Beloved, it has been a week!
In our national politics, we’ve gone from a major story
about the President’s taxes, to a “presidential debate” that defies
description, to the President and the First Lady being diagnosed with COVID-19
after hosting a series of super-spreader events at the White House and on the
campaign trail that also infected a number of the President’s advisors, the
chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, and at least three U.S.
Senators. We don’t know yet how many
other people may have been infected or precisely when the President knew he was
infected, and there are conflicting reports about his current health
status. All this in a week when racist
nationalism and assaults on the integrity of our electoral system reached new
heights. The great American project of
creating a just and egalitarian multi-ethnic democracy hangs in the
balance. Violence is in the air.
In the midst of this chaos, we are all dealing with our own
concerns about the pandemic and the related recession. Some of you are still grieving lost loved
ones. Some of you are still on furlough
and anxious to know if the federal government will provide another round of
economic assistance. All of us are
struggling with the effects of varying degrees of long-term isolation due to
sheltering in place; worried about aging parents and home-schooled kids and our
own loneliness; discouraged by our nation’s failure to collectively address
this public health crisis. California is
on fire. It just seems to go on and on.
And then there are the “everyday” challenges of illness,
medical tests, divorce, custody battles, employment discrimination, eviction
fears, worries about money. We don’t
have to look far to find all of these things.
They are right here in our beloved community of St. James. Sometimes, it seems like we can’t bear to
handle one more thing.
I want you to know that I see you. I see how tired you are. I see how your heart is breaking. My heart is breaking too. I see your beautiful and even courageous care
for others, even as you are carrying your own secret pain. I see how well and deeply you love, and
truly, it sometimes takes my breath away.
I know you are not perfect; neither am I, as you well know
by now. But I trust that we are all
striving to be the best versions of ourselves.
Perhaps you have found yourself harboring . . . uncharitable thoughts
this week. Perhaps you have not loved
your neighbor as yourself, much less your enemies. Or perhaps, you have, and that is the
problem. Sometimes, loving people as
much as we love ourselves is a low bar.
Often, we can find ourselves trapped in self-images that
bear little relation to the divine image in which we are created. Martin Laird tells the story of a women he
knew, an extremely talented dancer, plagued by self-doubt and driven by a
relentless perfectionism. She was
trapped in a video loop of herself as worthless, and could never do enough to
fast forward past it.
Most of that video was about pain. When she was a little girl, her mother walked
into her bedroom one day and found her looking in the mirror. “I hope you don’t think you’re beautiful,”
she said. Later, as a teenager, after
winning a prestigious scholarship to study ballet, her mother said, “Why would
they give you that? Everybody knows
you’ve got two left feet.” Martin Laird
observes, “This video was the cage that kept her running in tight circles.”[1] If we want to be free to love, we have to
become free of the story we’ve learned to tell ourselves about ourselves; free
from being defined by our pain.
Her story is a story about violence: how it works in
sometimes subtle ways, eating at one’s soul one cut at a time; cruel words
whispered in secret, a contemptuous look, simply being ignored. Such violence works its way through our
nervous system, shapes our consciousness, and ramifies through or social
relations. It corrupts hearts, families,
and whole societies. It can be hard to
love our neighbors, much less our enemies, because we do not love
ourselves. How much easier it is, how
much more familiar sometimes, to lash out at others or turn in against
ourselves.
We have to find another way to deal with our personal and
collective pain. This story about Martin
Laird’s ballerina friend reminded me of a story I once heard Methodist
theologian Tex Sample tell about himself.
When Tex was a teenager, he went from being 5’5’’ tall to being 6’2’’
tall in about 5 minutes. He was the
scrawniest, gangliest thing you ever saw.
And, of course, his glands went crazy.
He had terrible acne. He could
hardly bear to show his face at school and his classmates were not kind.
