The Golden Ass

"The idea that a God of love ever required a sacrifice to forgive His creation is a false one." - some guy named Barry Smith on Facebook.

I associate "required" with "necessity." I think if Christians associated necessity with "that which is inevitable" rather than with "should" and "ought" and "must," then a whole lot of other things would change, too. For the better. To that point, seen here is a screenshot from an online etymology dictionary:

I'm thinking of when my architecture professor used to semi-regularly say, "Necessity means death, that which is inevitable." Of course, to consider that in terms of a question of soteriology - i.e. when considering the statement, "It is a lie that a God of love requires sacrifice" - is to have at least two constructs in the background that so predominantly shape our paradigmatic interpretive lens for the world and our selves as to generally be taken for granted:

1. a metaphysical or spiritual transaction that occurs at the cross when we mentally assent to the "truth" of it, in which we go from rejected to accepted, and

2. universal rules for right conduct imposed at a distance from a transcendent position above, which we are obligated to follow and which rightfully serve as the basis for a properly ordered legal system of what ought or should be the moral standard of human action (i.e. Kantian ethics, which depend on a Kantian metaphysical construct of reality and a Kantian anthropology of the 'transcendent subject'; i.e., we're talking about "legalism").

When we put the two constructs together, we can say that our predominant way of functioning assumes that Christian spirituality is basically assumed to be oriented around God's "grace" for us in light of our having broken His "rules." "Grace" here is conceived, or at least imagined, almost exclusively as getting treated differently from what we deserve, i.e. being accepted or forgiven for the breaking of God's rules. Of course, being God's, the "rules" are a "just" set of them, and one of them is that a sacrificial offering is "required" as an offering to appease Him in order to obtain His "forgiveness" and thus (re)acquire right standing with Him. The blood of the sacrifice here is conceived as a symbol of the death that is "required" or "necessary" for the appeasing.

HOWEVER, in the background of my imagining "necessity" as "that which is inevitable" is INSTEAD a conception of "grace" that isn't first, and thus much less exclusively, "being treated better than we deserve." Grace IS, however, first and primarily God's desire for relationship with us, God's desire for relational connection (he "came" in the fullness of grace and truth - John 1: 14). Here, God's desire for us is an overflow and outflow of mutual divine desire for and of relationship within the Trinity itself. "Personal relationship" isn't here diametrically opposed to the binding "obligation" to communal relationship, because they are essentially one and the same.

So, when the God who is Life reaches out for and in loving relationship with a people who are bent towards death, and when part of what this means is God's showing us that His love is non-coercive and non-violent and instead is simply the overwhelming of death and destruction in His very person that He shares with us through the Spirit out and because of His divine desire for us, then the death of the God who is revealed, in said death, to be the God of Resurrection Life, is seen and revealed to be just as inevitable as the death of the humans who kill him in the sin that is the "animating" principle of their death (if we can call the principle of death "animating"). I.e., "Necessity means death, that which is inevitable."

The blood of the sacrifice here is conceived, instead of as a symbol of the death that is "required" or "necessary," the very life-blood of the animal, in and by which we share in the divine desire for His life that is characterized by Love that takes a certain and particular shape at the cross (Phil. 2:1-11). The "blood" here is thus a sign of the work and action of the Spirit's actually and functionally sharing God's life with us, i.e. the Life of "grace" in discipleship 🙂

Noticeably, here:

1. There is no "metaphysical transaction." There is simply a person who dies, lives, and will come again.

2. There are no "rules" "from above." The "rule" is "established" in the life and death of the person we see revealing to us our own very life and death. God isn't a legalist, because God is a person.

Also, noticeably, then, "sin" here is obviously taken very seriously. Just not in the same way as in our popular Christian imagination that is shaped by the above two constructs that I laid out.

I should also, of course, then note that an additional image that "overflows" from this different conception of the grace of God is that, if you look at the etymology of "necessity" - "condition of being in need, want of the means of living" - it helps us in our imagination to tie this "inevitability" of God's death to the vulnerability of Jesus as he reaches out for and towards relationship with us - imaged in his nakedness before us at his birth, his baptism, and his death.

This, in turn, means that - seeing as how we're talking about "necessity" in the first place and thus also about our "needs," i.e. about our economy - our desires for economic security are also our desires for life itself and are a sharing in God's desire for life with us, in the face of our death that is, in our sin that disorders our economic desires, inevitable. I.e., our desire for economic security is a response to the threat of death that is overcome in the life of God that He shares with us in the person of Christ through the Spirit (foreshadowed in the typology of Isaac and the ram).

