I'd like to make a small suggestion to President Obama and the inauguration planning committees: give us a blessing from Reverend Billy!
Say what you want about Reverend Billy or his message, but he's undeniably among the very best preachers in the world, maybe ever. This is preachcraft par excellance.
Don't believe me?
Watch this (OMG PLEASE WATCH THIS!):
Who is this guy?
The short version is that Bill Talen has taken on the role of anti-consumerism activist through using the image and techniques of a dime-store televangelist - the effect of using gospel music to sing about the hollow crap that surrounds us leaves a haunting sense of dread about what we've become, both materially and spiritually.
See What Would Jesus Buy, and as you watch the crunch of cars outside suburban shopping miles, with Christmas lights in the background, you hear Reverend Billy appealing with anyone who Has Ears To Hear to spend more time with their loved ones, and less time trolling malls or in cars. His mantra cuts me:
Shop less, give more.
He's blogging now, frequently, at revbilly.com - and it's just the stuff we need to be hearing now, as the Shopocalypse is upon us:
But now Americans are suddenly wise to Santa. We are rejecting this notion that Christmas comes from the FedEx jet, or Santa’s sleigh – from the outside. Our images of happiness are becoming self-made again, coming from within our loving relationships. Our dreams, memories and our imaginations are still independent from the grasping control of the marketing departments. This is the delightful and surprising world that is opened to us at the Stop Shopping church when we look at our email each morning. People report that they themselves are a fountain of dances, of paintings and song. They are making new memory fill-in games, promises of future journeys – we even hear of whole plays, dark comic musicals! In a word, we are awarding each other new experiences. This kind of gift is concocted from the funny adjustments that family members make over time to each other – those eccentric private arrangements that only we have, that no company could possibly mass produce.
I’ve been reading a great book lately, called The Politics of Jesus, by a theology professor named James Howard Yoder. Yoder, a pacifist who died in 1997, peels back the layers of generations of interpretation and dogma about Christ to try and recover a sense of some of Jesus’s original, radical message. It’s challenging stuff, and I recommend the book to you.
One part that jumped out at me is Yoder’s discussion of Matthew, Chapter 5 – the Sermon on the Mount, the part that starts with the Beatitudes and ends like this:
“You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Yoder points out that the admonition to be perfect has been a stumbling block for many readers. “Perfectionist preachers,” he says, “saw there the promise of an accessible sinlessness; mainstream ethicists turned it around as the proof that the [Sermon on the Mount]’s intent is not at all to be obeyed, but to prepare people for grace by crushing them under the demand of unattainable Godlikeness”.
But reading more carefully, Yoder says, “The parallel [verses] in Matthew and Luke make it clear that ‘perfect’ here means ‘indiscriminate’ or ‘unconditional’ – a quite conceivable, even attainable imperative.”
When I read that, it occurred to me that what this verse is expressing is not the edict that you should “be perfect like God is perfect”, but rather something much closer to “Let your love be unconditional as your heavenly Father’s love is unconditional.”
That is a powerful message for me to internalize, as a father, a husband, a coworker, and a Congregationalist. What conditions am I putting on love?
Am I raising my kids to know that my love for them isn’t dependent on their success, or (gulp) compliance? Have I assured my spouse that she really can do nothing to earn – or lose – my love for her? Do I truly bear nothing but goodwill in my heart-of-hearts for my colleagues (or rivals) in the workplace? Am I helping to build a church that welcomes and embraces all God’s children, no matter where they are on life’s journey?
It's a great gift to hear new words pop out at you while listening to time-honored liturgy. My experience this week was really hearing this phrase (the part in bold), for, I think, the first time:
“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:37-40
Have you ever caught that before? Here, Christ is explicitly identifying himself with the poor and marginalized. My family, he calls them.
(For some reason the reference to family makes the Godfather's voice pop up in my head...)
I am at times stymied by some of my radical views, in that at times they keep me from engaging joyfully in some of the simple pleasures of life that others happily enjoy without any further thought - and this is especially true at Thanksgiving. I think I have a harder time with Thanksgiving than just about any other holiday.
All over America, families will gather at table and thank God, many of them using these exact words, "for the great feast before us". Some families will list off their great blessings of the past year - jobs attained, health achieved, obstacles avoided, objects acquired. They will gather and thank God for these things, when just a short ways down the road, another family will be unable to put food on the table, or name half as many blessings from the year gone by. The first family, by invoking the name of God as the provider for all that they have, are simultaneously asserting a very strange hermeneutic - that God wanted them to have all of these things, and that God also somehow did not want those same blessings for the neighbors.
