Fake Good News - at the Fence

I serve as an escort at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The job is simple. It is to be a hospitable presence to the women and couples who come to the clinic for a variety of reasons. My wife tells me I need to tell people I am a greeter rather than an escort - ah, language and images! Both words work as a way to talk about how I see myself out on the parking lot as folks arrive. I do not know the purpose of a visit made by any of the people. I suppose this is much like the waiting room at my doctor's office - no one knows why I am showing up. Unless, of course, I look like death warmed over and seem like someone everyone should avoid less they too catch the plague. Even then, I am simply another patient in need of a doctor's or a nurse's attention. Just as important as not knowing what brings the people to the clinic is that I do not know them - their life situation - their history - their prospects for a life beyond that day at hand.

At our Planned Parenthood building there is a fence around the parking lot. On the outside of the fence there are often protestors armed with signs, pictures, and voices. Fences are not unusual. There are fences - everywhere. There are reasons for fences - many reasons. Fences divide up space. Fences set boundaries. Fences keep people and things inside the boundaries and fences keep other people and things outside. In many ways, it is the perfect image for a story about us and them. It is (this us and them story) as old as the history of the cultures of the world - as old as the history of religious folks within the life of those cultures. Think about it - there is usually no better maker of us and them than religious folk who work to create a world in which they can dictate - like a god - who is good and who is evil - who is in and who is to be out - who is acceptable and who is unacceptable - who knows God's mind and who doesn't. The assumption that one person or a people are able to make such a judgment makes that person or group of people (I would suggest) less than the humanity we are meant to be. We lose our creativity whenever we think we have the right to judge others - whenever our desire for life as we want it gives us permission to negate the lives of others. We refuse to see ourselves and others as the image of God - a we - not an us/them.

In our culture we are being hit with what has been called fake news. It is the antithesis of news. It is made up - it is like gossip - it is filled with stories that give us just what we want to hear - even when it is less than the truth or a half-truth - which is not truth at all. Fake news is not the property of one group of people - it is a self-serving word used by everyone in order to shape a world that looks just like we want it to look. After listening and watching and seeing the display of folks out at the fence - folks who cover themselves with the name of Jesus and select biblical  passages and Christian symbols and words associated with the Scriptures - I am very willing to say that the Good News at the fence is fake Good News. It is not a word or a presence of grace and love that is as available and vulnerable as the Jesus of Scripture. It is a warrior word - a vicious word - a condemning word - a self-righteous word - a finger-pointing word. It is a word afraid of a world that is the ground of God's ongoing creativity that moves us beyond our own fixed desires.

I find the words of the folks at the fence to be fake Good News because it attempts to drive people into a state of shame. Shame has a way of becoming a deep wound - one that can be inflicted quite easily - one that has a way of destroying the life of God's beloved - one that does not heal through more shaming. The Good News of the Christ of God never shames. The business of fake Good News is carried out by the powers of death - the powers that want to be gods of the world - the powers of religious control that have lost the vision of the peaceable Reign of God. Fake Good News rejects everyone who does not go along with the life that it has deemed as necessary - even if all others must be crucified by the lies of religious shame. Unfortunately, in many ways, I hear fake Good News within the breath of many self-proclaimed 'good' Christians - and it always smells like death and hell to me. No Good News at all.

Remember the woman caught in adultery. The good religious folks wanted to stone her. I would say they want to shame her to death - along with her family - by stoning her - by getting rid of her - by treating her as a threat that needed to be removed from their self-declared good lives. But what does Jesus do in that scene. He does not get in and ride in the boat of the shame-throwers. He does not drive the woman into the ground with sticks and stones and words of death. You see, God does not shame us - God holds onto us through any and all things - even when the depths of religiously concocted shame seem to be winning the day. Forgiveness brings a new day - beyond the powers of death that feed off of the lies - the fake Good News - of religious folks who believe only in the power they can manufacture - the endless lies. Forgiveness heals all things - all people. Then - within the realm of forgiveness - life beyond our own expectations blossoms - like a garden in Eden or one just outside the empty tomb.

Shame is fake Good News - it thrives on demonizing people who are the beloved of God.  It insults the God of creation who calls all of creation good. Fake Good News tries to paint God as a liar - a cheat - a fool. For when those seeds-of-shame can be sown, they leave no room for God's unbounded love that is to be the seed of life's creativity - joy - peace - forgiveness - compassion - and endless hopefulness. I find that religious people who thrive on fertilizing the seeds-of-shame are damned to live within their own crap. That is unfortunate for them and for others they are able to pull into their realm of self-induced - self-created - self-inspired crap. Fake Good News does not bring in the Reign of God - it is afraid of such a Reign of love and grace because it would lose its power that it has worked so hard to build up - in other words - a hell-on-earth.

Fake Good News at the fence cannot and should not be met with violence of any kind. It must not be shamed - for then, that game will then never end. It must be met with the self-sacrifice of the lamb - the protectiveness of the mother hen - the one who bends to serve any and all without partiality. Maybe, we can become a movement for new life whenever we are tempted to live by fake Good News - for it is so tempting.
TRRR