For my Catholic (and perhaps Reformed or Lutheran "Two Kingdom"?) friends, one implication here is thus that the bifurcation of the ordered ends of the church towards spiritual salvation ending in life in heaven, as compared to the ordered end of the State towards the meeting of human "needs" on earth, is apparently a false one (btw the early church Fathers, on whom this interpretation I'm articulating of the person and life of Christ relies, generally lived and taught before the predominance of the Constaninism that "necessitated" and makes sense of the bifurcation in question of the ordered ends of church and State). Both "ends" are ordered by and in that which is "inevitable" by and in the person of Christ's shared life with us. Is that "inevitability" in Christ our life or our death? The "needs" that are met by the State in the reigning bifurcation are articulated, are written, into the very death of the Word. The story of God's resurrection thus tells us that those needs are actually met in the non-bifurcated person of Christ, shared with us by the divine desire of grace in, by, and through the Spirit. In other words, the missio dei can't be birucated into earthly and heavently ends.

Tying this unity of the person of Christ to the story of our very life and death also, of course, ties the "sin offerings" of the O.T. to their entire economic system. Which, of course, ties the Resurrection Life of Jesus to ours (does "ours" here refer to our economic system or to our life and death? 😃 ) 🙂

My being cleaves to the dust.
Give me life as befits Your word.
- Psalm 119: 25

Often twice and sometimes three times a week the two of them came to town and into the house - the foolish unreal voluble preserved woman now six years absent from the world - the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx and produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly, unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience, into a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun - and the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness. - from Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner

Modern nobility means traumatic detachment. I say this as I reflect on my own noble aspirations that have shaped my life as a Southern white male here in Virginia. Witness James Madison's Montpelier.

Take this. Don't keep it at a distance. And eat. Let it become part of your body. Drink it into your lifeblood. Don't look at it as a beautiful spectacle, frozen in the historical past.

When you "take it and eat," how does it settle there? What do you feel and sense in your body? When you "drink it in," how do you see it shaping your identity, your desires, and the trajectory of your life?

Once, when I was visiting a farmer friend in the rural outskirts of Charlottesville, I went with him to deliver hay to a friend of his, whose property came up against a back gate of the Montpelier estate. I took in a sense of enticing mystery and honor, connection to the lore of our land and to one of its heroes. I "drank in" an aspiration to a nobility and dignity. In it, I sensed a calling to something higher.

Many years later, others have called, beckoned, and pointed me to parts of this estate, so to speak, that aren't included in this photograph. What I didn't see or take note of, what I didn't tend to when finding myself in close proximity to this shaping of elements of the earth in particular ways that are ordered to particular ends and to a particular vision for life (i.e. the Architecture), was the slave quarters and the shackles. This makes sense, because they're purposefully not included in the photograph. They aren't what we look to when we tend to either Montpelier or to our own lives. I look elsewhere.

The problem with this is that my entire vision was ordered in a particular direction, while what built and enabled what I was seeking after was something to which I was utterly blind. And history always carries forward into the present. I'm still shaped by this image of nobility and dignity built on the backs of those who are not accounted for as noble and dignified elements of the Architecture of our society.

As I've begun to tend to these desires and aspirations "within myself" to a nobility and dignity shaped in the particular ways that this photograph represents to and for us, I have begun to notice them at work in unexpected and surprising ways. For example, when I want to be, I'm pretty good at "argument," at critique, or "criticism." On my good days, I can exercise this muscle by making a point very effectively and clearly. On my bad days, if I'm honest, I'm good at making someone look like an idiot if I want to, or if I suddenly deem them worthy of that kind of treatment. Can you see how that's not unrelated to the hidden socio-political and economic dynamics embedded in this photograph? Who am I to judge that? Who died and made me master over them?

Related, I spent much of my life proud of how I was able to "think for myself," that I wasn't someone who just took things for granted as they were given to me by others. I didn't just "take in" what others handed me, you see. On resumes, this gets named "critical thinking skills." In popular culture and in current political antagonisms, it drives conspiracy theories (yes, I'm saying I can identify with the urge behind conspiracy theories). I recognize "within myself" this noble aspiration to "rise above the fray," to be able to control my own narrative for the world, to "see over" things in ways that others supposedly can't - or at least perhaps don't. I sense "in my belly" a primal desire for dignity disordered towards an image of myself as Master of the universe. Modern nobility means traumatic detachment.

If this wasn't so common, I probably wouldn't bother confessing it on Facebook or on my blog. I also probably wouldn't bother if it wasn't so easy to trace these aspirations I've taken into myself right through the honorable and noble desires of Southern Nationalist Plantation Theology - into which Trump has tapped. What I'm suggesting is that it is rather easy to connect the dots between the Classical Liberalism at the heart of conservative ideology and the unaccounted for and inevitable tensions born of our own racism at the heart of Southern culture, of Southern honor and shame relational dynamics, and of the individualism with which we identify and by which find ourselves in our theology that historically ran right through plantations just like this one.

How many times have you heard James Madison lifted up as evidence of the "Christianity" of our Founding Fathers and, thus, of the manifest destiny of America as a Christian Nation, a City on a Hill, a "light to the nations"? This can begin to sound a lot like it taps into my aspiration to a place "above the fray," can't it?