So I squirm to be part of it. In the days surrounding the holiday, the term "thankful" will be tossed around until it is rendered nearly meaningless. But each time it's invoked, the person saying it will be saying, by their "thankfulness" that they have God to thank for whatever item or blessing they name. This in a world walked by hundreds of millions of desperately poor.
So my attitude most Thanksgiving Days is to have some turkey, but hold the thanks. I just try to enjoy the time to relax and be with family.
And then along comes Jesus and says "the least of these... are members of my family" - and suddenly I'm taken by an entirely new vision - who is my family? And the answer, it seems, is the family down the street - and them every bit as much as my actual flesh and blood. Jesus reminds me that I am joined to the whole world as a family. I'm struck by this question: "How do I go about spending the holiday with my whole family?"
And I'm struck, oddly enough, by thankfulness. Thankfulness for this radical, lifechanging teaching we have from Christ - thankful for a country bursting with progressives who are breaking down so many barriers, building new communities, new economies, and electing new leaders - so many of them spurred on by true compassion and the call to look after the least of these. The Kingdom, it seems, is indeed at hand, the hour drawing closer. And for that, this year, I am thankful to God.
The images from the world's reaction to Obama's election are disorienting - throngs of people, thousands of them, reduced to tears of joy and dancing at the very thought of America's new president. The crowds didn't just appear on Election Night, either - Obama had been drawing huge crowds - nearly 100,000 in Denver, many tens of thousands in St. Louis, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, and elsewhere - whole cities that never come out of their buildings, congregating to look at each other and the man they hope can lead us out of the darkness of the Bush years.
In the joy that so many the world over have felt about Obama's ascendancy, though, there is something deeper, too. And the joy that has bubbled up is about much more than race. Obama's election points to something deep within us - a desire for justice, and a reminder of what Christians call the Kingdom Coming wherein
The last will be first, and the first will be last.
The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
(Matthew 20 and 23)
In his ministry, Jesus proposed a radical turning of our social systems, a Kingdom that would undercut the power of the entrenched winners of the current order. But more than simply laying out the vision, Christ used this premise as a way of articulating God's love for his children - a love defined by a lack of condition - a love set apart for the poor and oppressed as much as, if not moreso than, for the kings and high priests.
Not to rely solely on Christian wisdom, though, The Tao te Ching also has these words:
All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.
If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. If you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them.
(66)
These are words that make our hearts flutter, because we know deeply that they are True; that they point to a basic spiritual fact that pride and power are inherently disconnected from love - and that it is the will of the Spirit, whatever you name it, that we be governed by love.
And so when we see a black man, elected through the force of thousands of poor volunteers, standing at the podium on Election Night, we are reminded of the generations of suffering that fell upon people like him, and we remember the Kingdom where the last shall be first. Therein, I think, is the key to understanding the gush of tears and emotion the country has worked through in these last few days. Obama's election is, in the fullest sense of the word, a revelation. It's a glimpse of the Kingdom.
The day after the Election, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has done phenomenal work in retelling the history of the African American race, said this to NPR:
What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor — resulting in spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all of those black collective dreams deferred — that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama's election? ...
I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, "Yes! Yes! And yes, again!" I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay — the price of President-elect Obama's ticket.
On that first transformative day when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in our history before Dr. King Jr., said that the day was not a day for speeches and "scarcely a day for prose." Rather, he said, "it is a day for poetry and song, a new song."
Blow ye the trumpet, blow! The gladly solemn sound Let all the nations know, To earth's remotest bound:
The year of jubilee is come! The year of jubilee is come! Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
This sign was spotted in Grant Park that night...
~~~
So... all of this is to say to our brothers and sisters in the gay and lesbian community - the pain that you feel now over the passage of California's Proposition 8 is shared by so many, and should spur all of us to immediate and aggressive action. But know that it is also a pain that is also temporary. Know that the progressives always win in the end. The change you seek has not come, but it is coming. You too will have your Obama.
"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."
PeaceNerd is a pacifist and a deacon in the United Church of Christ, identifying strongly with Taoist philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and the new monastic movement.
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