The People We Are

There’s a worship song that’s stuck in my head at the moment but in that frustrating way where it’s only one phrase, one part of the song running over and over again without letting me get to the rest of the song so I even know what it is.  The phrase is “this is the people we are,” and it’s a sucker punch to me today because I am having a really, really hard time with the people we are.

I just finished my United Methodist Church Annual Conference, which is four days of 1,800 people bickering and worshiping and chatting and judging and connecting with each other.  It’s a very weird space, to be honest, that is both outrageously holy and maddeningly horrible.  It was less painful than last year and we passed a lot of pretty toothless legislation of how the conference would encourage churches to think about taking stands on some things.  I don’t mind so much that that we aren’t forcing churches into action because I love that the UMC is trying to hold a lot of different opinions together; what I mind is this appearance of engaging things without being anything other than lukewarm.

Is this the people we are?  Are we folks who value unity more than decisiveness?  Because #TrueConfession:  I am that person.  If I decide that I like someone or some organization, I will fight like hell to keep it together even if I know that that isn’t the best course of action.  (It takes an awful lot for me to like someone or something, so part of it is the invested time.  I’m also hella allergic to change, which is hilarious considering my life pattern and my profession.)  So will I avoid the conflict of saying we need to take a stand on this?  Yep.  For as long as I can.

To some degree, I think that’s a good trait.  My being less inclined to force a decision means I get invited to a lot of different kinds of spaces that I might not otherwise be.  It means people feel that I don’t judge when I listen (which is sort of true; some of that is that I have a better poker face than people think).  It means that I will stay in a conversation or relationship for a while because it matters to me to preserve that even when I’m mad about it.

But for sure there’s a downside.  My being less inclined to force a decision means I stay silent when I absolutely should not.  It means I allow myself to be a bit of a doormat sometimes.  It means I don’t call people on bullshit that is harmful and cruel.

One of the things that is hard to talk about in a post-modernist world (which is a fancy term that just means we are beyond the mindset that somebody termed “modernist” that characterized the last half of the 20th century) is the idea of Truth.  One of the tenets of the post-modernist school of thought is that situation determines concept; if I’m from, say, Texas, I’m going to think about things like spacial relation and a relationship with Mexico differently than if I’m from Vermont.  Or if I’m a white woman (which I am), I’m going to approach a text or event differently than if I’m a black man.  And I can’t ever not be affected by that; if I’m a white woman from Texas, I can’t ever sidestep the way that shapes my thinking.

Unfortunately, this really easily becomes a conversation about whether or not there can be any idea or concept that is true across contexts.  If my viewpoint can be changed by my outlook/situation/background, it will always be different than anyone else’s since no one else has the same combination of events and personality and such that I do.  So can anything be capital T True?  Some post-modernists would say no, all is relative.

I think that’s crap, and I think that’s how we get into spaces like this Annual Conference’s wishy-washy legislation and my general distaste for asking people (myself included) to declare where we stand on Hard Issues.  It is not relative that children should not be starved or separated from their loved ones and traumatized.  That’s bad.  It just is.  Why it’s bad can be relative; how it happens can be relative.  But the idea of whether or not you should be able to harm children carries across every aspect of healthy humanity.  Likewise, we shouldn’t be afraid of people simply because they look different than us.  How that fear manifests is relative.  Who that fear is about is relative.  But simply looking at a person and fearing him/her without any other information at all is not a mark of healthy humanity.

So when we have legislation in the Church that talks about how the Church deals with sexuality, I get that it’s a firestorm because the how is murky depending on ideology and position.  When we have legislation that deals with U.S. wars and the Church’s position in supporting or speaking against them, I get that people get heated.  But when we have stuff that’s about whether we should speak against kids being put in cages and left alone, or whether it’s a bad idea to treat women as subhuman, and there’s debate on that?  That’s crap.  Those are absolutes.  The value of a human being a human and not being harmed for simply being a human is a Truth.

Unless that is not the people we are.  In which case, we need to really look at what kind of people we have actually become.

