A Reflection on the Book of Job

As you probably have heard, legislators in Texas successfully created a law that has effectively ended abortion in Texas. The law, Senate Bill 8 as it’s known, empowers ordinary citizens to sue anyone who performs or in any way supports abortions that happen anytime after about six weeks, when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Most women do not even know they’re pregnant until well after the first six weeks. Now, doctors, nurses, Uber drivers, anyone providing financial support to a mother who might seek an abortion – anyone who in any way supports an abortion after six weeks, except for the patient, is liable to be sued by any ordinary citizen. The law empowers citizens rather than state officials to enforce the law. And it incentivizes enforcement of the law by providing $10,000 rewards to any citizen who successfully sues anyone who performs or supports an abortion after six weeks. Senate Bill 8 is in clear violation of decades of established legal precedent since Roe v. Wade upholding a mother’s right to seek an abortion until the end of the second trimester of pregnancy. But by preventing citizens who want to protect their abortion rights from sueing public officials, the Texas law outmaneuvers the normal way that illegal laws are challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court, as you probably know, allowed the Texas law to go into effect, not seeing a clear response to the unorthodox procedural issues presented in the case. As a result, abortion providers have effectively shut down in Texas, fearing legal prosecution brought by pro-life citizens and/or citizen bounty hunters who are variously motivated to enforce the law. Women are now forced to seeking abortions in neighboring states: Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas.

I like to listen to podcasts, especially when I’m driving or out walking the dog. One of my favorites is The Daily from the New York Times. The daily provides an in-depth look each day at one story that is center-stage in the day’s news. On Friday, that story was about an abortion clinic in Oklahoma called Trust Women. Trust Women, like many clinics in states neighboring Texas, has been overwhelmed in the last month with a swell of women from Texas who are now forced to travel to seek abortions. Trust Women is about three hours north of Dallas and is one of the closet clinics that Texas women can still go to. As a result, Trust Women has been overwhelmed with demand, so much so that the clinic simply cannot schedule many women for an abortion before Oklahoma’s 20-week abortion limit. Texas women who cannot get an appointment in time and cannot afford to travel to find a clinic that can perform the abortion are left with only one legal option: they are forced to carry their baby to term.

There were a number of heartbreaking interviews in Friday’s episode of The Daily. The most heartbreaking one to me was a young woman, Samira, from Beaumont, Texas. Samira found out she was pregnant at five weeks. She scheduled an appointment for an abortion in Texas on September 1, the day thenew law into effect. And on that day, the doctors heard a fetal heartbeat, which meant that she could no longer have the abortion. Heartbroken, Samira had to schedule an abortion outside of Texas, in Oklahoma. Samira grew up in poverty. She has a two-year old son. She and her partner hold minimum wage jobs. Their financial situation is precarious, but in the last year, it improved, and they were making it. In November 2020, Samira and her partner moved into their own apartment and bought their first brand-new mattress.

Samira says that she is determined to provide for her two-year-old son the things that were often missing from her upbringing – electricity, heat, and enough food. In the podcast, we hear the fear and desperation in Samira’s voice as she explains that having a second child will plunge her family into financial emergency. Samira is so passionate about wanting to create a better life for her son, and she is so clear that a second child just will not make that possible. At the same time, Samira is torn by the decision. She wishes that abortion weren’t the only way to address her situation. But of course, those lawmakers who are intent upon undermining access to abortions are often the same lawmakers who are unwilling to provide the resources to support children and families who cannot afford to bring another child into the world. “They don’t understand that we’re real people,” Samira says.

What’s striking about Samira’s story is the fragility of her situation. Here’s a person who is trying hard to scratch out a life for herself and her family. She’s a hard worker. She and her partner are committed to providing a better life for her son – and by “better life,” she doesn’t mean a McMansion, a Volvo, and summer vacations. She means an apartment, where the lights come on when you flip the switch; that is warm in the winter; and that is stocked with enough food so that her two-year-old son doesn’t go hungry. Samira is clearly a child of generational poverty. And just when she and her partner are starting to achieve the life they envision for themselves, the Texas abortion law almost upsets the whole apple cart.

“They don’t understand that we’re real people,” Samira says. To me, that’s a reminder that we human beings are vulnerable, although sometimes that’s easy to forget. We are vulnerable to pain, sickness, heartbreak, and death. We are vulnerable to violence that others perpetrate on us. We are vulnerable to systems that oppress and marginalize. In many ways, what makes us most human is that we are vulnerable. We’re limited. We human beings are vulnerable creatures, who can hurt and be hurt, who don’t live forever, who aren’t invincible, and who mess up, sometimes badly.

And then there’s Job. Job didn’t mess up at all. And yet God saw fit to allow Satan, the accuser, to test Job’s piety. First, Satan takes everything away from Job – his crops, livestock, camels, servants, and Job’s family. Still, Job stands firm. He does not “sin or charge God with wrongdoing.” So then Satan comes back for round two. This time, Satan says, let’s afflict Job physically, “touching his bone and his flesh,” and then Job will surely curse God to God’s face. Fine, God says. Do it. Just don’t kill him. Satan goes off and inflicts Job with sores all over his body. Job scrapes himself with a potsherd and sits among the ashes. His wife, exasperated, tells Job: why don’t you just curse God and die? And with that, our happy reading for today comes to an end.

You may know the broad outlines of the rest of the story. The fairytale narrative in the first couple of chapters turns to poetic verse for most of the rest of the book. Job’s three friends come to him and try to convince him that he has done something wrong, is deserving of punishment, and needs to repent. Job agrees with his friends about the power and majesty of God, but disagrees with them about his guilt. He maintains his innocence, and his resolve to defend himself intensifies throughout. The Book of Job is framed as a kind of cosmic trial in which Satan, literally “the prosecutor,” tries to impeach Job’s God-fearing character. Rejecting his wife’s advice, Job never directly curses God. But he does curse himself and the day he was born. And by doing that, Job does effectively impugn God as the creator of such a miserable life, and in insisting on his innocence, Job also questions God’s justice. Job’s self-defense implicitly turns the tables of the trial, with Job assuming the Satanic role of prosecutor, while God moves closer and closer to the role of defendant. But in the end, God famously answers Job “out of the whirlwind,” challenging him to reckon with the majesty of God’s creation. God relativizes Job’s implicit questioning of God: Who are you to question me? And who are you to call my creative work into question?

Job is a challenging book in many ways, in part because it’s hard to say just what it’s about. In some ways, Job is the ultimate statement of what theologians call “theodicy,” the problem of evil – how an all-powerful and completely good God allows bad things to happen to good people. On that question, Job doesn’t hold back – God does allow bad things to happen to Job, and then when Job pushes back, God essentially puts Job in his place. The book seems to be saying: “You think this is bad, Job – but what do you know? You couldn’t possibly understand the designs of such a powerful and majestic God.” For many of us, “what do you know?” is not the most comforting answer to the problem of evil, particularly when God is allowing it to happen as a test.

Job is about the problem of evil, but it is more fundamentally about the problem of being human. Some commentators have said that Job is part two of the creation story. I like to think that Job picks up at Genesis 1:31, where God saw everything that God made, and indeed, it was very good. To me, this one verse opens to the deepest challenge to faith. And that challenge is not so much about how it is possible that a good and all-powerful God allows evil to happen. I think that the most urgent challenge to faith is actually deeper than the problem of evil. It is this: was God telling the truth when God looked at God’s creation and deemed it good? Surely, that must be a joke. Look around. What’s good about it? Human beings suffer in all manner of ways, both because we are finite – that is, we die like all other creatures – and because we abuse what freedom we have, perpetrating evil on others. Look at Samira, a woman who grew up in generational poverty, who has worked hard to scratch out a better life for her son, and who now has to make the hard choice between bringing a new child into the world, which would almost certainly impoverish her family, or terminate the pregnancy. Sure – Samira has probably made some unwise choices. Who hasn’t? But at the same time, we have chosen not to create systems that meet people like Samira where they are.  