In the same way that slavery disappears from this photograph, our anti-Christian urge born of Enlightenment Revolutionary spirit to rise "above the fray" and, for example, "think for ourselves," or to be a "free thinker," or even to be consumed with fears and worries of whether or not I AS AN INDIVIDUAL "am saved," covers over the Supremacy at the heart of what animates the unaccounted for racial tensions in our history and our present, tensions Jesus himself calls us to heal and reconcile but which we instead choose to cover over with ideological narratives of individual Mastery over our own universe. I would say "me" rather than "we," but what I'm saying I'm seeing "within" myself, what I'm telling you I've "taken in," has too much explanatory power of our history and our present for me to try to pretend not to see it elsewhere, as well.

Why are those of us most apt to think of ourselves as "independent" or "free" or "self governing" also most apt to scapegoat "the left" rather than to confess and repent of our desires that don't order our lives toward the shared life of communion to which we are beckoned by and in God? Why are so many of us not only willing but itching to fight valiantly to the death to save a "freedom" or a Mastery against all that we perceive to impose on it, as though we're either still fighting against the Union Army or have decided to join in said fight? I'm aggravated with "the right," and I STILL, in a sense, have a tendency within myself to want to do this.

Why are we still actively working towards and for that which segregates and divides rather than that which heals and restores? Why do we scapegoat and fear "the rioters and looters" (most of whom are actually at least relatively peaceful protesters) rather than seek to see justice and mercy roll down like waters? Why is Sunday still the most segregated day of the week? Why are there so few black people in the rural South? Why did "The Great Migration" of the 1920's to the '70's happen (see link here, if you aren't aware of what this is), followed and accompanied by White Flight (see links here and here if you're wondering what I mean by "White Flight")? Why do we walk right up to the front of the Master's House rather than following in the footsteps of Jesus down to the slave quarters? Why do we have such a hard time facing, naming and owning our racism? Why is it still unaccounted for?

I would suggest that, in this very moment, you are "taking and eating" and that you are "drinking" a representation of the answer to those questions - in ways that aren't as obvious and easy as the ones that we can point to safely and distantly in a frozen history of the past. This history of our covering over of the trauma of our racial tensions with a narrative of above the fray detachment is actually even built into the foundational history the Montpelier Estate itself. The original house on the property was called "Mount Pleasant," and its history included an apparent murder of the Master by three of his slaves, followed by deadly and torturous retribution by the legal authorities (click here if you would like to dig into a bit more detail on this).

Though murder is never the answer in God, we should not all too easily imagine that the Master was murdered becuase his slaves experienced his yolk as easy and his burden as light there on Mount Pleasant. This history carries forward into our present racial tensions and protests of police brutality. This history that never died and is our present is why our white middle class suburban houses here in Virginia look like Colonial Plantation Houses. It's also why the neighborhoods where the descendants of slaves are over-policed to keep them "in their place" and out of sight of our contmepory Master's quarters.

This kind of sader meal of the story of my time and place came to me as I reflected on how basically all of the social, character, and narrative dynamics of Absalom, Absalom hinge, unnamed, around slavery. Of course, this wouldn't mean much if Absalom, Absalom, centering around the building and life of a Southern Plantation in Mississippi, wasn't about us, our world, our land, and our story.

Modern nobility means traumatic detachment. I say this as I reflect on my own noble aspirations that have shaped my life as a Southern white male here in Virginia. As the people of God, how are we called and invited to respond to these conditions?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5, Friday Day 6, and Saturday Day 7.

***

Sunday, Day 1 of a New Week:

“Amen I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who have been sent to you, how often I have wished to gather your children, the way a bird gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not wish it. See: For you, your house is abandoned to desolation. For I tell you, henceforth, you most assuredly will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who come in the name of the Lord’.” – Matthew 23: 36-39

How will we escape the destiny of our path towards abandonment to desolation, utter useless to God, total rot and fruitlessness before the Anointed? Can we enter into His election for us, into His desire and beckoning into shared life with those who are not like us in ways we would otherwise, without the reign and royal sending of the Spirit and thus without a conversion of our very desires, never do?

What does our waiting for the Son of Man who comes in the name of the Lord to take his throne look like? What does that tell us about what awaits us when what we think we hope for actually comes to fruition?

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

*Pictured here: Dead Confederate soldiers in the sunken road after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, September 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5, and Friday Day 6.

***

Saturday, Day 7:

“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the upright, And say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers,’ we should not have had a part with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you bear witness regarding yourselves that you are the sons of the prophets’ murderers. And you – you fully measure up to your fathers. Serpents, brood of vipers, how may you escape the verdict of Hinnom’s Vale? So look: I send prophets and wise men and scribes to you; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will flog in your synagogues and drive from city to city; Thus accrues to you all the righteous blood shed on the earth…” – Matt. 23: 29-35

I have said in my heart: “Why are they beating Rodney King, and why is it cause for such social unrest, such violence? Surely he did something for them to beat and punish him that way! Law and order must be maintained!”

I have said in my heart: “But OJ did it! This is an injustice and a travesty! Why are they jumping and screaming and hugging and crying tears of joy! This isn’t right! Law and order must be maintained!”

