to his community, or the young child foaming at the mouth and lifted up by Jesus to be given back to his parents (Luke 9). Or think Lazarus, raised from a tomb of death but still bound. Jesus turns to his beloved community: “Unbind him,” he says to them (John 11).

Most of all, this: Jesus lived the healing he preached and practiced around tables of shared food.

Jesus at Table
I begin every one of my theology classes with this: “Christian faith did not begin with a text, or a doctrine, or an institution, but with radical social practice: table fellowship.”

The gospel accounts portray how often Jesus got in trouble for eating with the wrong people. In that first century context, those with whom you shared food mattered as much as those with whom you had sex. Both food and sex were the primary ways to mark social dominance in a system of hierarchical value.

Jesus cast those systems aside and ate with the wrong people.

He did this because his people, and the wider society, the whole human race suffered from a debilitating social disease: oppression, fragmentation, isolation. And only a social response would suffice: all are welcome at the Table.

This is ridiculously pedestrian and wildly profound: We must eat with the wrong people. It’s our only hope.

Ditch your self-improvement book. Stop berating yourself for that second, or third, or fourth glass of wine. Reject all those messages about your flaws and shortcomings. Do this: Set a table with food and invite everyone you know – all of them, including officer Krupke.

Accompany others. Be accompanied.

Love someone. Be loved.

This is totally ridiculous. It’s also the peculiar faith of Christians, who hope because of love.

We, all of us, suffer from a debilitating social disease. Only a social treatment can heal us.

It’s called Love.

Our Migratory Species at the Table of Belonging

Everyone migrates, whether a few short blocks every day or across continents over many weeks, and the land we cross doesn’t actually belong to anyone but God.

That claim scrambles how most people organize the world we currently inhabit. But I’m not sure if I’m willing to live its implications – a borderless world with no political boundaries, let alone gated communities, designated wetlands, national parks, secured parking garages, and countless other spaces marked with painted or fenced lines.

But I am sure of this: modern Western society perfected a system of belonging that has very little if anything to do with actual land and terrain and nearly everything to do with political allegiance and religious affiliation. And this, too: navigating that system – migrating – carries enormous economic and cultural consequences, often life-and-death choices. And one more thing: belonging is never clear and absolute, despite both legal and political rhetoric to the contrary; it’s always ambiguous, intentionally.

I grew up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on television. I was fascinated by the behavioral patterns of different species of animals, including the mind-numbing treks whales take across oceans and the ones managed by butterflies over vast fields and mountain ranges. Canada geese caught my attention every fall and each spring, their honking migration punctuating my walk to school.

I grew up in a settled suburb in one house for my entire childhood. Migration is what other species do, I thought, not humans. But of course, our species migrates constantly and always has. We began somewhere on the continent of Africa and then walked, for a long time, and filled the planet.

migration_current — Global migration patterns, 2010-2015; for an animated map and analysis: http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/

We migrate for many reasons – wanderlust, better resources, fleeing violence, escaping tyranny, following a lover who got a great job offer. But these movements are rarely unfettered.

Those people are taking our jobs.
We don’t have enough resources for them.
Our cultural heritage is being destroyed.
They bring chaos and violence.

These are not new concerns. The ancient Israelites worried about “exotic” cultural practices staining their religious life (we find this in texts supposedly condemning gay men like me). Early Christians worried about “pagans” and gentiles corrupting their newly gestating faith (which would include, well, gentile men like me).

And yet, sacred texts likewise declare the primacy of caring for the stranger and sojourner in our midst (Leviticus 19:34 – the same book, ironically, that worries about exotic influences); insist on pilgrimage as a vital characteristic of faith (Hebrews 13:14); and portray Jesus himself fleeing to Egypt as a refugee with his parents, presumably without a passport (Matthew 2:13).

I keep wondering why migration so quickly provokes anxiety and panic, and I keep returning to money and power.

William T. Cavanaugh offers some helpful framing for this. I’m thinking especially of his analysis in Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. He notes, for example, that national borders are actually not meant to keep all “others” out but only to regulate their crossings.

