What To Do Now?

No use beating around the bush. The Presidential election has upended the entire country. Some rejoice. Some grieve. Some are on fire with rage. Others are trying to find some way to be positive.

What’s a Christian to do? No, let me rephrase that. What are you to do? And does Christian faith have anything to offer you in your response? You do indeed have a response, and you are already making it and will continue to do so, though you may shift a bit here and there. Keeping silent is a response. Wait-and-see is a response. Spewing vitriol is a response. Saying “I told you so” is a response. Gloating is a response. So is desperation.

Sermons are not the place to dissect election returns. Nor, for my money, are they the place to moralize or paper over difficult things with pious platitudes. But sermons are a place, one would hope, for telling the truth. My purpose is to tell you some truth. Nothing of what I am about to say is anything more or less than my attempt to tell you what I believe to be the truthful answer to one question: what does Christian faith have to offer you in your response to this election’s results?

You might notice, as I do, that sometimes the scriptures appointed for a given Sunday, though selected years ago, might well have been chosen with current events in mind. Such is the gospel for today. “…Jesus said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’” He said that as people were oohing and ah-ing about the beautiful temple, Judaism’s most sacred institution. Well, the temple has long been gone, and all that is left is part of the old retaining wall now known as “the Western Wall” and sometimes called “the Wailing Wall.” 

The Western Wall, Jerusalem

Generally speaking, we are not fond of seeing the institutions that we revere and respect dismantled stone by stone. We don’t do well seeing the things we’ve worked and prayed and sacrificed for and sometimes given our lives to trashed and smashed by those who either do not understand or who do understand yet repudiate the very values that guide the building of communal fabric that through symbol and sacred promise bind the quarrelsome human family together. Sometimes reality dishes up the tragic vision of us standing before the ruins of a once noble civilization with little left to do but weep and wail and gnash our teeth, sticking prayers of grief and sadness into the crevices between the few stones left standing, bleak reminders of what once was and is no more.

One of the ironic twists in all this is that the very destruction that threatens to obliterate all that we hold dear, and very well may do so, is the catastrophe that in another way spotlights truth. I do not mean that the truth is necessarily hopeful or comforting. Quite often it is anything but. The entire biblical narrative is replete with stories of ruinous reigns, invasions, exile, defeat, oppression, slavery, and subjugation. Indeed huge swaths of the story, whole books of the Bible, are attempts to appropriate calamitous developments and the occasional ray of hope. When catastrophe happens the light shines on the reality exposing the situation for what it is.  Exposed is the folly of believing in the invincibility of human endeavor. Exposed is the betrayal of values. Exposed are the deep fault lines and fissures between tribes pitted against each other, divisions that simmered under the radar, ready to break out when crisis shook the nation. Exposed over the long haul is the truth of the prophets’ thunder warning the careless of disaster. Exposed too is the promise spoken by the Prophet Malachi, “For you who revere my name the sun of righteousness will arise with healing in its wings.”

We may wish to think that our situation is unique. Not so much. We’ve been here before. 1776, 1860, 1917, 1929, 1941, 1963, 2001, and lots of other times. I take no comfort in that fact. I do take comfort in knowing that

           

                                   

…history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.[1]

And that is the first and most important thing that Christian faith says to us. There is a God far stronger than the forces of injustice and oppression. Paul wrote to the Galatians what can easily be said to any and all of us, including our President-elect, “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap.” It might take awhile for something that goes around to come around, but rest assured: it always does. Don’t fall for the seductive notion that when things are going your way somehow it is because an external God is smiling in blessing upon you, or that conversely when things turn sour somehow an external God has withdrawn and is no longer at work. For God works through all things to bring about the eternal and timeless purpose. Sorrow might spend the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Is our memory so short that we don’t recall the struggles of our forebears, the persecution of the innocent, the pogroms and hate campaigns that have buffeted the saints from pillar to post and from age to bloody age? The kind of insanity that produces just such suffering was cousin to the profound and torturous depression that produced the oft-quoted and dimly understood passage from William Cowper,

                        God moves in a mysterious way

                         His wonders to perform

                        He plants his footsteps in the sea

                         And rides upon the storm.