I have said in my heart, “Racism should not and does not need to be discussed in church. Church is about the salvation of souls. This makes me uncomfortable.”

I have said in my heart, “Do not remove and destroy our history and our monuments. We should honor the history of our fathers. Those violent extremists are destroying our freedom and our way of life!”

Thus I bear witness regarding myself that I am the son of the prophets’ murderers. And I – I fully measure up to my fathers. Serpent, brood of vipers I belong to, how may I escape the verdict of Hinnom’s Vale?

We quote the prophet Martin Luther King as though we love him, but we turn our backs on his invitation into shared life with him. We kill him, and then we praise him (when he was murdered, he was one of the most hated men in America). We praise him, and we conveniently gloss over those particular words of his that challenge our ways of life. I am so blind to this that, when black people point it out to me, I genuinely don’t know what parts of MLKs teachings to which they’re referring. At other times, I have perhaps known but, in my pretense, dressed myself up in an honorable “righteousness of God” while, in my heart, arbitrarily proclaiming the prophet a dangerous Marxist (which, his being being non-violent, was obviously my partaking in an arbitrary system of meaning in accordance with my own desired socio-political ends).

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

How will you escape the destiny of our path towards utter useless to God, towards total rot and fruitlessness before the Anointed? Can you enter into his election for you, into his desire and beckoning into shared life with those who are not like you in ways you would otherwise, without the reign and royal sending of the Spirit and without a corresponding conversion of desire, never do?

The prevailing story of America is one of freedom, equality, and “democracy.” Some, however, say that we cannot tell the story of America without telling a story of racism. White people tend to respond to this with utter offense. There is a divide here that appears irreconcilable. Election2020 seems to be confirming our division. How could so many white people still be voting for Trump after what we’ve seen for the last four years, right?

I saw someone say this today: “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots. There’s a fear or longing they have that we’ve got to be able to tap into somehow…” Black and minority voices legitimately remind us that it’s not rightly their burden to do that work. I think it is part of my work, though. After all, I needed a conversion of sorts myself to even begin to “see” the story of my own racism. So, I feel at least somewhat qualified to somehow try to “tap into” what’s going on. And, where will we be with no sense of mutual understanding? So...

I have a dear Catholic friend from rural Charlottesville. If there was ever someone who revealed the truth of “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots,” it would be him. He and I have been dear friends for 22 years, precisely because he’s “good people.” He’s not a hateful person. But he also legitimately thinks Trump isn’t racist. How is that possible? What world is he living in? If he were in your living room with an elephant, what could he be looking at, and in what direction, to not only not see the elephant but to look me directly in the face and tell me there’s no elephant?

Let me offer two anecdotal answers that will at first seem totally nonsensical and out of thin air: eggs, and the Eucharist. He’s passionate about both. He doesn’t eat eggs from the grocery store. He refuses. He only eats eggs laid by the chickens on his farm. And, he doesn’t flavor them with processed foods from the grocery store, either, such as cheese or salt. He savors the “natural” flavor of the eggs themselves. Connected to his love for the eggs laid by the chickens on the land on which he dwells, I believe or at least suspect, is his passion for the Eucharist. He got emotional last night telling me repeatedly essentially that the “ACTUAL body and blood” of Jesus in the Eucharist is the only way to salvation. He put great stress on the word “actual.”

He sees the “World Economic Forum” and “The Great Reset”, progressivism and globalism as evil threats to healthy society that are and can only be explained and driven by Satan. At this point, it may be EVEN EASIER for victims of racial and patriarchal trauma everywhere to dismiss him as a racist misogynist, but please bear with me here, if you are able.

Let me suggest that this love for eggs and this aspiration to the “actual body and blood” of Jesus can stand as representatives of the positive, “good” hope or vision that could possibly drive people to “miss the elephant in the room” and vote for a man who, to the rest of us, is obviously dangerous. In eggs and Eucharist, I think we can see glimpses not of what they’re blind to but of what they see and want. And, perhaps it’s actually difficult – for anyone - to name (Neo-Thomists, don’t @ me). For all Trump voters, it won’t be represented in eggs and Eucharist. The specifics of the story will be different for many. For many, it might go by something like “connection to nature.” For others, it might be “the natural way” to bear children and family (minus contraceptives and abortion)? For all I know, it might be hiking for some people.

Out of this vision and hope for connection to and identification with the land and the earth comes a dread, a fear, an utter and total rejection of what is SENSED as its loss. To gain the globe is to lose the land. So, the further “globalism’s” territory spreads, the greater the rural Trump voter VISCERALLY senses dislocation from the land. And, this is difficult to name and articulate. I would even suggest that the Conservative’s rhetoric of “freedom” may “actually” ring most true for rural voters as a sense of binding to the beckoning of the land.

The kicker for me, then, is that the white rural Trump voters and those traumatized by their votes essentially share the same trauma. Those who dissociatively and aspirationally insist on narratives of freedom and equality are actually telling the same story as those who give witness to their own racial (and patriarchal) trauma. What do I mean by that?