Even in an age of multi-national corporations, Cavanaugh insists that corporate entities require national boundaries to regulate the flow of human capital – think Mexican farm workers in the Central Valley of California picking the fruit I buy at Trader Joe’s. Think as well on the fear they live with every day, which keeps them willing to work for wages I wouldn’t take and under conditions I would not accept. immigration_california_strawberries2

That’s the money part. The power part is drenched in white supremacy. “Whiteness” is no less an invention of Euro-Americans than the borders defining nation-states; both will be defended to the death. Post-Civil War Reconstruction and the regime of Jim Crow made this perfectly clear: “Whiteness” depends on the proximity of a subservient “other,” a vast underclass of colored people against which “Whiteness” itself is defined. Equality is the presenting heresy in this worldview, not the mere presence of people of color.

“White nationalist” rhetoric would seem at odds with this view, but only at first blush. White nationalists do want to be separated from people of color, but not so far away as to lose reasons for their superiority. I recoil at the crudeness of this, its vulgarity.

Perhaps I recoil too much, sitting on my heap of white, male, economic privileges. I’m not talking about guilt – though it does linger unhelpfully around the edges. I mean: how many borders and boundaries am I willing to let dissolve and fade away in the light of the Gospel? How much do I rely on all those demarcations for my own sense of self and safety?

I struggle with these questions and can’t imagine trying to respond by myself. That’s why I keep going to church, to the Eucharistic Table, to that borderless access to divine life. There I can be reminded, or try to be, that we’re all in this together; that there is no safety in isolation; that our shared distress is rooted in powerful forces that would keep us separated. I don’t know what to do, and I can’t risk what I must, without others.

Protesting at rallies, lobbying Congress, advocating for policy changes, resisting the totalizing effects of global capitalism – all of that matters. These matter, too: dinner parties with our neighbors whose names we don’t know and who speak with an “accent”; noticing the people we work with whose skin color is different and whether everyone makes the same wage; stopping the car and talking with the fruit sellers on the corner, the day-laborers at Home Depot, the imam down the street.

We get to know people, care for them, find ourselves happily in solidarity with them, and we might suddenly decide to chain ourselves to a DACA deportee; if they go, we go. Because we, all of us, are a migratory species.

I like to imagine St. Paul nodding his head vigorously as he sits in prison, in chains, writing from his detention cell. That saint who insisted that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female (Galatians 3:28) – no green-carder, no passport-holder, no citizen, no refugee, no ESL graduate. There are only creatures of God, all of us longing for home, to belong.

I see this – not always, but often enough – as I migrate to the Table.

eucharist_contemporary

Beloved Community and the Irrevocable Deed

“How good and pleasant it is,” declared the psalmist, “when kindred live together in unity.”

Many Christians recited that verse from Psalm 133 during Sunday worship yesterday. What a striking contrast between reciting what is “good and pleasant” and recalling Charlottesville, Virginia descending into chaos and violence, hearing with dismay the hate-filled speech, lamenting a country deeply fragmented.

Like many others, I long for just the right words, the most effective rhetorical posture, the finely-tuned strategy – anything at all to fix this broken society.

I pondered this as I sat and prayed with the other biblical texts for yesterday’s liturgy – the story of Joseph and his brothers in Egypt, Paul writing about Jews in a letter to Christians in the heart of the Roman Empire, the encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. These texts reminded me how deeply embedded we are in systems far larger than ourselves, systems that divide and fragment us with cycles of injury and vengeance, systems that remain invulnerable to reason, and logic, or just a “better argument.”

We are not dealing with mere partisanship here or ideological differences, as if all we need are persuasive facts to correct wrong-headed ideas.

Cornel West was among a line of clergy in Charlottesville who stood arm-in-arm to face a phalanx of white nationalist demonstrators. West is no newcomer to this work and witness; he’s been around the racism block many, many times. West described staring into the eyes of those demonstrators and noted: “I’ve never seen that kind of hatred in my life.” west_charlottesville

What has recently become more directly visible, and its expressions more emboldened, has deep and stubborn roots. Festering in this country’s past is not only the institution of slavery but the construction of race itself as the means to justify and perpetuate the superiority of white people over all others. This creates a social system that cannot be uprooted or dismantled by fiat, much less by street brawls.