War, disease, disaster, climate change, pandemic, chronic poverty, food insecurity, political dysfunction. When God created all things, including human beings, and called them good, was God serious? Job doesn’t think so. Job calls the goodness of his own creation into question. Despite my piety, despite all of the ways I’ve sought to honor God in my life, still this happens. It would have been better if I’d never been born, Job says. I don’t need to curse God and die; I can just curse myself and die.

And that is where God takes exception. That is where God shows up in the whirlwind, and says: Where were you when I created all of these things? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  When I shut in the seas with doors? When I caused the dawn to know its place? Over five chapters, God makes it very clear to Job how wondrous God’s creation is. The point of the Book of Job is to inspire wonder at the wondrous works of God. Because for the author of Job, wisdom and wonder are linked. To wonder at the magnificence of creation is to grow in wisdom. And wisdom is the awareness that God’s work is good, just as it is. And when God created all things and said that they are good, God was telling the truth.

And so we are all vulnerable, just as Samira is vulnerable. But being limited, being finite, being vulnerable is part of what makes human creation good. Much of what we value makes sense to us because we are vulnerable: love, courage, commitment, striving, hope, faith – all of these values are meaningful to us precisely because we can die and we can make mistakes. What would love be if loss were not possible? Or courage? Or friendship? Or hope? All of these things are good to us because we are vulnerable and fallible creatures, not invincible and perfect ones. I think Job is saying that as painful as it is to be human, we are actually good – not because of something we might become, but because of what we are – finite, limited, vulnerable. And so when God created us and said we are good, God was telling the truth.

Romans 7:15-25a

Trinity Presbyterian Church, Winston-Salem, NC

July 5, 2020

“White People School.” That’s the term my friends and I jokingly used in high school whenever we observed white people making racial faux pas. For example, if an adult referred to a person of color as “articulate,” as though they were surprised to learn that black people could use English well, we’d say: “He must have missed the first week of White People School.” “Definitely failed White People School.” That was our judgment when a white person – perhaps another person in our peer group – attempted to use language they had heard in MTV hip-hop videos to relate to people of color. Or here’s one that came up all the time: “What do black people think about …” Our white parents and teachers loved that one; it came out of their mouths often. And it definitely earned a White People School demerit. “You don’t ask a single black person to speak on behalf of all black people. That was covered in, like, week three of White People School,” we’d say. “She must have been absent from White People School that week.” My friends and I loved to snicker at white people who ran afoul of these rules, and by our snickering, to judge benighted white people for failing to learn the lessons of White People School. Of course, as teenagers, we knew more than everyone else about everything else, and we weren’t afraid to let ourselves and others know it. This was no doubt arrogant behavior. But if I’m being honest, I enjoyed this form of racialized humor – and maybe still do, just a little bit. 

White People School was not, of course, a formal course of study. There was no White People School building. There were no White People School teachers, no regularly scheduled White People School course meetings, no White People School recess – although I bet I could create a great stand-up routine around the idea of “White People School recess.” There definitely was, however, White People School instruction. A good bit of it was subtle, implicit rather explicit, instruction. One learned through observation, and also through correction, about what to say and do, and, more importantly, what not to say and do, around black people. The fundamental theme of the White People School curriculum is that it is vitally important for white people to choose their words and also regulate their behavior very carefully when in the presence of people of color. That’s because, our White People School curriculum told us, black people are always and forever angry with white people and are looking for any opportunity to express that anger. It is therefore vital to do and say the right things, lest black people accuse us of being racist. Behind closed doors, of course, the lessons of White People School did not apply – in fact, White People School lessons about public behavior reinforced private spaces where all bets were off. In private spaces, white people can say what they really think of people of color.  

My White People School lessons started early. My grandmother, my father’s mother, Lilly Mae was a wonderful person in many ways. She grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the Jim Crow South. Her White People School education was much different from mine. Grandma routinely displayed distrust, if not outright hatred, of black people, whom she referred to as “colored” her entire life. She always lowered her voice to whisper whenever it was necessary to talk about people of color, which struck me as odd. I remember one time, my Dad called my grandmother out on her use of the term “colored” to describe African Americans. “Mom,” he said in a joking tone, “you’re like two or three politically correct terms behind the times,” he said. “We now say ‘African American.’ That’s the polite way to refer to them.” That was, of course, a classic White People School lesson. My dad wanted to show that he’d kept up his White People School bona fides; and he probably wanted me to learn a lesson in witnessing that exchange. But Dad didn’t anticipate my Grandma’s response: “I thought ‘colored people’ was the polite way of referring to them,” she said. Clearly, my grandmother using a similar White People School logic, but she was working with a different vocabulary list. 

So, that was White People School in a nutshell. White People School was all about learning how to do and say the right things in the presence of people of color in order to avoid courting their wrath. And that was my entire education in race, or so I thought. I thought that learning about race meant learning how not to make black people angry. The white people I grew up with in Cincinnati, OH, thought that racism only exists in the South, and Cincinnati isn’t in the South. (There are all kinds of problems with this idea, but we’ll have to save that for another day.) Also, they thought, you’re not really a racist unless you’re a card-carrying, cross-burning Grand Wizard of the KKK, a neo-Nazi skinhead, or something like that. 

Of course, White People School was really part of a deeper education in whiteness and white supremacy. That is, it was an education in how to avoid wrestling with real questions of the systematic and structural power and privilege that white people have by virtue of our whiteness, of thinking we are white people. More specifically, White People School was an education in guarding against what we now understand as “white fragility,” that feeling of defensiveness that white people express when they are reminded of their participation in structures and processes that have created racial injustice and racial inequities and that go to the very heart of white identity.

In fairness, I must say that it does take some effort to navigate the world in the ways that White People School taught us to navigate it. There are lots of rules to learn and follow, lots of situations to analyze carefully so we can know what we’re supposed to do. That is tiresome. It’s not, of course, as bad as being systematically hunted by the police, for example. But this is why, I think, that white people who have attended White People School are enraged when they now hear that race is a problem, not of word choice, but one that is connected to whiteness and white identity itself; that we are still racist even if we perfectly heed the lessons of White People School; that what we need to do is not simply use words correctly but dismantle the very structures of power and privilege that make whiteness and white supremacy what they are – when White People School graduates that I grew up with hear these things, they get really angry. “But I did everything that these rules tell us to do,” they say. “Why do you still think I’m a racist?” And then their next move, of course, is to attack the whole enterprise of White People School as fundamentally unjust for white people: “This is all just a bunch of political correctness nonsense,” they say. “White people can’t win for losing. I didn’t create these injustices, and I’m not responsible for them.” All of a sudden, we’re the victims of political correctness. 

That’s where a lot of white people are these days. In fact, lots of white people are doubling-down on their whiteness, through, for example, the valorization of Confederate history. White people also double-down on their whiteness when they reject and disparage public health measures as infringements on our individual freedom, because white people think that we’re invincible and that the world should accommodate itself to our convenience. White people are right that their identity is being threatened. But they’re only right about that if they also understand that whiteness is an identity predicated on illusion, violence, exploitation, death, and destruction. And that’s an identity we should want to get rid of. 