“Historically, this is so obvious as to seem trite, but…while almost imperceptible, [this displacement] was earth shattering…It will not be easy to articulate the material reality of displacement because it is the articulation of a loss from within the loss itself. To fully tell it requires the very thing that is lacking, indigenous voices telling their own stories of transformation through current concepts of space, identity, and land. Equally difficult is the attempt to peer into a theological mistake so wide, so comprehensive that it has disappeared, having expanded to cover the horizon of modernity itself...Vilgnano [a 16th century Portuguese Jesuit priest on a mission to spread Christianity to Japan] entered this moment of dislocation by choice, the slave by force.…That new space…meant utter disruption for the African. Gone was the earth, the ground, spaces and places that facilitated his identity…” – Willie Jennings, pp. 37-39, The Christian Imagination: Theology And The Origins of Race

One entered by choice, the other by force, but both DID enter “this moment of dislocation.” And, it was and remains traumatic for both. All trauma leaves us aspiring to health and healing. “Gone was the earth, the ground…” This is, perhaps, the rural voter’s visceral fear of the “progression” of globalism. This shared trauma may also thus even partly explain why the contours of "socialism" or "communism" become so nebulous in the linguistic world and practices of conservatives?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5.

***

Friday, Day 6:

“You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are filled up with plunder and dissoluteness. Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup, so that its outside may also be clean. Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly indeed appear lovely, but within are filled with the bones of the dead and with all uncleanliness. Thus you also outwardly indeed appear upright, but you are full of dissimulation and lawlessness.”- Matthew 23: 25-28

I noted in my reflection on Day 5 that, like the Pharisee, I repeatedly staked my life on an arbitrary system of meaning I constructed in order to place myself in a particular place on our late consumer capitalist social ladder (see Matt. 23: 16-24), until Jesus confronted me with my shame and my pride, my failures and my desires, and I more readily was formed into a desire to follow Jesus into the posture of “servant” (see Matt 23: 11-12). I told the story of how I was confronted by and challenged with this idolatry of mine when I lost my jobs as “an Architect” and as “a Nurse.” I now usually say, “I work as in hospice nursing” rather than “I am a hospice nurse.”

What I have not shared is the extent and depth of what was reveled “inside the cup” when I saw the idols of my own identity I had constructed shattering and falling apart before me. I am using David Bentley Hart’s translation, so I characteristically had to look up “dissoluteness” and “dissimulation” in the dictionary. The NRSV uses “self-indulgence” and “hypocrisy”, respectively. I almost replaced DBH’s terms with the NRSV’s, simply for the sake of simplicity and clarity. But, DBH’s words name and follow the contours of the depths and extent of my darkness with much stronger texture and more vibrant color.

A quick google search, and I came up with this:

“The adjective dissolute means unrestrained. If you're a dissolute person, you indulge in gambling, drugs, and drinking and don't care if others disapprove. If your mother tells you you're dissolute, she's not trying to be kind. – from here.

marked by indulgence in things (such as drink or promiscuous sex) deemed vices…leading a dissolute lifestyle; the dissolute and degrading aspects of human nature. – from here.

When I was living into my constructed monument to my own glory and individual talent as “an Architect,” the underbelly of my empty and vain grasping at wind was evident in the fact that I spent hours of my daily life consumed by sexual compulsions that took various forms, including but not limited to: strip clubs leading to thousands of dollars of debt, hours upon hours of pornography, and online social games that made space for overt and insubstantial flirting that required nothing of my full personhood and that didn’t call me into a shared life of covenant love or of divine joining with other persons who are not like me and thus who reveal myself to me.

“Self indulgence” may accurately describe that, but I suspect it doesn’t as fully do justice to what was “inside my cup” the way “dissoluteness” does. I partly hear in this judgment Jesus’ telling the scribes and Pharisees that their hard-heartedness, uncaring and unloving hearts was what drove their arbitrary rules requiring a contract for divorce so that they could ever-so-easily lust after whoever else they wanted instead, thus not caring that they were leaving their wives to a hopelessly shameful life of either begging or prostitution (see the woman at the well). In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee. In this sense, I identify with Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” pictured here.

My quick google search of “dissimulation” yielded “concealment of one's thoughts, feelings, or character; pretense.” “Hypocrisy” might accurately describe that, but our post-Enlightenment presumptions of “authenticity” tend to miss-shape the color of that term in ways that avoid what Jesus was specifically naming. Where “hypocrisy” might make us imagine Jesus was talking about being “two faced,” or perhaps “putting on a performance” and “not being their true selves” due to their “insecurities,” Jesus was more specifically confronting them with and exposing the ways they didn’t care about or love the people with whom God called and invited them to share life of divine joining, while they pretended to posture and position themselves as honorable leaders of those very people.

I have already told my story of how I sought to climb my way up the ladder and didn’t care who I left behind (see Matt. 23: 13). What I didn’t share is that the life and identity of my American consumer Christianity, like the Nationalistic Jewish life and identity of the scribes and Pharisees, shaped and formed me to, as a white person, like and enjoy being socially “centered,” and – even if I “helped them” from a distance - I didn’t care about others on the margins. All the while, I postured and presented myself as an honorable member who fit well within our sick social fabric. I identify with Patrick Bateman on this count, too.