The Emancipation Proclamation may have ended slavery as an institution, but it did not dispel the social system or its enduring legacy. Michelle Alexander reminds us how that system perpetuates itself in ever new guises – at first as “Reconstruction,” then “Jim Crow,” and today, in the “mass incarceration” of young men of color.

It’s tempting, in other words, to isolate problematic individuals – whether as neo-Nazis or white nationalists – and to suppose that rebuking them or arresting them or punishing them will solve the problem. But we are not dealing with a few bad apples in the barrel; the barrel itself is the problem. Or as a poet-activist recently proposed, white supremacy “is not a shark; it’s the water.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King understood the deeply spiritual character of this system of injustice and its hateful expressions, for which only a deeply spiritual response will suffice. This insight shaped the six principles of nonviolence that guided his life and work.

Principle #3, for example, urges us to remember that we are seeking to defeat injustice, not people. “Evildoers are also victims and are not evil people. The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil not people.”

How easy it is to forget this in the heat of confrontation and conflict, yet so vital to remember: the hate Cornel West encountered is just as soul crushing and corrosive for the hater as it is for the targets of their hate.

King believed that the only meaningful and lasting solution is for all of us, together, to create and sustain what he called the “Beloved Community.”

It’s worth pausing to reflect on what King meant by this, which is certainly much more than a social club. That galvanizing image first appeared in the work of Josiah Royce, a late nineteenth-century philosopher of religion.

For Royce, the communal bonds we share with each other, the ones that make us human together, are torn apart by treachery. Royce called that moment of betrayal “the irrevocable deed.” He chose that language carefully, to underscore the severity of treachery and its debilitating legacy, how it refuses to dissipate just by ignoring it or pretending it never happened. Apologies alone will not suffice to heal the rupture of betrayal; the deed still stands as irrevocable.

Treachery, Royce argued, demands atonement – for both the betrayed and the betrayer. This will mean creating something new, not in spite of that irrevocable deed but because of it. This new thing Royce described as the Beloved Community.

Royce turned often to the story of Joseph in Genesis, the climax of which was appointed for yesterday’s worship (Gen. 45:1-15). Recall how the story began: out of envy, Joseph’s brothers sought to kill him and he was sold as a slave into the house of Pharaoh. Over time, Joseph becomes a trusted servant and even a “lord of Egypt.” And this: his ability to interpret dreams saves the whole land from a terrible famine.

Among those he saves, of course, are members of his own family, including his treacherous brothers. The storyteller does not give us a “forgive and forget” moment but an extended family reunion in which Joseph insisted that his brothers remember what they did to him. He insists on this, not for vengeance or retribution but to build something new and hopeful from their shared memory – the essence, Royce proposed, of “atonement.”

hands_multiracial Genuine community, Royce argued, the Beloved Community, emerges from a shared memory of betrayal and a shared hope for new life.

Countless “irrevocable deeds” litter our past, some festering like an open wound, others leaving only traces of a scar. What transpired in Charlottesville is but the latest manifestation of what Jim Wallis calls “American’s original sin” – racism. Unless and until we tell that story truthfully, remember it together courageously and humbly, the irrevocable deeds of white supremacy remain un-atoned.

Royce would argue that Christians already know what that kind of truth-telling looks like, or have at least a hint of its rhythms whenever we gather at the Eucharistic Table. At that Table, through a shared memory and a shared hope, the same God who made something good from the evil done to Joseph makes something good from us – the Body of Christ.

In a world torn apart by hate and violence, what Christians do at the Eucharistic Table matters. The Table matters; I have to believe this. At the Table we cease to be fragments – divided by race and nationality, split apart by color and gender, betrayed by envy and sold into the slavery of countless cycles of injury and vengeance – at the Table we are knit together into a single body, bound together by love and grace. This, at the very least, is our hope.

Learning to tell the truth in and with love at the Table will not solve our resilient divisions; but I am convinced it’s the only path on which a graceful solution will appear.

Martin Luther King, Jr., urged us along that path with familiar words that never grow old:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

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