But every night, before he went to sleep, his mama would
come into his room and sit on the edge of the bed. She’s stroke his forehead and say, “Tex, you
are the purdiest boy I’ve ever seen. You
are so purdy, I can hardly stand it.” Telling
that story 40 years later, Tex realized that his mother saw him as God saw
him. And in the light of such love his
pain was transfigured. No matter what
the culture or his peers tried to tell him, he was able to receive his identity
from a source much deeper and more true.
Jesus understood the everyday violence that suffused his own
culture and made it difficult to love. He
was very much aware of the structural violence of poverty, patriarchy, and
imperialism in first century Palestine.
He was intimately familiar with both state-sponsored violence and
revolutionary counter-violence. He hung
out with Roman soldiers and Jewish rebels.
He saw how people suffered violence and was bold enough to say that the
kingdom of God suffers violence too.[2] God is with those trapped by videos of the
pain they have suffered; and, I daresay, the pain they have caused. God is with you and me in our pain. Jesus offered a practice of God’s love that
transfigures human pain so that God’s kingdom could be a violence-free zone.
The parable of the wicked tenants is a parable about
everyday violence.[3] It is about the pain of oppressed people
exploding in a violent uprising against the injustice and greed of their
oppressor. It is a common story. We’ve seen it play out over and over again in
history. About the time Jesus was born,
there was a similar uprising in Galilee against Roman oppression. Jewish rebels would rebel against the Romans
again about 40 years after Jesus died.
In both cases, the uprisings were brutally repressed by the Roman
empire.
So, there is nothing surprising about the response of the
chief priests and elders when Jesus asked them what would happen to these
tenants. As part of the Jewish
aristocracy, many of them were no doubt absentee landlords like the one
described in the parable. They knew how
to deal with unruly tenants. They knew
how this story would end. And they were
right.
But they were also wrong.
They thought that the tenants were getting what they deserved, that
violence against them was justified – even divinely ordained. Jesus just shook his head and said, “Have you
never read in the scriptures: ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become
the chief cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our
eyes?’ Therefore, I tell you, the
kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces
the fruits of the kingdom.” [4]
The chief priests and elders are right about the cycle of
violence. What they fail to understand
is that God has nothing to do with it.
The stone that the builders of civilization rejected is
nonviolence. Can you imagine a
civilization built on love as the cornerstone rather than violent
coercion? Now that is amazing to our
eyes!
This is a teaching that leaves us all a little bit
uncomfortable. Jesus rejected calls for
law and order masking the everyday violence of an oppressive state, but he also
rejected violent resistance. Jesus stood
in solidarity with the victims of injustice, marching with them at the head of a
protest into Jerusalem, occupying the Temple, and calling the authorities to
account for turning a house of prayer into a den of robbers exploiting the
poor. Jesus took a knee while the
guardians of law and order wrapped themselves in the flag and demanded to know
just who he thought he was.[5] Then he told them this parable: I am the
cornerstone of a new community based on revolutionary love.
Violence is in the air.
In our pain, it is hard to know how to respond. What do we do with all this pain? We can’t absorb it – that just keeps us
locked in the self-image of victimization, running circles in our cage. We can’t reflect it – that just keeps the
cycle of violence going. We must
transfigure pain through love. Only then
can we resist evil without mirroring it.
St. John of the Cross said, “It seems to the soul that the
entire universe is sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the
living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of
the boundaries of this love.”[6] Jesus invites us to become conscious of this center
and live from it. This is what gave him
the courage to love. Deeper than our
pain and our fear, there is a kingdom within us and around us. It is here that we must learn to make our
home. When we do, we will know how to
love ourselves, and our neighbors, and our enemies.
Beloved, I know it has been a week. I know it is hard to love when we hurt so
much. Share your pain with God. Let God love you up. And then let God continue to love through
you. You are not alone. God is with you.
[1]
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of
Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 20-22.
[3]
Matthew 21:33-46. This is the second of
three parables Jesus’ tells the authorities who question him.
[4]
Matthew 21:42, quoting Psalm 118:22-23.
[6]
Quoted in Laird, p. 17.