"I've always been struck in America by an emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable or organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private self, they would never have become so dependant on what they call the Negro problem. This 'problem,' which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters. And it is destroying them. And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of the guilty and constricted White imagination, as assigned to the blacks." - James Baldwin

I liked and enjoyed my life of safety and comfort in my middle class, suburban, white neighborhood, and I didn’t care that others on the margins were not safe, and that they spent their lives shaped and formed by the trauma of violence, whether violence from those in their own neighborhood or from police whose job was to enforce the segregated geography of our white supremacists social order that rules as a principality and power in all of our American cities. And, if I didn’t know about any of this, I didn’t care to. So, when black and brown people heard “law and order” as a militaristic threat, I didn’t blink or think twice. The phrase signaled safety, security, and comfort for me. Being a white male who had the safety and comfort we all desire but that all of us don’t have in our shared social space together that we arbitrarily impose controlled segregation over, I embraced my posture and position as an honorable and contributing part of our social fabric. In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee.

I liked and enjoyed, even took for granted as expected, growing up with and having good health care. And, I didn’t care that others couldn’t get it and spent their lives in fear of being economically shattered by any potential medical emergency. . Being a white male who had the access to affordable health care we all desire but that all of us don’t have in our shared social space together, I embraced my posture and position as an honorable and contributing part of our social fabric. In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee.

Because I was never in that situation, I am not sure if, bearing the fruit of my life of dissoluteness, I would have cared that a woman had gotten pregnant and been able to choose to get an abortion. Perhaps that would have beckoned me out of my blindness and compulsively disordered desires? But I know I didn’t care that black people couldn’t exactly choose not to be black – at least not without choosing to participate in and tyrannically give their allegiance to the principalities and powers constructed, legitimized, and enforced by White power. I mentioned this in my reflection on Day 3 (if interested, see link, above), on Matt 23: 13.

“My inside” was “an unwashed cup.” I was “filled with the bones of the dead and with all uncleanliness.” In other words, I was not filled with love for and care towards those not like myself with whom I am called and beckoned – in other words, ELECTED – to a shared life together in Christ. The difference between the “inside” and “outside” was that of my “cup” or of the “whitewashing” of my tomb, yes. It was the difference between my true “impurity” and “uncleanliness” compared to my “pretense” to honor and position on our social ladder, yes.

"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story." - James Baldwin

But these analogies of uncleanliness and death also describe, refer, or point to the deadly rot that governs and consumes us within our white, rich, suburban communities at large, compared to the pretense and whitewashing that so glaringly and obviously appears as such to black and brown people on the margins (if they aren’t instead shaped by desire to become like us). And, those on the margins of the life of Israel perceived this about the scribes and Pharisees, too.

"You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed that isn't faced." - James Baldwin

Wherever you stand in relation to it – whether perhaps embracing it or being governed by your reaction against it - does your formation and discipleship into Nationalistic Christian consumerism, or into partisan politics, shape you into “self-indulgence” or “dissoluteness”? How do you see it training and making it easy for you to indulge the basest of your desires? Do you see it as a degradation of your humanity? Do or can you see the way our combative, culture war, American consumer Christian formation shapes us into desires to reach upward towards higher social and economic capital and thus towards “dissimulation” or “hypocrisy” in relation to those who are not like us?

And, can you hear these questions as good news of freedom from such death and invitation into a care and love that constitutes our divine desire of beckoning, of ELECTION into shared life together in Christ among those who would otherwise have nothing to do with one another?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4.

***

Thursday, Day 5:

“Alas, for you blind guides who say, ‘Whoever swears by the Temple sanctuary, it means nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the Temple sanctuary, he is under obligation.’ Fools and blind men! For what is greater, the gold of the Temple sanctuary or the sanctuary that makes the gold holy?...the one who swears by the Temple sanctuary swears by the sanctuary and by him who dwells in it. And the one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you tithe a tenth of the mint and the dill and the cumin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith; yet these things you ought to have done, while also not neglecting those others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat but drink down the camel.” – Matthew 23: 16-24

From what I understand of the Pharisees’ interpretation of Torah, they had established a hierarchy within it to help them give a proper order to their lives. How do we follow the whole Torah? What does that mean or actually look like? It can be, or at the very least seem, confusing and contradictory. They had thus divided it up between the “heavier” and “lighter” commandments, and so the “heavier” ones “carried more weight” for their lives.

Jesus also criticizes this system of interpretation elsewhere. But here, I hear him specifically naming it as an arbitrary system of meaning by which those in power were able to carve the life they wanted out of Torah. And, I hear Jesus naming the life they wanted as the one where they get the salutations in the marketplaces and the chief couch at meals (see vv. 5-7). They had articulated an interpretation of meaning that established and maintained their own social honor and class hierarchy.