So, what should we do? I think Paul’s thinking in Romans may point in some helpful directions. The Letter to the Romans in many ways exemplifies Paul’s mission to share the good news of God’s redemptive work, first revealed in the experiences of the Jewish people, and now offered to the whole world and all of creation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul wants to put all human beings and all of creation on equal footing. Thus, he works to remove any suggestion that Jews are somehow exclusive recipients of God’s redemptive purposes. He does this in lots of different ways. One way is to note how deeply implicated all of us are in sin and evil, and how Jewish law is an insufficient remedy for this situation. “… all,” Paul writes, “both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (3:9). And in our reading for today, Paul tells us that sin is so pervasive, that he finds himself doing the very things he hates, rather than the things he wants to do. Paul then says that if it were he who is doing these bad things, then the law would be valid, since the law condemns persons for doing bad things. But, Paul argues, it is in fact not he who is doing what he does not want to do. Rather, it is, Paul says, “sin that dwells within me” that causes him to act in ways he does not want to act. The problem with the law, Paul is saying, is that the law is a remedy for the wrong problem. The situation is actually far worse than the law contemplates. 

So, when we do bad things, it is because of the evil within that, as Paul says, “lies close at hand.” What then is to be done? Paul asks: “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The answer for Paul is the new and abundant life that arises in us through faith in the resurrecting power of Jesus Christ. And that new life, Paul argues, provides a certain kind of freedom – the freedom to live fully into life unencumbered by sin, pain, brokenness, and missteps of the past. “For freedom,” Paul writes famously in Galatians, “Christ has set us free.” We don’t have the freedom to do whatever we want. But we do have the freedom to receive the gift of life that God offers through Jesus Christ. We also have the freedom to fail at living that life and to still be loved by God. We have the freedom, in other words, to be imperfect. 

Let me be clear that there are problems with Paul’s theology – not least, in my view, his association of the body with sin and death and the soul with life and redemption. We could spend a lot of time talking about why these are problems. Leaving all of that aide for now, what I do deeply appreciate about Paul is his commitment to the belief that God wants more than anything else for God’s creation to have life and to have it abundantly. We find ourselves caught up in all manner of sin and brokenness. We make some of that sin and brokenness for ourselves through our own poor choices. But some forms of sin and brokenness choose us. That’s true, in a way, of our whiteness and our white supremacy. No one of us single-handedly created whiteness and white supremacy; they chose us, and our active participation in them only reinforces their grip on us. Whiteness gets its claws on us in lots of different ways. White People School is just one of those ways. These evils are very much alive, and they are lodged deep within us. But they are not, Paul tells us, who we really are, nor are they who God intends for us to be. 

I think that white people fear that if they dismantle their whiteness all the way down to the deepest levels of their being, they might discover that nothing remains. And then we, who think we are white, will not recognize ourselves. That is scary. But the Good News is that the freedom of new life that we have in Christ ensures that when we dismantle our deepest racist identities and impulses, there is something else there. There is life and purpose oriented around love of God and neighbor. There is life in life together with God, neighbor, and creation – in shared life with others whose experiences resonate with but also differ from our own. We belong to God, and we belong to one another. That is who we are made to be. To be sure, living into the life that God intends for us isn’t easy work. It is indeed a kind of burden. But as our Gospel passage for today tells us: Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden is light. 

I know this congregation has been exploring different ways of dismantling whiteness. I want to encourage all of us to consider how we might take risks in these endeavors – risks that reflect our confidence that there is life within us underneath our whiteness. Presbyterians have the tendency to think that there is no social problem that a really great book club can’t solve. Don’t get me wrong – reading and educating ourselves about issues of whiteness and racial justice are important first steps. But they can also serve, I think, to keep this conversation on the level of interesting ideas rather than transformative self- and community-work. And so I ask you: Where does White People School, whatever that experience was for you, still live in your deepest impulses, in your everyday orientation to the world, in your aspirations, and in your very sense of who you are? Where does White People School inform the ways that you spend your time, energy, and your money? Where does White People School get in the way of your willingness to stand and work in solidarity with vulnerable and marginalized communities? Where does it prevent you from listening deeply and carefully to members of these communities rather than speaking for them? And how does your training in White People School hinder you from engaging in the work of dismantling whiteness in risky ways – risky in the sense that you might actually lose your life and find a more abundant one in the process? Jesus tells us that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” What does the promise of abundant life look like apart from whiteness? I’m not sure any of us really knows. But I’m hopeful that God will bless our continuing journey towards life abundant. 

God saw everything that God had made, and indeed it was very good (Genesis 1:31)

I have always thought that the word “indeed” is a telling detail in this passage. I don’t know, and am too lazy to go find out, what the relevant Hebrew word is here and what its nuances are. But to my ear, there is a suggestion of additional affirmation of the sentiment that all the things God had made are very good. But why would God need to affirm God’s own sentiment that what God had created is very good? Wasn’t God sure? It’s as though God got distracted for a minute, got onto something else – the grocery list, the dishes, the lawn – and then a fleeting anxiety registered in God’s mind: wait – was that stuff I made good? Let me double check. Oh yes. My creation is indeed good. Very good, in fact. Thought so. Whew.

The “indeed” here probably doesn’t suggest a moment of hesitation, of God’s second-guessing the wisdom of creating all the things, especially human beings. But if it did, it wouldn’t be the last time in Genesis that God expresses concern about God’s human creation. The Noah and Abraham stories are peppered with Creator’s remorse. And, one might imagine, human beings continue to be the cause of divine consternation: genocide, ecological devastation, structural evils of all kinds, not to mention garden variety murder, abuse, and the like. We human beings seem to be here for all of it. And we are so profoundly vulnerable, limited, finite, as the current public health crisis reminds us.

In my view, the deepest mystery of faith is contained in this one verse at the end of the first chapter of Genesis. For better or for worse, I’ve never been challenged with a lack of certainty about God’s existence. I have simply been aware that God exists. It’s not always easy to know that God is present – although I suspect that our breath, when we pay attention to it, is God’s reminder that God works actively in every instant to sustain all of creation in its existence. At any rate, I just cannot shake the conviction that God exists, even when God does not feel present.

I am, however, vexed by what theologians and philosophers often call the “problem of evil” – the problem, in other words, that an allegedly all-powerful and essentially good God would permit the existence of evil and suffering in the world. But I am not bothered by it in quite the same way that the problem of evil often challenges philosophers and theologians. That problem is often taken to call the very existence of God into question: how can such an all-powerful and irreducibly good god exist if evil, pain, and suffering also exist, as they surely do? Yes, evil, pain, and suffering surely do exist, either by dent of human abuses of their freedom, however much or little of it we human beings have, or by the limitations imposed by finitude – that we human beings are not eternal and not invincible; we are instead vulnerable to vicissitudes like COVID-19 and other diseases, earthquakes, cancer, and the like. Two things are true: human beings abuse the agency we have, and the agency we have doesn’t protect us from everything. These twin afflictions are sometimes called “moral evil” and “natural evil.” (There are probably better ways of describing the conditions of evil, pain, and suffering in the world – but this is good enough for now.)

The end of Genesis 1, in my perspective, raises a challenge to some traditional explorations of the problem of evil. According to Genesis, human creation, with all creation, is supposed to be good. If that’s true, then we human beings must be good in the way that God created us: as, one might say, finite creatures who also enjoy a modicum of freedom, some ability, however limited, to step outside of our desires and instincts and to critically evaluate and respond to them. All of human experience exists under these conditions (again, there might be a better way of describing them – but as a shorthand, they’re good enough). That is, all things that we human beings say we value, that we experience as good, exist under the conditions of finitude and limited freedom. What we recognize as courage, love, honor, fidelity, commitment, etc., are only intelligible to us because we are both a lot bit vulnerable and a little bit free – we are limited, we suffer and die, and we also abuse our freedom from time to time, or perhaps a lot of the time. But we cannot imagine or experience human value except from within the conditions of finitude and relative freedom. We cannot, for example, imagine what love is except from the perspective of creatures who are finite, who die, and who abuse their agency from time to time. After all, what would love be if loss and disappointment were not possible? Christians hope that an infinite love exists in the being of God, and some have faith that it does – but it’s not a part of our natural experience.