                        Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take!

                         The clouds ye so much dread

                        Are big with mercy and shall break

                         With blessings on your head!         [2]

So it is that Christian faith says clearly that God is not a tribal deity synonymous with this or that political position—or doctrinal position for that matter. Precisely one of the things that this election has exposed is the extent to which large numbers of Christians imagine God to be exactly that. What we can say with firm assurance is that God as revealed in Jesus Christ cares inexhaustibly for the weak, the poor, the outcast. We may be wrong about justice and truth, but it is never wrong to seek diligently to know and to do them. We may be ever so wrong about mercy and how to show it, but to be committed to a life marked by mercy and all its allies—kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, compassion—is never wrong, for those are exactly the qualities and virtues that our courteous Lord embodies and manifests.  We do not have to be in doubt about the will of God when we focus on the model we have in Jesus. Learning how to live not just like him but in him is the point of all Christian practice, from prayer to political action. And being in Christ is exactly the strength and compass for just such an hour as this.

That brings me to the next thing that Christian faith says to those of us who are looking for some way to appropriate this election. What we do and how we react is greatly important. It matters. Will being hated we give way to hating? Will we add to the total anger and madness in the world? Will we succumb to the very divisiveness and contentiousness that for a long while have been waiting anxiously for an opening to ascend the throne? Let me be clear. Refusing to hate does not mean capitulating to the forces of repression and destruction. Refusing to hate is not the same as acting nice. And refusing to hate is certainly not the same as refusing to do anything. No. The alternative to hating is to organize, to keep the pressure on, to use every legitimate tool to fight injustice, to stand up audibly and visibly for the powerless and dispossessed. Those are not political strategies derived from a left-wing playbook; they are actions derived from the God of the Bible who always, always comes down on the side of the poor and defenseless.

Don’t ever forget that the Jesus who took on the scribes and Pharisees of his day, calling them out on hypocrisy and a totally manipulative reading of their very own Tradition is the same Jesus who taught us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us. The most twisted and diabolical souls that we despise are the very ones to teach us that no one is below—or above—the need of prayer. I didn’t make that up, nor could I. It is not some obscure passage stuck in a small book of a minor prophet, but in the Sermon on the Mount from our Lord himself.

Arnold Friberg, "The Prayer at Valley Forge"

A few days before the election, Joe’s nephew was visiting us from Texas. We took the occasion to go to Mount Vernon. I had not been to Washington’s home since I was a child, and was excited to make this long deferred pilgrimage to the grounds where one of America’s saints lived and died. I think the thing that impressed me most at Mount Vernon was the grace and candor with which the story of slaves there is now told to the public. One could fault Washington for his complicity in that system which he himself grew to question as time went on. But somehow we find it in ourselves to forgive people like that because we know that on balance their character and commitments were such that even what we now see as their part in a tragic darkness does not eclipse the good that they did. And where did that good spring from? It arose and flourished from the roots of faith, watered by prayer, informed by scripture, nourished by sacrament, practiced through discipline. It was not that Washington was or is an example only of a faith that is narrowly Christian, much less that he was flawless, but that his Christian faith molded him into a man who manifested strength and gentleness, efficiency and good humor, dedication and profound humility. Your task now and mine is not to be a Washington, but to manifest authentically, as he did, the marks of what we profess and confess. Our vocation is the same today as it was last Sunday or the one before that or what it was on the day we were baptized and what it will be on the day we die: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

We do not walk this way alone. We walk it with an innumerable caravan of ordinary folk who despite the clamor of hate and war hear a voice saying, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016

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[1] James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis,” in the Harvard Classics, English Poetry III, from Tennyson to Whitman, online at http://www.bartleby.com/42/805.html, accessed 12 November 2016.

[2] William Cowper, “God moves in a mysterious way,” The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation), 677.

What Shall We Do?