In this passage, I also hear Jesus addressing that and how identity was conferred in relation to the Temple. He who swears by the glory of the gold of the Temple or by the value of the offering he, as one of high social and economic class is able to make, is staking his life on his own ability to contribute to, or even lead, Israel’s Nationalistic hopes in the face of Roman imperial insult and oppression on the ritual purity of the Temple as designated by the arbitrary and ideological system of meaning that he himself had helped to create and maintain!

As such, I hear in these words from Jesus as a warning to us of what’s at stake in “keeping the name holy.” Are we praying a curse on ourselves when we pray “hallowed by thy name” while also making such oaths based on our arbitrary and destructive systems of meaning that we ourselves create or designate for “order of worship”? Pictured here is Donald Trump, on June 1, 202, in the midst of the protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Would Jesus’ implicit warning to the scribes and Pharisees have meaning here for Trump and those who give their allegiance to him?

When I was practicing as an Architect, I remember my mentor referring to the Architectural plan as an act of faith. When an Architect draws that plan up, he is staking his life on it. It’s a kind of oath. And, when he signs a contract with the builder and owner, he is swearing this investment of his life on the imagined building he hopes to see come to fruition. Also when I was an architect, out of my sense of divine calling and mission, out of a legitimately profound sense of meaning and purpose for my life, I tried in my own mind to reconcile my practice of Architecture with worship of the one true God of Israel and of all creation.

But, what I really ended up doing was placing more interpretive weight on the brick and mortar of the buildings I helped design than on the people who make and dwell in them. I didn’t view my profession as a profession of service to and love for my neighbor. But, unbeknownst to me at the time, I practiced Architecture instead as the erection of monuments to my own talent and hoped-for glory. Once, while in the midst of a design-build project, the owner decided – without telling us, as the design team - to change some of the material finishes near the front of the building in order to make it look “more expensive.” When I discovered this change, I was so exaggeratedly furious that I screamed at the top of my lungs to the heavens for a half hour until I lost my voice.

The reason for my fury was, ironically, the building owner’s having placed more weight on an arbitrary system of meaning oriented around material commodificaiton rather than around the system of meaning we had designated around a rhythmic set of “musical” relationships between the resultingly (no longer so) harmonious parts of the building. This became ironic a year later when, in the wake of the economic downturn, I was laid off and, in the processing and confronting of my resulting feelings of pain and loss, shame and unworthiness, I realized that I had been treating “Architect” as a market-driven consumer identity.

I was confronted with the fact that I had tried to reconcile Architecture to worship but had, in the end, essentially been worshipping my own practicing of Architecture. I had established an arbitrary hierarchy of meaning by which I could have my own version of “the chief couch at meals” and “salutations in the marketplaces” in accordance with and oriented around a system of worship by which I had found my identity. I can now hear Jesus saying: “You blind fool! Which is greater, the architecture, or the image of God dwelling in and among it?” And, I can now hear this as Good News, because I am the image of God dwelling in and among it!

I repeated these same dynamics years later. When I got my nursing license in September of 2014, I prayed with my accountability partners that I would not take “Nurse” on as “my identity” in the same way. After struggling for a year and getting fired from my second nursing job in the midst of continuing to strive for an identity in the world, I found myself confronted with the reality that I had again setup an arbitrarily system of interpretation of the world and of my life and thus made “nurse” my identity in and among the marketplace of American desire and consumer choice in my blind fool’s attempt to live out the Way of Jesus.

I thus, a year and a half after having gotten my nursing license, went on to work as a “servant” in a restaurant for a year while diving deeply into scriptures about joyful service in love and into Peter’s texts about his own confrontations with his pride and shame, failures and successes in his discipleship to Jesus the Anointed One. “You blind fool! Which is greater, the nurse’s uniform or the image of God wearing it?” Through actual practice “in my bones” and with my feet as a “servant” – which involved a lot of very difficult and humbling lessons and required a number of confrontations with my shame, my pride, and my economic fears - I again became more readily able to hear that as Good News from God.

And, two years after starting life as a “servant” in a restaurant, I was again beginning life practicing nursing, this time serving families and patients as a hospice nurse and making more money than I ever had while finding my identity and glory in Architectural monuments to myself. Having more fully submitted myself to the Way of Love, I am getting paid MORE to more honestly and truthfully tend to “the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith.”

This is to say nothing of the arbitrary systems of ideological meaning by which our model Evangelicals who we follow after and are discipled by - such as John McArthur, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr, Tim LaHay, and Ken Ham - articulate interpretations of meaning of Torah that work to establish and maintain our own social honor and class hierarchy around a Nationalistic image of God. In other words, this is to say nothing of the more specific ways that we do the very things Jesus angrily names as what the scribes and Pharisees were doing, to lamentably destructive ends.

Do you stake your life on arbitrary systems of meaning that work towards social ends that are foreign to the vision of shared life, struggle, and endurance into which Jesus calls and invites us? How so? Can you hear the truth of that as Good News that is freeing for you, that dignifies the imago dei that is the very personhood of yourself and those who are not at all like you?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3.