Some thinkers talk about the problem of evil as though we could hope that God should and would suddenly remove the conditions of human finitude and relative freedom. But what, then, would we be hoping for? All the things that human beings understand and care about, they do so from within the human perspective, not from some other perspective. What would love mean to us if we were infallible? What would courage mean if we were invincible, or if human life had infinite duration? To suggest that a good and all-powerful God should work to change or alleviate the conditions under which human beings are, well, human, either from the outset of creation, or by swooping into history from time to time to save us from ourselves, is essentially to hope, it seems to me, for a kind of re-creation. But how could that situation be intelligible to us? What we recognize as valuable and meaningful and good is intelligible to us from within a human horizon, not some other creaturely horizon. What would human goods and values mean, how would they be intelligible to us, if they existed in a non-human horizon?

Genesis tells us that God made us human beings – not as unfree automatons, nor as eternal and unconditioned gods, nor as perfectly responsible angels, nor as invincible “men of steel” (or more inclusively, “humans of steel”) – and deemed us, along with the rest of creation, to be good. What does that mean? (And in asking this question, I underscore another distinctive feature of our human existence – that we human beings, unlike many of our co-creations, are very given to meaning-making.) So I ask again: what does this mean? This human creation – a lot bit vulnerable, a little bit free, and very given to meaning-making – and not some other kind of creation, is supposed to be good. Can that be?

Another way of asking this question is: When God created human beings and deemed us to be good, was God telling the truth? This strikes me as the more compelling theodicy question – one that perhaps even induced a divine double-take not long after God created us.

*****

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (John 20: 26-29)

This passage from John is my favorite post-Easter moment. The disciples are sheltering in in place, socially and physically distanced, hiding not from an invisible pandemic, but from very visible authorities who, presumably, are hunting them. Suddenly, Jesus shows up, stands among them, and offers a blessing: “Peace be with you.” Then Jesus, enfleshed in a physical body, breathes on the disciples, bids them to receive the Holy Spirit, and empowers them to forgive sins. We who have sheltered in place for several weeks, who fear the coronavirus, who have suffered and even lost loved ones to it, long for Jesus to show up behind our locked doors, offer peace, and impart the repairing and reconciling power of the Holy Spirit.

Then it happens again. Now Thomas is present. We remember Thomas as the doubter, who resolves only to believe in the resurrected Jesus if he can see and experience the physical resurrected Jesus. Thomas is often construed as a sceptic, who needs empirical evidence to believe in Jesus. We are supposed to learn from the Thomas story that faith, not experience, is sufficient to substantiate belief in the risen Christ. Maybe so. But I’ve often wondered if Thomas is the most faithful character in this story. Thomas, not the other disciples, is willing to do what only we vulnerable and somewhat free meaning-makers can do: Thomas sticks his fingers in the wounds of human vulnerability, and tries to figure out what’s down there. It’s a scary thing to do, and many of us, including myself, are often unwilling to do it. What is down there? Pain, brokenness, loss, death? Absolutely. But is there anything deeper than that? The answer that the story gives is, in a way, simple. What lies underneath our wounds and our vulnerability is peace and forgiveness.

Amidst all of the brokenness and complexity of human experience, God shows up in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ with one more “indeed,” one more affirmation that, indeed, when God created human beings and deemed us good, God was telling the truth. God is present among us, not as an unfree automaton, nor as an eternal and unconditioned god, nor as a perfectly responsible angel, nor as an invincible “person of steel,” but as a broken, wounded, and (until recently) deceased human being, who breathes, who knows anxiety, who understands fear and brokenness, who mourns the loss of loved ones and friends. 

We now find ourselves in that locked room with the disciples, physically and socially distanced from our friends and family, afraid, and perhaps mourning the loss of loved ones. Now, perhaps, more than ever, we ask ourselves: is any of this that we call “human experience” good? In the deepest recesses of our wounds, when we stick our fingers all the way down into them (and in this moment, we pretty much have to), what we find is peace and forgiveness. We still find ourselves in locked rooms, afraid, hiding from an “invisible enemy.” The brokenness and suffering do not go away. The wounds are still present, even in the body of God. We are still a little bit free, a lot bit vulnerable, and very given to meaning-making. But our fear and wounds don’t define us. They’re not the most real condition of our existence. Nor are the locked rooms, the fear, the physical distancing, the sheltering-in-place, and the quarantines. Peace and forgiveness are really real. When God created us and deemed us good, was God telling the truth? Yes, indeed, God was.

Fourth Presbyterian Church, South Boston, MA

October 15, 2017

When we first moved to North Carolina, I volunteered for a couple of years as a chaplain at a local hospital. I was on call about one night a month, and was called to the hospital anytime an emergency situation arose. One night I was called to be with the family of a woman, Rose. Rose, who was in her sixties, was receiving treatment for a drug overdose from earlier that evening. Rose was stable, but had passed out, and as I arrived, she was beginning to come to. In the meantime, Rose’s immediate family members, her husband Robert and her sister Jennie, had also arrived. As I talked with Robert and Jennie in Rose’s room, it was clear to me that neither was sober. At first, I had a hard time understanding exactly who Robert and Jennie were, what had happened to Rose, and what they wanted me to do. They asked me to pray for Rose, which I did. As I was praying, Rose began to wake up. She wasn’t lucid. I finished my prayer, and as I did, Robert and Jennie wanted me to know that Rose struggled with addiction, that she wasn’t a bad person, that all of them had a tough life. Rose tried hard to get clean, they said, and sometimes, for a time, she was clean. But it didn’t last. There were addiction problems with Robert and Rose’s children as well. Jennie and Robert had a story to tell about themselves and about Rose, one that invited the listener to affirm them in their struggle to live a good life, even when they couldn’t always manage to do so. That was an easy invitation for me to accept.    

As I listened, it struck me that this wasn’t the first time that Jennie and Robert had uttered these very sentences. They’d had occasion to tell that same story to other strangers, in other moments of crisis and vulnerability. My sadness and empathy connected with the reality that this probably would not be the last time that Rose, Jennie, and Robert would tell this story, because this would not likely be the last time that this family would find themselves in this situation. At the time, I felt at a loss as to what I could do to help them – there wasn’t much from my own experience that could orient me to the kind of struggles that Rose, Jennie, and Robert wrestle with every day. But in hindsight, I realize that maybe the best thing I could do for this family in that particular moment was simply to hold space for them to tell their well-worn stories about themselves and their lives, to hear those stories as best I could, and to let Rose, Jennie, and Robert know that they had been heard.

In the Exodus passage for today, the Israelites are presented as “stiff-necked,” as the text says, unwilling to be faithful to the God who was their champion, the God who led them out of slavery in Egypt, who watched over them during their long sojourn in the wilderness, and who was leading them to a promised land, flowing with milk and honey. The story would have us condemn the Israelites, as God condemns them, for their faithlessness. But that’s hard for me to do, in part because of my experience with people like Rose, Jennie, and Robert. I can’t help but have sympathy for the Israelites. They’ve endured trauma after trauma, first in slavery to the Egyptians, then the harrowing escape out of Egypt, and the long sojourn in the wilderness. All the while, their God is hard to access, hidden in a roving cloud, parked on top of a mountain that the people aren’t allowed to go on, or absent altogether for long periods of time. And now Moses, their leader, has been gone for quite awhile. You can imagine that the people’s anxiety is through the roof. Has God brought them out of an already vulnerable position in Egypt only to lead them to destruction in the wilderness?    

