a sermon for today IF I were still a preacher: gimme shelter

Not long ago, a colleague posted a meme on Facebook declaring: Yes, this IS who we are, America! Perhaps you've seen it, too? It is a short hand reminder that racism, antisemitism, misogyny, violence, and fear of the stranger are not new things for our nation: rather, hatred has been woven into the fabric of our history. It has been a part of us since the beginning. Sometimes it seems dormant, other times it awakens to become the dominant energy in our politics, and always it shapes and forms our patrimony. Overtly or covertly, the story of the United States is one saturated in hatred. 

Let's be clear, however, it is not the only fact of American history. Such a claim would be untrue and critically unbalanced. There is a legacy of kindness and generosity that also boldly runs through the American experience. It periodically breaks through both the organized and spontaneous acts of our hatred as well as the crass and selfish machinations of our dominant culture. Sometimes our better angels appear as individuals: think Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Clara Barton, A.J. Muste, Dolores Huerta, A. Philip Randolf, Fannie Lou Hammer, Cesar Chavez, Joe Hill, William Barber, Gloria Steinhem, Sitting Bull, Carrie Newcomer, Denis Banks, Maya Angelou, Valerie Kaur, Harvey Milk, MLK. At other times, the holiness becomes organized: the Abolitionists, the struggle for women's suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, the labor movement, the peace movement, the women's movement, the movement for LGBTQ equality, the American Indian Movement, our ecologists. The aching of our hearts for freedom has been strong and consistent. It has also been systematically compromised, violated and defiled. No one captures the ambiguous agony of America's hopes and dreams better than Langston Hughes in his poem, "Let America Be America Again."

Let America be America again. 

Let it be the dream it used to be. 

Let it be the pioneer on the plain 

Seeking a home where he himself is free. 

(America never was America to me.) 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— 

Let it be that great strong land of love 

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme 

That any man be crushed by one above. 

(It never was America to me.) 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty 

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, 

But opportunity is real, and life is free, 

Equality is in the air we breathe. 

(There’s never been equality for me, 

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

(read it all @ https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-america-be-america-again)

We are a romantic and often naive nation. We tend to see only part of the truth at any given moment in time. We rarely appreciate paradox and often deny the irony of our history. What's more, we haven't yet learned the importance and necessity of corporate confession and repentance - a peculiar oddity given our Puritan roots. Germany learned to confess after orchestrating the Holocaust. South Africa, Rwanda and Canada have explored repentance too albeit imperfectly. At the height of the Cold War, America's wisest public theologian, the late Reinhold Niebuhr, who was equally insightful and blind to his own shadows, described our history in his masterwork, The Irony of American History:

The tragic elements in present history are not as significant as the ironic ones. Pure tragedy elicits tears of admiration and pity for the hero who is willing to brave death or incur guilt for the sake of some great good. Irony however prompts some laughter and a nod of comprehension beyond the laughter; for irony involves comic absurdities which cease to be altogether absurd when fully understood. Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history. Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb. And the irony is increased by the frantic efforts of some of our idealists to escape this hard reality by dreaming up schemes of an ideal world order which have no relevance to either our present dangers or our urgent duties... Our own nation, always a vivid symbol of the most characteristic attitudes of a bourgeois culture, is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the days of its infancy. The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world. The pattern of the historical drama grows more quickly than the strength of even the most powerful man or nation.

Today - after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa and a week of attempted political assassinations of President Trump's most vigorous critics by pipe bombs - we are no closer to embracing, confessing and repenting our shadow than we were after the white nationalist rebellion on the streets of Charlottesville, the carnage at the Pulse Club in Orlando, or the slaughter of the innocents at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. No closer. Some thought Colombine might be our turning point. Or the bloodshed at the University of Virginia. I was certain it would take place after Sandy Hook. But our addiction to violence, the virulent denial of American hatred, and greed runs deep. I see no reason to believe that the events of this past week will awaken us.

No, we will enter the mid-term elections as a nation divided and remain so afterwards for the elections will only solidify our polarization. Republican ideologues will likely triumph in the Senate; and Democratic challengers will surely pick up momentum in the House. The Senate elections are mostly in large, rural states with small, conservative populations. The contests in the House will occur in highly populated urban and suburban centers where white, educated women might vote their disgust with the President. It is an important election and holds the possibility of restoring a bit of balance to the equation of power in Washington. 

