Is the church really a people who bring new life to the world? Maybe I need to ask if your congregation is a gathering of people who bring new life to the world? Then again maybe I need to look in the mirror and ask if I am a part of the church - of our humanity -the brings new life to the world?
Even in retirement - and more so when I served as a pastor in a parish setting - it seems as though we are too often involved in the sacred exercise of keeping things as they are. Obviously that is not true. Many folks will point out how much the church has done to change the world. Then again, just like the steamboat that keeps on rollin, the character of our society keeps on the path of keeping on the path of what has been - and with that - following the path of how it can keep on keeping on just as is - that is often the violence of a humanity that wants nothing to do with the peaceable Reign of God - whether religious our secular.
What is the new life we bring to the world? Is it a uniform and universal stance against racism? Not yet. More and more, it seems as though we speak well of the end of racism yet the church too often fades into the wall when race is brought into a conversation trying to uncover the ongoing game of racism - a game in which we - are the active pieces on the board. I am working my way though Tim Wise's book White Like Me. It is a life story that open up the subtle yet powerful way that we white folks are sucked into a false reality - a reality that closes off the wide wonderful spectrum of the diversity of our humanity. Wise presents an honesty and painful personal history that too many of us white folk try to dismiss - too, too easily.
When recalling a story of how his very, liberal thinking and living mother - having had too much to drink - said, Goddamn nig... He shut her down. It was a point of painful recognition. When I read it, it made so much sense - painful sense. Let me quote something Wise wrote:
Racism, even if it not your own but merely circulates in the air, changes you: it allows you to think and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be. My mother, by proving her own weakness and exhibiting her own conditioning, taught me that one can never be too carful, can never enjoy the luxury of being too smug of believing oneself so together, so liberal, so down to earth with the cause of liberation that it becomes impossible to be sucked in, to be transformed.
Then he writes; People never hurt others in moments of strength and bravery, or when we're feeling good about ourselves. If we spend all of our time in places such as that, then fighting for social justice would be redundant - we would simply have social justice and be done with it, and we could go swimming, or dancing, or whatever people do.
Within our diversity - within our world that draws lines between neighborhood - within the places we claim as safe as we point at those that we see as dangerous - within the wonderful way our humanity is expressed in different colors and languages and life experiences, there is one truth that too many of us are afraid to hold onto and not lose our grip: we are one. But that, that truth, is something we have learned, somehow, is not true. Where in the hell did we get that? Well, we were born into it and we drank its poison even as it was hidden within the love of wonderful family and friends. Today, we must not accept poison or lies. We must be vulnerable people who question. We must be people who know how to bend and bow and not make others into our image - but listen to the story of their humanity that is as human as ours - maybe more so.
We have come out on the other side of of another Independence Day. We, especially people of faith, need to divest ourselves of the stuff that has given us so much. So that - we will be open to the humanity of those we have been taught - however subtlety - is not like ours. Until then, the same old power of death will lead us - we will draw lines - we will move away - we will talk about them - we will see ourselves as the blessed norm. Yet, the norm has never been blessed. It has always been the power of the beast that the Lamb - through its love - dismantles through sacrificial living.
TRRR
No comments:
Post a Comment