We human beings are meaning-making creatures. In moments of anxiety and distress, we look for explanations and narratives, some of them well-worn and many of them often repeated, many truthful and some not. Narratives help us to make sense of our world and our experience in it. Rose, Jennie, and Robert had a way of talking about themselves in their most vulnerable moments that helped them to make sense of their struggles. I think that’s what the golden calf did for the Israelites: it helped them to make meaning of their struggles in the midst of pretty profound vulnerability. In the golden calf, the Israelites affirm that they are worthy – worthy of being noticed, worthy of being remembered, worthy of being saved from the Egyptians and from the wilderness, not by an inaccessible or absent Yahweh, but by gods who can be seen and touched. The golden calf made sense to the Israelites because the golden calf made sense of their experience.

So, what’s wrong with the golden calf? What’s wrong, in other words, with idolatry? On the one hand, the Israelites were doing what human beings do – they were trying to understand how they had gotten to where they are and where they are going. On the other hand, the golden calf also signaled the Israelites’ failure to live into the new way of being that God was offering. The story of Exodus is really about this question: what does it mean to live into a new identity, a new kind of story about who we are and what makes life meaningful? In Exodus 19, God tells Moses to tell the Israelites that if they “obey my voice and keep my covenant, [they] shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples … you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” In Egypt, the Israelites had been slaves. Pharaoh abused them at will, pressed them into labor, killed Jewish children, and denied the Israelites their full humanity. But God offers the Israelites a new identity and purpose. Moses leaves the Israelite camp to ascend Mt. Sinai, and he hears from God in great detail just what a priestly kingdom and a holy nation will look like. This priestly kingdom is not without its problems (there are still slaves, for example), but it is one that protects and cares for the poor, resident aliens, widows and orphans, laborers, and those to whom harm has been done and to whom compensation is due. The holy nation that God envisions was not like life in Egypt under Pharaoh; it is a place of justice.

But for that priestly kingdom to be a possibility, it must begin with the affirmation that God is the one and only God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and out of the house of slavery. So, maybe the golden calf wasn’t just about worshipping a false god as much as it was about the Israelites’ resistance to becoming something new, a fear of learning to live differently in the world, a fear of becoming a new kind of people. It’s scary to let go of old identities and old ways of being in the world because it means that at a certain point, we might not be able to recognize ourselves anymore – and then what will happen?

This past summer, I went with a group of Wake Forest students on a nine-day pilgrimage to Iona. Iona is an island off the west coast of Scotland and is the home of an ancient monastery that is a center of Celtic Christianity. We understood what we were doing as a pilgrimage, in the sense that we were cultivating an intentional openness to new experiences of God that, we hoped, would change the way we see ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. There were a couple of students for whom the Iona trip was a first experience of traveling abroad. One of them, Carly, showed up with two huge suitcases and a smaller bag full of stuff. (Keep in mind that this was a nine-day trip!). I asked Carly if she was moving to Scotland, and I teased her that she was planning to run off with some Scotsman like Jamie Fraser from the TV show Outlander. As we traveled on trains and ferries and buses, and schlepped up and down staircases in hotels and hostels, we had to devise a buddy system for Carly so that she wouldn’t get left behind or collapse under the weight of her considerable luggage. At the beginning of the week, Carly really struggled with being away from home, with the near constant cold and wet weather, with the absence of many of the amenities that made her home life safe and comfortable. Home, or at least some idea of home, was Carly’s golden calf. Her anxiousness about the trip manifest as constant complaining. Carly casted everything in a negative light – the food, the weather, the hiking, the schedule; there was nothing good about the experience. About two days into the trip, my colleague Chris Copeland called Carly on her complaining. He said, “You know, Carly, I know you’re not in your comfort zone on this trip, but if you complain about everything, chances are you’re not going to learn anything while you’re here. You need to let some of this go.”

To her credit, Carly took Chris’s suggestion to heart. She committed to the group that she would practice gratitude whenever she felt inclined to complain. Towards the end of the week, we went for a three or four-hour hike around the island. Not ten minutes in, it started to rain, hard, as it often did. Iona is full of muddy bogs that are always a challenge to navigate, especially when it is pouring down rain. Carly was wearing bright white tennis shoes that, by the end of a day of trekking through muddy bogs, looked to be ruined. We were all waiting for her to complain about the hike, but she didn’t. Someone finally said: “Carly, if you want to complain, it’s OK.” It was pretty rough, after all! Carly said that she had been so engrossed in the conversations she had with her colleagues along the way that she had forgotten about the rain. She was surprised at how much she had learned from sharing and listening to the stories of her walking partners. Carly later reported that her attention to gratitude had shifted the whole experience for her, and she also developed more of an awareness about why she was so fearful of the experience of pilgrimage in the first place. Carly had feared the pilgrimage because she wasn’t sure she could find her way in world in which God wanted more for her than she wanted for herself.

Idolatry isn’t just about the worship of false gods. It’s more fundamentally about closing down the possibility that in being in relationship with the true God, we will become more fully who God intends for us to be. Idols are tough. Because we make them, they help us both to recognize and understand ourselves and our world. Idols shore up our vulnerability to disappointment and distress. But they also blind us to possibilities for new life. The Israelites failed to be open to the possibility that whatever was going on between Moses and God on Mt. Sinai promised more for the Israelites than the Israelites could imagine for themselves. The same was true for Carly, and maybe also for Rose, Robert, and Jennie. In closing down our vulnerability, idols prevent us from hearing what theologian Howard Thurman called the “sound of the genuine” in ourselves – those ways in which God is calling us to be who we really are.

God’s anger about the golden calf and God’s willingness to change God’s mind about the Israelites also tells us something. Yahweh is incensed at the Israelites for their idolatry and faithlessness. Yahweh is ready to wipe them off the face of the earth and rebuild the chosen community through Moses’s offspring. But Moses persuades God that if God were to destroy the Israelites, that would only show the Egyptians that God meant to exploit the vulnerability of the Israelites all along. But in calling the Israelites to be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation, God is calling them to be open to vulnerability. Moses, then, exposes an inconsistency in God’s rage. Moses reminds God of God’s promises to Israel. God relents; and not only that – God changes God’s mind.

What I hear in all of this is that the journey into new identities and new purposes to which God calls Israel and us is not linear; it’s not just good and getting better all the time. Instead, this journey is more often two steps forward and one step back. It is a redemptive journey, one in which our vulnerability is always affirmed in God’s forgiveness. God invites; we make ourselves vulnerable to God’s invitation; we try; we fail, God forgives us, and we try again. The life to which God calls us is not a good life, if “good” means progress towards perfection and the achievement of some goal. We are not called to live “good lives” in that sense; we are called to live redeemed lives – lives that don’t always get it right, but are made good despite inevitable failure in our yearning and striving and stretching towards God. Our role is to try and try again; God’s role is to forgive. And that is a hard lesson to learn, even for God.

What is the sound of the genuine in your life? And where are the opportunities to let go of narratives and stories that stand in the way of living more fully into the person God has called you to be? Wherever those opportunities are for you and for us, may God bless you on the journey.    

John 9: 1-41

FBC Highland Avenue

March 24, 2017

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday morning when I opened my copy of the Winston-Salem Journal to find a considerably large picture of one of our School of Divinity graduates, Liam Hooper, on the front page. The picture, of course, was connected to a story. And the story examines the views of two local ministers, Liam being one, on House Bill 2, on the first anniversary of the passage of that legislation. HB 2, as I’m sure you all know, is popularly known as the “bathroom bill.” Among other restrictions, the law makes it illegal for persons to use public restrooms of any gender besides the one to which they were assigned at birth.