 

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.  (1 Peter 2:9-10, NIV)

The Church with the Boarded-Up Doors

I feel like I apologize to you every time I post now, Reader, for my erratic schedule and the lull between postings; I can tell you that I’ll post this and then be back for my usual Advent Christmas carols shtick.  This semester is taking the mickey out of me in ways I really did not see coming at all; I will be so very glad when it’s over.  To be honest, I’ll be very glad when this degree is over, which is super unfortunate.  But the upshot of being here in the Wicket Gate is that I work at a pretty amazing church.

It’s an old church, as in over a century old (which is old for Americans; I know that’s laughable for Europeans, but cut us some slack, we’re young).  Being old means that there’s a lot of repair that has to happen.  Right now our main front doors are gone because water had warped the bottoms of these thick wooden masterpieces, so there’s a beautiful Good Shepherd stained glass window hanging out over a bunch of plywood.  It looks pretty awful, and it confuses the crickets out of visitors, but I was thinking the other day about what it must look like from the street.

Oh, what a shame, some driver may be thinking, another beautiful old church closed down and falling apart.  Because those boarded-up doors make it seem like we’ve thrown in the towel, for sure.  The thing of it is that they are the exact opposite—those plywood planks are the showcase of our growth, our fiscal health, our connectivity (paid for by a grant from our denomination), our stewardship of the building, our desire to make sure we are able to welcome people to this house of God.  Our boarded-up doors are symbols of our being alive, not dead, and I wonder what that looks like when speaking of the larger Church.

I have very little patience left for folks who bemoan the death of the Christian Church and even less for the people (like a classmate of mine, recently) who say that the Church should die because it’s outdated.  Nope.  The Church is not dying, not by a long shot.  Christianity is a truly global religion represented on every continent, with over two billion believers.  It is the largest organized religion on the planet.

Now I know, Christianity doesn’t necessarily equal the Church.  But the Church is its most cohesive vehicle.  The Christian Church is the community that goes out and fights for justice, that works for peace, that stands with people suffering from natural and human disasters.  The Church is the community that gathers to stay strong in faith, to challenge ourselves to live godly lives, to reach deeper into the mind-bending compassion of God to be able to see each other—and ourselves—in love.

It is also the community that is wrapped up in colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, a million different kinds of discrimination, power grabs, ageism, judgment, and oppression.  We, the Church, do not have clean hands.  But that does not mean God is done with us.  My church, my century+ church, definitely has things it needs to deal with about how we interact with each other and our community, and I pray mightily that we acknowledge those things and open ourselves to God’s ability to change us and speak through us to the hurt and the aching need for hope here in the Wicket Gate.  Yet I also pray mightily that we may continue the growth that we are doing, both the quantifiable and the completely unquantifiable.  We are a constant work in progress, thank God, as is the larger Church.

Certain parts of it must change.  That is undeniable, and unsurprising, because no living thing is ever permanently stagnant.  It would die.  So when folks talk about how the Church is dying because it’s changing, I wonder at their definition of death.  Do we have fewer people in American pews than there used to be?  Sure.  But Christians are gathering in Africa, in southeast Asia, in South America, and they can’t keep up with the amount of churches needed to house the communities.  A shift is not a death.  Do we have a different cultural relationship with Christianity than we used to in the West?  Sure.  But Christianity is becoming something that is owned with purpose and determination rather than to impress your boss or make sure the neighbors don’t think you’re a terrible person.  A shift is not a death.  Do the new generations have a wariness about Christianity that often manifests in us leaving the faith?  Sure.  But many are hungering after authentic grace and we millennials, for one, are becoming some of the strongest change agents in the Church.  A shift is not a death.

So look deeper when you see a church with plywood where the doors ought to be.  It may well be that that church has closed—but perhaps that’s to form a co-op with another church down the street, or to move into the city to be closer to the people who need this news of unconditional love, or to switch to a more accessible and less leaky building to keep on worshipping.  Or maybe it completely folded, and that’s okay too because the face of Christianity is changing and that church may have lived its purpose in that spot.  Or maybe it didn’t, maybe it wasn’t done yet, and that boarded-up church represents a workplace where God is calling someone to bring the message of hope back into that neighborhood.  Is it you?