But it will not heal our souls. It will not evoke a change of heart nor a call to corporate conversion. This will not take place because we are obviously not ready to get honest. Or vulnerable. Or heart broken. Or courageous. Apparently, there must be still more grieving in these so-called United States before there is room in our beings for radical, transformative, healing grace. So let us grieve: publicly, repeatedly, boldly, relentlessly, and honestly. Let us join the Psalmist and lament:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann has written that the Hebrew prophets of ancient Israel have something essential for us to learn: lament opens our hearts. Grief drives us to our knees. Confession exposes us to the possibilities of repentance. And then, when we least expect it and never deserve it, at God's own unique and mysterious time, a vision of a new heaven and new earth is shared with the human imagination. Then, and only then, when we are open to the wisdom of our wounds and thoroughly vulnerable, can a measure of healing take place. It is always beyond our control. It is never a consequence of linear thinking. It is, however, congruent with our brokenness and grounded in our despair. 

Brueggemann makes two points: First, to prepare our hearts for God's healing:

The prophetic task (is) to break that denial, and that can only be done by honest, public acknowledgement that takes the form of grief for what was that is being lost. Ours is a society of great loss; that loss, moreover, generates fear and anxiety. But until the denial is broken by the public acknowledgement of grief, we are unable to come to terms with the reality of our social condition. Old patterns of privilege and entitlement cannot be sustained any longer!

Second, as we wait upon the Lord, God's prophetic servants must name and claim our grief or the despair that results from denial:

The failure and loss of the ideology is not acknowledged, there is enough awareness of loss and failure to lead to despair. There is no doubt that our society is in despair, hopes for nothing, and does not believe that there are gifts still to be given. Such despair characteristically results in violence, either against others or against self. Readiness for violence in our society (see the militarization of the police and the force of the gun lobby) is a measure of our despair... (But) despair is countered in prophetic parlance, by acts of vigorous hope. The prophets articulate what God has yet promised on which the faithful rely. Such hope is voiced, for example, by Martin Luther King in his mantra, “I have a dream.” The dream he dreams is the promise of God; such prophetic hope insists that the circumstance of social failure has not defeated God’s capacity to generate new social possibility.

(see Brueggemann, Reality, Grief and Hope: Three Prophetic Tasks)

It is my sad conclusion that the lies of the President - his naked racism, his vicious shaming, his disdain for the Earth, and utter disregard for the most vulnerable of our sisters and brothers - must continue. Not because God wills it, but because it is the natural consequence of our denial. And until we are sick and tired of grief and despair, the violence and fear will grow. You see, the terror that we are now experiencing as white folk has been a long time coming: it has been present since our origins, it has always been a part of the experience of people of color - women, indigenous, minorities and LGBTQ people, too - and now, to paraphrase Malcolm X, "the chickens have come home to roost among white people of privilege." Our brokenness is palpable. Two thirds of our nation knows it to be fact. 

So our work is to own this grief. To feel it profoundly - without denial - to express it visibly and regularly. Even as we trust in a love greater than our sorrows, now is a time to weep - to sing and dance and wait creatively, too - but mostly to weep.

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity...
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun...
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

I may not live to see the healing in my generation. My father said this at the start of President Obama's bid for the highest office in our land - but it came to pass. My grandmother said it about equal voting rights, too - but that which was not imaginable came to pass in 1965. I may not live to see a just peace win the day in the US again. But by faith I trust that compassion and justice are at the core of God's heart - and by faith I know that God's will wins. Love wins. As St. Paul wrote after encountering the presence of the resurrected Jesus:

We celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because hope is God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Our sisters and brothers have lived through times like these - and worse. The rise and collapse of fascism in Europe. The middle passage into American slavery. The Holocaust. Jim Crow. McCarthyism. The internment of Japanese. Sexual violation and exploitation. The trail of tears. The Underground Railroad. Martyrdom in all its multiple forms. The rise and fall of communism. In solidarity with those we love, with song and prayer and encouragement, with earth shattering lament and just a little bit of faith - like unto a mustard seed - we can do this hard thing. We can. We have. And we shall again. 

And I know this to be true both by faith and because I have already experienced the sacred imagination giving us glimpses of our new day through artists letting their grief be transformed into healing by God's love. In their vulnerability and honesty, the holy takes our shared pain, leads us through our agony and points us towards repentance and a measure of hope. If you listen to NOTHING else this week, please give yourself time to take in Lisa Fischer's transformative interpretation of "Gimme Shelter." She is proof that we CAN do this hard thing...