I am proud to say that I had the pleasure of working with Liam during his time at the School of Divinity in a number of courses. Liam is an insightful, wise, and courageous minister of the Gospel, and a tireless advocate of transgender rights. That is to say, Liam would remind us, that he is an advocate of human rights – the right of all human beings to be, well, human. Indeed, in the Journal article, Liam comments that the “real failing” of HB 2 is, he says, “the failing to see [transgender people] as human.” When asked about the concern some people have that without the bathroom law, public restrooms are vulnerable to sexual predators, Liam remarks:

“[That concern] plays on and agitates pre-existing fears that people have about the possibility that the universe might not be as ordered as we think it is or that we might not fully understand the order of nature. … And so people are afraid that if there aren’t these absolutes that are men or women — what does that really mean? And it’s kind of a subconscious or pre-conscious fear. It’s just something that comes up in all of us.”

Then Liam said something that really got my wheels turning. Liam names a deep concern that I think motivates much of our fear much of the time, and particularly our fear of the other: “What if,” he says, “the world isn’t what I think it is?” What if the world isn’t what we think it is?

When we learn that the world isn’t what we think it is, what do we do then? How do we respond? And how is God present in the ways we might respond to the world when we learn that it is not what we think it is? These are tough questions – questions that maybe only a formerly blind beggar can help us to see clearly.

Please join me in a word of prayer: God, we give you thanks for the opportunity to gather in your presence as your people and your body. We ask, God, that you would work to illumine your Word for us in this moment, that we would see and feel and understand the ways in which your Word bears us up in this broken world and inspires us to respond to it with the love and compassion you showed in the life and work of your Son in whose name we pray. Amen.

_____

I have some fairly profound vision problems. Because of a genetic disfiguration of both of my corneas, I have had five corneal transplants, three in my right eye and two in my left, most recently in January of last year. There have been times – months, entire semesters even – when I could read with only one eye. And when I accidentally broke my only contact lens for my left eye this past December, on December 24 to be exact, I had a panic attack. At the time, that tiny piece of plastic was the only thing I had to help me to see well enough to read. Fortunately, I was able to get a temporary replacement. Many of you have probably experienced similar kinds of vision issues. And you know that when you love to read, you read a lot, and you aren’t certain from day to day whether you’ll be able to – well, I’ll tell you, that’s depressing. And, as you might imagine, academics who can’t read don’t do very well.

And so, as someone who has learned not to take good vision for granted, I’m struck in this passage by the blind man’s response to his own healing. We don’t hear any jubilation. There is no sense of relief. We don’t get an enthusiastic, “Thank you, Jesus” – though, in fairness, the text also doesn’t suggest that the man was ungrateful. But it is odd, isn’t it, that the only one, it seems, who is not surprised that he has been healed and can now see is the man who was blind! I’m surprised everyday when I can see! So, what’s up with that? His neighbors are surprised, the Pharisees and Jews are surprised – and in fact, “surprised” is too mild a term. They are incredulous, unwilling to believe the man, and angry that this happened at all, and especially on the sabbath. But the formerly blind beggar – he’s not surprised; he’s just cool.

When the man’s neighbors ask him where Jesus is, he says simply, “I do not know.” I like to imagine, though it is not really in the text, that this moment is the first time the formerly blind man is asked to use his vision to confirm a truth about the world. “Where is Jesus,” his neighbors ask him. I imagine the man shading his eyes, scanning the horizon, looking for Jesus, so that he can respond to his neighbors’ query about Jesus’ whereabouts. But he comes up short. How profoundly do we rely on our vision to verify everyday truths about the world? We all know the expression, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And yet, just as the newly sighted man is not surprised that he now has vision, he seems equally unperturbed when his vision fails him the first time he is asked to use it to report a fact about the world. The man doesn’t see Jesus, but, the story tells us, that does not interrupt his belief about what happened.

To my mind, the most compelling feature of this story is the man’s straightforward affirmation of the truth of his experience, despite the ways his experience complicates and confounds the worldviews of Jesus’ detractors. The Pharisees are exercised that Jesus performed the healing of the blind man on the sabbath; therefore, they conclude, Jesus must not be from God. The Jews are similarly upset. For the Jews, the formerly blind man and Jesus are both sinners, the man because his blindness proves that he was born into sin, and Jesus because he practice healing on the sabbath. The Jews question the man’s parents who out of fear insist that they talk to their son directly. The man, irritated that he is being questioned a second time, says simply: “I do not know whether [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

What irritates the Pharisees and the Jews so profoundly is that this healing upsets their deepest truths about the world. Those truths are that the law of Moses tells us what it means to live good lives, lives that reflect God’s intentions for the world; that the law clearly forbids work on the Sabbath; that disability is a form of punishment for breaking the law, and that persons born with disabilities are being punished for their own sins or the sins of their parents. The Pharisees and Jews simply cannot let go of these concerns. The last time we see the Jews in this story, they have re-affirmed their belief that the man must have been born into sin because he was blind. The fact that he is no longer blind doesn’t make him clean; the man, in their view, is still a sinner, and they drive him out. That’s exactly the same place Jesus’ disciples begin 34 verses earlier, when they ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It’s hard to let go of old ways of seeing, isn’t it!

But here Liam’s question is crucial: What if the world isn’t what we think it is? What if the world is completely different? And now, the really scary question: What if the world is different from our experience of it in such a way that those differences threaten to upset the power and privilege that benefit us but marginalize others? Imagine a prophet in the time of the Pharisees who came along and said: “You have heard it said: God loves those who pray in private. But I say unto you: pray loudly, obnoxiously, and often in public, and God will love you even more.” Now, there’s a prophet a Pharisee can love! The powerful are happy when they find out that the world is different than what they thought it was, as long as those differences benefit them. But when a sinner can be healed in a way that breaks a religious law, and that religious law ensures the power and privilege of the Pharisees and Jews – well, that just won’t do.

I’m reminded of the poignant phrase the essayist Ta-Nehesi Coates uses to describe white people in his book Between the World and Me. He refers to white people as “people who believe they are white.” That phrase underscores that whiteness is not a matter of skin color. It’s not a matter of national or ethnic heritage. Whiteness is not a natural condition. Whiteness is instead a constructed identity, made by people, that reflects a world oriented to benefit certain persons and communities at the expense of others. Whiteness is primarily a marker of power and privilege, rather than a description of a person’s natural identity. Now, we can all think of a lot of people who got into a lot of trouble for pointing to a world different from the one arranged to enhance white privilege.

Similarly, one could get into a lot of trouble for upsetting the power arrangements that determine who gets to be a man or a woman, what resources are available to men and women, and what possibilities are open to men and women for living lives of meaning and purpose. The Journal article I mentioned reports the views of another minister who defends HB 2. That minister says: “I serve a God who has never made a mistake from all eternity.” He goes on to say that: “To look in the face of God and say, ‘I know you created me a certain way but you made a mistake, and I should have been born male. But I was born female,’ or vice-versa. I just don’t believe that happens.” To my mind, that comment misunderstands what transgender folk are saying about their identity. They’re not saying that God made a mistake in creating persons assigned to a gender identity that does not align with their own experience of themselves. Instead, transgender folks are saying that gender is a human category, like whiteness. It is useful in some respects. But gender and sexuality categories are also not immune from the play of power that privileges some at the expense of others.

Jesus would not, I think, have said that God made a mistake in creating the blind man with a physical disability. He would not have said that the man was blind because of some sin that he or his parents committed. Jesus does say that blindness is a human category, and it is applied in ways that reinforce human power structures. At the end of the passage, Jesus flips the Pharisees’ judgment of the blind man’s sin on its head. Now, sight is the token of sin, and blindness is the token of sinlessness. Jesus says to the Pharisees: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” Similarly, what if it is the case that those who get to say what counts as a man or a woman, and those who benefit from getting to determine what counts as a man or a woman, are the ones with sin – and that the ones who challenge these categories bear witness to a new reality that Jesus has introduced?