Or, maybe, it’s just getting its doors replaced so it can come out looking beautiful once more, ready to fling those doors open come Easter and let the hymns roll out over the stone steps into the neighborhood proclaiming that Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.  Keep looking.  There is life here, and life abundant.

 

We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and he will never die again. Death no longer has power over him.  He died to sin once and for all with his death, but he lives for God with his life.  In the same way, you also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.  (Romans 6:9-10, CEB)

 

Patriotism, Racism, and Christianity Walk into a Bar

And Christianity goes to meet its friends over in the corner, Mercy, Hope, and Peace, and never talks to the two ideas it happened to walk in with because they are totally antithetical to it.

Is how that should go, right?  So even someone like me who lives under a rock (a.k.a. in a hospital pretty much ALL THE TIME—I had my last 24-hour shift this past weekend and it was brutal) is aware that shit went down this week in Charlottesville, Virginia.  And as a white person, it is incumbent on me to take every platform on which I have a voice to say unequivocally that I denounce that violence, that I denounce that idolism, that I denounce the idea that it is ever okay to talk about “getting our country back” as though it was ever ours and as though there’s some kind of fight over it right now.  It is incumbent on me to call out racism and refuse to accept it in any form because, being white, my voice has the kind of power that carries.  It is incumbent on me to work to dismantle that kind of power because my black and brown brothers and sisters are fierce and wonderful creations of God who deserve every ounce of humanity given them at their very birth.

Because here’s the thing—so much of the alt-right/Nazi-istic/KKK shit going down in Virginia claims connection to Christianity and that does not work.  Christianity is a religion built around a brown Jew from a poor provincial town, an insignificant carpenter’s son Who was executed for threatening the secular power system by saying things like hey, maybe we shouldn’t put God and money on the same level and perhaps prostitutes are people, too.  There is literally no place in the Bible where I can see any kind of support for violently marching through a town in defense of an icon of a treasonous general supporting a slave state based on the color of people’s skin, and yes I am including the Old Testament in that statement.  If you feel like I’ve missed something, I very seriously and honestly want you to let me know because there is no Christ in the Christianity I hear from the alt-right.  There is no love, there is no reverence for life, there is no hope, there is nothing but hate and blindness in the dim light of those tiki torches.

It is not only my color that demands I speak against this but my faith.  I am a preacher, I am a chaplain, I am a pastor, I am a faith leader and it pisses me off to see the God Who has loved me to a state of wholeness in which I might actually be okay in this life be dragged through the mud like this.  BUT I do not get to say that the people in the march are thus less human, because that same God laid in His own blood in the dirt while men hurled insults at Him and His death was for them, too.  The men in Virginia are my brothers, my fellow humans, God’s created children, and the reason that God blows my mind and keeps pulling me back in is that I am called to denounce them utterly and love them completely at the same time.

As are you, whether you’re Christian or not, because all faith systems save maybe Satanism have an inherent recognition that the other person is bound to you in some way and that you can’t treat someone else like they are less to make you more.  Even atheism, if done with any morality at all, has a certain appreciation of other people.  If I’m going to say that my black and brown friends are valuable and wonderful and beautiful if only because they are human, then I better be prepared to say that these white supremacists who scare the hell out of me are also valuable (if not wonderful or beautiful) because they are human and I do not get to take that humanity away from them.  Even if I really, really want to.

But I do get to call out hate where I see it and say that isn’t okay.  I do get to refuse to let my silence be my complicity, as President Trump has so cowardly done.  I must do these things, because I call on the name of a God Who will look me in the eye at the end of days and ask whether I gave food to Him when He was hungry, whether I gave Her drink when She was thirsty, whether I clothed Him when He was naked, whether I gave Her housing when She was without shelter, whether I visited Him when He was in prison, whether I looked at Her and saw God in every shade possible.

White supremacy has no place with God.  Racism has no place with God.  The idea of America has no place with God, for “My kingdom is not of this world.”  And I will say that plainly, baldly, forcefully from every platform I can find and call upon everyone who reads this to do the same because I cannot pray with any patient or preach from any pulpit if I do not.  That would be hypocrisy of the highest order, and I have had enough of being a whitewashed tomb.