 Luke 3:7-18

Every year John the Baptist shows up in Advent and hangs around for half the season, at which time he suddenly disappears until after Christmas and Epiphany, when he reappears to baptize Jesus the first or second Sunday in January.  The connection between John and Advent is reasonably clear:  he is the forerunner, and his message paves the way for the coming Messiah.  Were it not for John, the message we would likely hear in Advent would be something about the sweet baby Jesus, thus joining us to the culture’s romanticizing of Christmas by obliterating Advent.  John forestalls that.  His is a message of wildness, of thunder, of fire, of irrepressible truth telling.  If we hear him at all in Advent, it is hard not to grasp the notion that this season is about way more than getting revved up for a planet-wide blowout on December 25, and far beyond the sentimental notion of a little baby being cradled by a young mother meeting all the dictates of middle-class conformity. 

Oh, how we love to domesticate God!  The man upstairs, the genial co-pilot, the model scoutmaster, even the familial tyrant, the petty dictator, the threatening police officer, the punitive judge:  many of our functional notions and pictures of the deity are drawn from our rather small ideals and rather oversized fears and amount to a mishmash of cartoons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Truth.  John the Baptizer, though, proclaims a no-nonsense gospel of practical yet transformative behavior.  “What shall we do?”  ask the crowds on hearing his prophecy of a new age.  “Share your coats if you have more than one, and food if you have any,” he says.  “What shall we do?” ask the tax collectors.  “Don’t cheat,” he says.  “What shall we do?” ask the soldiers.  “Tell the truth and quit extorting,” John answers.  Pretty simple.  Moral.  Direct.  Somehow this is connected to turning over a new leaf in preparation for the messianic age.  Don’t underestimate it, though.  Stopping what we are used to doing; changing ingrained behavior; getting a totally new attitude: it might seem simple, but we know better if we have ever tried it.  The pull of the familiar is strong, strong.  God smashes the familiar in order to re-create us, freeing us from the patterns that warp us and leave us misshapen and powerless to do any good.

John the Baptizer.  People questioned in their hearts whether he might be the Messiah.  He looked and sounded and no doubt smelt like a messiah. Yet, he said, “One is coming who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”  The search committee was looking for a parson, and John frustrated them:  “Not I,” said he.  “Look for another.  One is coming who will baptize you with Holy Spirit and with fire.”  That sort of sounds like Pentecost, doesn’t it?  And Pentecost Day is the culmination of the Easter season.  So what is going on here?  Suddenly John the Baptist has afforded the bridge that links Advent with Easter and Pentecost.  And that is fitting because of all things, John the Baptist is known for baptism.  Sure, his baptism was a simple bath, the way he practiced it.  It was an outward, visible sign—washing—of an interior change of heart.  It was the manifestation of a transformative shift in attitude and behavior. 

And that is what Advent is truly about.  Not something that is essentially tied to a birth a long time ago, but a season for getting our bearings in a new world—a world of resurrection, a world spirit-driven, where old habits are discarded, old attitudes are reworked, old approaches cleaned up, old responses carefully re-appropriated to match life in a new context. 

This is, if anything the secret of Christianity—and an all too well kept one.  The whole life of Christ, the entire message of salvation, is not a series of disconnected events and discrete messages having to do with a variety of things, but rather a single story that has to do with only two things, which are themselves two sides of the same thing.  One is incarnation and the other is resurrection.  One has to do with God becoming one with humanity.  The other has to do with humanity, especially the human body, being the vehicle for divine life.  These two things are all there is to it, at the end of the day.  All morality, all knowledge, all existence are caught up in these two things—and they are summed up in baptism.  We have taken baptism quite a way beyond what John the Baptist practiced, but we have not entirely left John’s baptism in the past.  We see going down under the water and back up again as the pattern for death and resurrection, while he only saw it as a change of heart. But the two insights lead to the same conclusion: resurrection is about radical change here and now.  We are bodies that share the divine life of him who for our sake came to share our humanity.  We are dead to all that is alien to God and alive to all that belongs to God, and it is only radical Grace that explains how and why. 