The blind man was open to seeing the world in a new way – a world in which God’s work to make creation whole takes precedent over the priorities of the powerful and the privileged. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t surprised that his vision was restored. The Jews and the Pharisees were closed to these possibilities. The blind man is our answer to the question: What do we do when we find out that the world is not the way we think it is? What do we do when the world is different from the way we think it is in ways that threaten the privileges that we enjoy? We open ourselves to it. We trust that God is working to create spaces in which all of creation flourishes, and we look for ways to participate in God’s work for justice, reconciliation, and compassion in the world. Listening for Jesus often begins with Liam’s question: What if the world is not the way we think it is? Let us take courage and listen attentively. Amen.

In 1961, Charles Lomas, pioneer of rhetorical studies, famously defined demagoguery as “the process by which skillful speakers and writers seek to influence public opinion by employing the traditional tools of rhetoric with complete indifference to truth. In addition,” he wrote, “although demagoguery does not necessarily seek ends contrary to the public interest, its primary motivation is personal gain” (Lomas, “The Rhetoric of Demagoguery,” Western Speech (Summer 1961), p. 161). Lomas goes on to specify what he means by “the truth.” He argues that there is no need to “posit an absolute truth;” at minimum, we can say, he thinks, that the demagogue is one who clearly does not intend to “state and interpret facts objectively.”

I’ll admit from the outset that I’ve been casting around to learn more about demagoguery because I suspect that our soon-to-be President, Donald J. Trump, is a demagogue. That’s my working hypothesis. While it might be a simple case of confirmation bias, I am inclined to think that Lomas’s definition of demagoguery describes Trump’s politics well – particularly the parts about using the tools of rhetoric with “complete indifference to the truth” and that the demagogue’s “primary motivation” is “personal gain.” I won’t re-hash here concerns about Trump’s “indifference to truth,” nor persistent worries that he will manipulate the presidency to advance his business interests.

With Lomas, I don’t think we need to invoke some understanding of absolute truth to describe demagoguery accurately. Contra Lomas, I’m also pretty sure that there is no such a thing as “objective” statements and interpretations of “the facts,” So, let’s just forget about both absolute truth and objective interpretations of the facts and say that the demagogue is characteristically inhospitable to nuanced and competing descriptions of politically relevant states of affairs. Indeed, the demagogue even aspires to undermine the conditions that make nuanced descriptions possible (by undermining the media, norms of public discourse, etc.) – and is especially inhospitable to nuanced descriptions of politically relevant states of affairs that threaten to disrupt the demagogue’s aspirations for personal gain.

The demagogue perceives already existing tensions in what public audiences are willing to endorse as truthful descriptions of politically relevant states of affairs. The demagogue then works to undermine norms of public discourse in order to surface these tensions in ways that enhance the demagogue’s political power and position. Donald Trump, it is often claimed, is “just saying what everyone already thinks.” That statement is surely false in its assumptions about who “everyone” is and what they think. But the statement is probably true in that it implies a margin of public discourse that Trump did not himself create but, through his rhetorical performances, disclosed, legitimated, and leveraged to enhance his political power. Validating and intensifying fear, anger, and anxiety, demagogues engage a disaffected margin of public discourse, not to advance constructive forms of political cooperation, but to undermine democratic affirmations of pluralism, and the qualities of nuance and complexity that accompany them. The demagogue is not finally a champion of the disaffected communities he or she claims to be defending; she is a champion of herself.

In her recent book Prophecy without Contempt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), Cathleen Kaveny argues that the proper function of the prophet is to administer what she calls “moral chemotherapy” in times when practical reasoning is profoundly attenuated – when, she writes, practical reasoning proceeds either on the basis of “distorted assumptions about the nature of reality” or a “skewed perception of the importance of the moral values at stake.” She goes on to suggest that the prophet “[destroys] the diseased moral reasoning” and “[promotes] healthy regrowth based on a secure connection with fundamental religious and moral truths” (pp. 312-13).

Demagogues and prophets bear interesting similarities to one another. Both diminish complexity in order to radically re-orient public discourse; both, therefore, are blunt-force instruments. To the extent that Kaveny’s “chemotherapy” metaphor signals drastic rhetorical measures, both prophets and demagogues work in that medium. Demagogues pull public discourse in the direction of disaffection, fear, and anxiety – political emotions that thrive on absolutist distinctions between good and evil, strong and weak. Demagogues thereby undermine democratic commitments to pluralism and conceptions of justice that affirm multiple and conflicting forms of human experience and value. Demagoguery expands the marginal spaces that prophets inhabit, as prophets stand on the side of “the weak” and “the enemy” that demagogues so passionately demonize. In democratic contexts, prophets pull discourse back in the direction of fundamental commitments to equality, equal access, and justice for all. The “for all” part ultimately distinguishes the prophet’s vocation from the demagogue’s; the demagogue is finally only out for himself.

We will shortly have a demagogue in the White House. That’s an open invitation to prophets who can champion all of those left out of Trump’s project to “make America great again.”

Philippians 3:17-4:1

I am the only child of two American history teachers. My parents, Joan and Dave Senior, both taught eighth grade American history, both in the same junior high school, on the same floor, down the hall from one another. Together they were one half of the eighth grade social studies program – although it often took students the whole year to figure out that “Mr. Senior” and “Mrs. Senior” were not just two people who coincidentally shared the same last name. I think it’s not romanticizing too much to say that I grew up with a much thicker civic than theological dogmatism. By that, I mean that my parents didn’t much care about what I believed about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and all of the other stuff that we do in church on Sunday mornings. They weren’t nearly as concerned, as Paul was, that our citizenship is in heaven. But they both – and especially my Dad – had a very clear story to tell about the American republic.

It was on one level just a story, one that focused mostly on great white men and the wars they fought. There were lots of dinnertime conversations about classroom antics, problematic students, and school politics. But I heard in those conversations, too, a lot about the trajectory that my parents’ eighth grade American history courses followed. I remember the story of those courses very clearly: from what was called the “pre-history” of Native American populations in North America; to the age of exploration and colonization, to the French and Indian War and the burdens that war imposed on the American colonies through British taxation; to the American Revolution and the founding of the republic, first in the Articles of Confederation and then, when it failed, in the Constitution; to the war of 1812 when the White House and Capital burned, and Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem; to the rowdy years of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s and the systematic genocide of Native Americans in the “Trail of Tears;” to the “peculiar institution” of American slavery, the continual turmoil it caused, and the many attempts at political compromise endeavored in response; to the Civil War and finally, Reconstruction. As May rolled around, my parents usually had not made it much past Reconstruction, and it was left to the high school social studies program to explore American history in the twentieth century.

Admittedly, this story leaves many voices and perspectives out: women, African Americans, Native Americans, poor and working class citizens, and immigrants, among many others. But the story I learned from my parents about American history did clearly communicate why our history and politics matter, and why, therefore, our shared history and politics constitutes a res publica, a “public thing” in the Latin, a republic, as Franklin said, if we will keep it. I’ve found in my own reading and learning that a history that includes the fullest range of American voices and experiences only strengthens this thesis.