 

Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.  (Romans 13:10, NET Bible)

To Repeat, to Repeat

I am white.

This is not true in the strictest sense of the color white; I do not match the many papers littering my desk.  I am, in fact, a sort of mottled peach covered in light brown freckles.  The insides of some of my fingers are a burnt orange; I’ve never figured out why.  The veins that show through my black tattoos are lavender and teal.

When I was a kid, my family had a foster kid who was black.  This was not true in the strictest sense of the color black, either; she was a deep brown with palms even lighter peach than mine and frizzy black hair.  I called her my chocolate baby because I was three and she was two and the only thing I’d ever seen before that was her color was a Hershey’s bar.  I thought she was beautiful, and I still remember when I figured out that you don’t grow out of your skin color like you can with hair color and that I was, in fact, always going to be white.  It broke my heart.

This week has been so strange in the utter nonsense of the Dolezal mess and then the heartbreaking stupidity of the Charleston massacre.  I have everything and nothing to say to this.  In fact, I would love to let Dr. Greg Hills speak for me, because I agree with what he says.  And I would love to have Jon Stewart speak for me, because I wholeheartedly agree with what he says, too.  I would even let myself speak for me from three years ago, because it’s still true.

But those are easy.  Those are leaning on the words of others so that I don’t have to respond here, now, to the fact that we as a nation are continually ignoring the deep split between our rationality and our actions.  My father sometimes tells the story of growing up seeing segregated water fountains in public places and I always thought oh, how far we’ve come.  How good it is that we would not stand for that anymore.

Is it better or worse that we “allow” everyone to drink from the same water fountain but refuse to stop segregating safety?  Is it better or worse that I can teach a class of students of every shade but know that the darker kids will fight twice as hard to go anywhere with the lessons?  Is it better or worse to know that racism has buried itself in our marrow rather than boldly flying its colors?

I cannot in good conscience look my black, brown, peach, yellow, white, or beige friends in the eyes and say I am beyond angry about the murders in Charleston or the appropriation of oppression of Dolezal if I am myself still shading away from “them” in any sense, if I am not refusing at every opportunity to point out the places built to exclude, if I am not paying attention to the thousand small ways that I keep my comfortable little bubble intact.  But I cannot even begin to understand, Reader, what to do.  I can mourn, as Reverend Gafney calls for, and that is good and necessary.  And I can, in the little daily interactions, refuse to turn away from someone simply because s/he looks different.

But what else?  I’m not much of one for storming the capitol or even organizing a prayer vigil, yet God did not call me to be His feet so that I could sit on them.  Christianity is a faith that walks, runs, leaps through the places where hate destroys to be the light that saves.  It is a faith that demands we hold ourselves and each other accountable to a Kingdom view that says this shit won’t be tolerated, cannot stand in the presence of the God Who Himself was rather darker than the Europeans when He was in human form.  It is a faith with no patience for injustice, and the deaths in Charleston are quite simply that.

Hate is not just.  Unprovoked violence against the defenseless in a sacred space is not just.  Blaming the victims is not just.  Pretending that our social system did not create a place where someone felt it was not only possible but right to plan and enact the murder of nine people is not just.  And we must face that.  We must say it to ourselves, the shocked whispers building to the outraged roar that we are part of injustice and we cannot stay there.  We must not stay there; we must refuse to accept that this is Somewhere Else, that it is a fluke or an accident or a tragedy unconnected to the conversation we have in every level of a society that promotes weapons as though they’re intrinsically harmless, that connects skin color to human value, that belittles the mentally ill by classifying hate as an uncontrollable malfunction.

I have no idea how to do this, but I know that it must be done.  To continue repeating this cycle of violence founded in racial prejudice is to ignore all that we learn every single time about the worth of God’s children—and what good is it to be thinking creations if we do not learn?

 

And Jesus said, “The things that come out of people are the things that make them unclean.  All these evil things begin inside people, in the mind: evil thoughts, sexual sins, stealing, murder, adultery, greed, evil actions, lying, doing sinful things, jealousy, speaking evil of others, pride, and foolish living.”  (Mark 7:20-23, NCV)