OK.  Enough rhetoric and theory. Where do spirit and flesh meet in all this?  What does all this have to do with the husband who is grieving his young wife’s death?  What does this matter to the parents who have just found out that their young son has incurable cancer?  What does this say to the person who has just lost his third job with no prospects of getting another any time soon? 

We would like a template that we can take and apply to any and all situations, coming up with answers that make sense of these lofty notions of incarnation and resurrection, especially if the template would make all things turn out happily.  There is no such thing.  As scripture says in one place, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which means look at your own life and figure out where wholeness happens for you, and how, by the love of Christ, you can not only survive but really live.  The way we go about this whole process is through sharing our stories.  Little tidbits of light and promise show up in my life and in yours.  We talk about  them with each other and gain some insight in the way to live.  We gradually begin to see patterns of things, never reducible to formulas, but strangely telling of principles like letting go, easing up, learning to trust, giving up control, fighting for the right against all odds, learning to submit our egos to a higher, if sometimes incomprehensible, purpose.  Such is the story of a man whose life the church is about to celebrate this week, William Lloyd Garrison.  Born in Massachusetts, Garrison tasted poverty in his childhood when his father, a sailor, abandoned his family.  Somehow—God knows how—Garrison caught a zeal for justice and a hatred of slavery.  He worked on a newspaper in Baltimore.  Later he returned to Boston.  The black community there helped him to found The Liberator, an antislavery paper.

Garrison’s paper became the dominant voice in the abolitionist movement.  He refused to be a moderate when, as he put it, the house was clearly on fire.  People all over the country, enraged by his insistence of abolition with no compensation to slave owners, spewed forth hatred and violence, as is, you might observe, the norm.  Garrison was even jailed for his own safety. 

Not to be deterred, Garrison invited black and female writers to contribute to The Liberator.  Maria Stewart was one of the writers who came to him with a handful of essays to publish.  An orphaned black woman born in Hartford, Stewart had grown up in the household of a white minister.  Widowed at a young age, she became an outspoken foe of slavery and racism.  Ultimately she became the Head Matron of Freedom’s Hospital here in Washington, which was to become Howard University. 

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong,

Though her portion be the scaffold,

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future

And behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above [God’s] own.[1]

So this is the outward life.  But the inward life is not too different.  Justice does not come only to those who are engaged in the large fights against slavery, inhumanity, and oppression, but also to those who are privately hurting, wounded, and choking back their own tears.  The grieving husband might find astonishing power to form new relationships and to weather the days and nights of loneliness by reaching out to others.  The parents of a dying child may discover how to celebrate life whether it is short or long.  The jobless person could bounce around trying to find work and ultimately discover new life in communities of caring people.  Does it always work out handily?  No.  Are there disappointments galore?  Yes.  What makes the difference then?  Why should anyone pay any attention to this gospel of baptism, of death and resurrection?  For the simple reason that those who give themselves over to it, like William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Stewart and Joan of Arc and Mohandas Ghandi and Thomas Merton and Nelson Mandela and Dorothy Day and Jesus of Nazareth, keep showing the human race that success is a worthless deity, while the Spirit gives New Life to mortal bodies, often weak ones, forgotten, and even dead. 

So John the Baptist thunders on.  Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees.  Bear fruit, or be cut down.  It doesn’t sound pretty.  But he means that we simply cannot make peace with oppression, either outwardly or inwardly.  The resurrection will happen, no matter how many stones are rolled against the grave.  God will raise up children who are as good as dead.  You don’t even have to believe it.  Incarnation is powerful enough to take bread and make it body, and take blood and make it drinkable as wine.  God is afoot in the world and there is no deterring what brought all into being.  Mock on, fret on, and you cannot stop the unstoppable. 

Of course, there are no guarantees.  That is why we call it “faith.” 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

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[1] James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis,” popularly known as “Once to Every Man and Nation,” The Hymnal 1940 (New York: The Church Hymal Corporation), 519.