This election cycle is unique in my experience, both in the ways that the deep injuries of citizens have energized it, and in the way that this election has exploited injuries to traumatize and re-traumatize, over and again, our own citizens for political gain. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that this election has been an exercise in what I would call public trauma. The theologian Serene Jones in her book Trauma and Grace defines a traumatic event as “an experience in which a person perceives oneself or another to be threatened with annihilation.” Trauma, she writes, can be overwhelming physical violence as well as overwhelming violent rhetoric that threatens annihilation. Trauma can be experienced not only by the person or persons who are the object of violence but also by those who witness it. We are familiar with “post-traumatic stress disorder,” the term that describes the long-term psychological damage that results from trauma. Trauma survivors who experience PTSD are hyper vigilant in monitoring their environment in preparation for anticipated attacks; they often experience emotional numbness, sleeplessness, lost or fragmented memory of trauma; and they sometimes feel a compulsion to repeat and re-live traumatic events over and again.

For some, trauma has fueled anger and desperation that our candidates have skillfully manipulated. Consider those Americans who have lost their jobs and livelihoods to a global economic system arranged to reinforce the interests of a powerful few at the expense of the well-being of many. We have chosen to create an economy that privileges wealthy corporate owners and big-box consumers over industrial workers, leaving many without jobs and without much possibility of ever re-entering the workforce. Or consider communities of color whom institutions and systems at home persecute violently because those who benefit from such systems have neither acknowledged their fear of losing their privilege, and are far from dismantling it. For others, campaign rhetorics and tactics have been a constant source of injury: women, survivors of sexual abuse, immigrants, the disabled, and communities of color, among others. I am not myself among these groups, but I can imagine that campaign rhetoric has opened and re-opened old wounds, returning the abused spouse, the displaced immigrant, the disabled reporter to those moments of original injury, forcing traumatized citizens to re-live and re-experience trauma. Some are forced to re-live trauma every time injuries are delivered from the campaign podium, in attack ads, or by whipped up and aggressive supporters.

These various experiences of injury are traumatic in that they threaten annihilation. Our politics has manipulated these threats of annihilation in the worst way, most often responding to injury by inflicting more injury. For many, this election has been a place a deep darkness, sadness, and injury, not unlike the storm-tossed sailors in today’s psalm, those who, in the midst of the storm, “went down to the depths” and whose “courage melted away in their calamity.”

I am saddened and outraged, as I am sure many you are, both by the sense of hopelessness that many Americans feel, and by the rhetorical violence enacted upon our citizens in this election. I am also grieving a sense of loss, that, contrary to the narrative I learned from my parents, ours may not be a civic tradition that honors the contributions that all of our citizens make to our common life, nor one that provides all of our citizens the resources they need to live well.

In his words to the Philippians, Paul begs an important question: what does it mean to that our “citizenship is in heaven”? And how does that inform the way that we encounter one another as citizens of earthly polities. I must say, first, that I’ve always bristled at theologies that locate our true citizenship in heaven, casting our earthly political life as a poor imitation of a heavenly kingdom. Some political theologies – those, for example, inspired by St. Augustine – urge us to understand that what is ultimately real is not our earthly experience, but the heavenly order. And so we should try to arrange our earthly politics in ways that reflect the heavenly kingdom, in which all things are ordered properly to the love of God. In these theologies, earthly politics are disordered to the extent that they fail to reflect the way things really are in the heavenly kingdom. If I’m being honest, my dis-ease with such theologies is probably rooted in my upbringing, which valued the political traditions of the world immensely. But I also think that while such theologies may tell us why our earthly politics are deficient, they don’t open space for us to feel deeply for our compatriots whom our politics injure. On this view, earthly suffering is, after all, not ultimately real.

There is a flavor, perhaps, of this kind of theology in Paul’s words to the Philippians in our passage for today, when he contrasts those “enemies of the cross of Christ” whose “minds are set on earthly things,” with those whose “citizenship is in heaven.” The Philippian community was fractured internally. Paul urged the Philippians to imitate his good example and thereby to unite in living into the life of Christ together. In drawing a contrast between earthly and heavenly citizenship, Paul knew what he was doing, for the Philippians understood the language of citizenship well. In the civil wars that led to the ascendancy of Caesar Augustus as Emperor of Rome, Philippi was promoted to the lofty status of a Roman city. Philippian citizens had all the rights and privileges of citizens of Rome. Indeed, if we believe the account of Acts 16, Paul’s narrow escape from persecution in Philippi turned on his own status as a Roman citizen. Christians in the Philippian community spoke the language of Roman citizenship. Paul knew that an appeal to a more perfect citizenship would not land on deaf ears.

It also seems likely that the Christian community in Philippi was suffering persecution and humiliation, as Paul himself did, at the hands of local authorities. Threatened with annihilation, the Philippian community was suffering public trauma. But Paul argues that the humiliation of public trauma is the very medium that the cross of Christ transforms into wholeness, healing, and victory. In another well-known passage in Philippians that we didn’t read today, Paul invokes what seems to be an early Christian hymn, one that remembers the way Jesus Christ discloses the divine character in the most profoundly traumatic of humiliations, “even death on a cross,” as Paul says. In our passage for today, Paul writes, Jesus Christ will “transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.” For those whose bodies and minds and hearts have suffered traumatic humiliation, those who are made to experience and re-experience the trauma of humiliation in our politics, this, perhaps, is good news.

How is it good news? Serene Jones notes that the Christian story is odd in that it portrays a profound trauma, the horrible execution of a man nailed to a cross, and then immediately offers a redemptive response, the resurrection of Christ. Jones writes: “We are compelled, deep within to believe that in the throes of this traumatic event, God uniquely meets humanity in the fullness of love and offers to us the grace of life abundant.” Christians have lots of ways of making sense of how God works in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to redeem the pain and brokenness of the human situation. Jones suggests that it’s not so important which theory we select to explain how God accomplishes redemption. Indeed, she argues, for trauma survivors, different explanations of God’s redeeming work may hold different kinds of power. What’s important is that the cross interrupts trauma, breaking up the narrative of pain and injury that trauma survivors so often find hard to release, and offers an alternative narrative gesturing towards wholeness and new life.

Jones recounts an experience she had with four women who participated in a course on self-defense that Jones helped to lead. The last meeting of the course happened to be on Maundy Thursday, with the service scheduled to begin just after the self-defense class ended. Jones writes that she was surprised to see four women from her course file into the Maundy Thursday service. As the service ended, Jones greeted the women on their way out, curious about why they’d come. Jones writes: “Mari spoke to me first, rubbing the knuckle she had bruised in class: ‘This cross story, … it’s the only part of this Christian thing I like. I get it. And, it’s like he gets me. He knows.’ She hugged me and walked out. Shanika left next, saying something about Jesus standing between her and her ex-partner, taking blows meant for her, keeping her safe. Sarah, her closest friend from the shelter, disagreed, smiling. ‘He’s the King, man. He’s throwing your ex’s sorry ass in hell’s jail soon as he can.’ Joanne, the last to leave, didn’t say anything but gestured toward the cross with a slight shrug just before walking out the door.”

I wonder whether we, the Church, in our most foundational story, have something important to offer a republic suffering in a season of trauma. Indeed, the Church itself was born in its response to the trauma and grace of the resurrection story; we are a public thing, a res publica, inasmuch as we come together, as we always have, around the cross of Christ and the redemptive possibilities it offers. As much as I love the narrative of civic pride and responsibility that I learned from my parents, I see the limits of that story in offering hope, wholeness, and healing to persons that our political process seems to go out of its way to injure. A more fitting story is available to us who gather as the Church. To be a citizen of the heavenly commonwealth is to remember that politics at its best should help people to live fully human lives. But all fully human lives are broken lives; no one escapes the brokenness and pain that make human beings human. Neither does our God. And while our brokenness and our injuries may not go away, God offers wholeness and flourishing despite them. The resurrected Christ has deep and unhealed wounds, and is also a God who offers new life in the midst of wounded-ness. How can we offer the cross as an interruption to the traumas that our political process inflicts on traumatized citizens to offer life made new?