***

Wednesday, Day 4:

You travel all about the sea and the dry land to make one convert, and when it is done you make him twice the son of Hinnon’s Vale as you yourselves. – Matthew 23: 15

While I was working as a sever in nursing school and hating my job, I was also engaged at a large, local church called “Western Branch Community Church.” Its sanctuary is pictured here. True to its vision, it has since become multi-campus and changed its name to a more displaced and generic one.

On the margins of its large, social, fellowship space at its heart were three smaller spaces of note. One was a coffee shop, where drinks and pastries were actually bought and sold. Another was a space of racks and shelves where I could freely chose for myself from a large assortment of many objects for sale that I could, once bought, then identify myself with the church and grasp for myself into my possession proofs of its branding upon my person: T shirts and sweatshirts, coffee mugs and bracelets, bookmarks and house decorations. By entering into that space of transaction, I was also able to clothe myself in her righteousness. The third smaller space of note inside the larger social space at the heart of the church was the information station. I could stop there to most conveniently and easily find out how to bind my identity to her brand, if I so chose.

The large social space at the heart of that church was oriented most primarily in relation to the even larger “sanctuary” that was adjacent to it. In that space, I was offered an experience of loud, high quality worship music, of engaging, entertaining speeches by charismatic “leaders,” of highly produced and light-hearted videos for my consumption, and of funny skits to make me laugh and ease the anxiety of being in such a mass of social space where my anonymity predominated. The explicitly stated goal around which the entire worship experience inside that massive sanctuary was organized was to increase the numbers of attendees to as to also thus increase the number of “converts.”

So, while working at a low level job that I hated while freely reaching for a higher level consumer identity with greater social and economic capital, I was also engaged in a church whose primary mission was to convert as many people as possible into discipleship into its own brand of high level consumer Christianity. Perfectly appropriate to the essentially American brand of this order of worship, every July Fourth included the solemn ritual of our standing for both the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and at attention to the marching of the Color Guard. Every so often during a sermon, the preacher mentioned “the voice” of the “Silent Majority.”

Leading up to and during that period of my life, how many times then did I “have conversations about Jesus” and, whether implicitly or explicitly, excitedly invite people into that particularly “free” “Christian” marketplace of American desire? Notably, “Hinnon’s Valley” here in Matthew 23 has nothing to do with “hell.” It is an image of fruitlessness, of utter worthlessness. It’s an image of the putrid, flaming trash heap outside the city. To become a child of it is to, according to Jesus’ words here, exile oneself as useless in his Way, to become a putrid stench before the King who is sovereign over and faithful to a people committed to one another towards a shared life of divine love.

Of note, that space was mostly white. I was happy that there were some black faces scattered about here and there. But, if it had been a black space with some white faces scattered about, I would not have chosen to share that life in that space. And, I would have perceived the space to be less valuable in economic and social capital. I would have left them behind. African Americans, it should be noted, are, for obvious reasons, far more ambivalent about our ritual displays of patriotic affection than we are. And, most of them would have perceived our July Fourth ritual accordingly. If it was a predominantly black space, I would have shut the door of my life to them, and locked it behind me.

As a child of consumer, patriotic, “free” American Christianity - which fits quite well with the larger system of late American consumer capitalism that shaped my economic and social desires in general - I was engaged in a system in which we “traveled all about the sea and dry land to make one convert, and when it was done I made him twice as much a son of Hinnom’s Valley as I was myself.”

How might the Christianity you practice market itself to American consumer or political identities? How might it, with consumerism or patriotism or otherwise, exclude those “left behind” by your desire, whether for upward mobility, social or familial inclusion, political leverage, or a legitimately empowered voice? Does this Christianity cultivate physical, social, and economic space for shared life together among those we most readily honor and include and those we most readily shame and exclude?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my reflection on Day 2, click here.

***

Tuesday, Day 3 - ELECTION DAY:

You shut the Kingdom of the heavens in men’s faces…nor do you allow others going in to enter. – Matthew 23: 13

As I hated my job as a server, and didn’t want to be there, and worked and scraped and clawed my way out, you see, I was seeking another kingdom. The NRSV translates it as, “when others are going in, you stop them.” I was leaving them behind. I was shutting the door of my life to them, and locking it behind me. I was not desiring a divine joining in shared life, because I was driven by desire for something else.

Because I was never in that situation, I am not sure if, bearing the fruit of my life of dissoluteness, I would have cared that a woman had gotten pregnant and been able to choose to get an abortion. Would I have cared that the door to life was shut in my unborn baby’s face? Perhaps that would have beckoned me out of my blindness and compulsively disordered desires? But I know I didn’t care that black people couldn’t exactly choose not to be black – at least not without choosing to participate in and tyrannically give their allegiance to the principalities and powers constructed, legitimized, and enforced by White power. I will give this more context to this duplicity of mine in my reflection on Day 6, on Matt 23: 25-25.

Pictured here is an icon into the history of my duplicity. The broken relationship between these white men and this enslaved chef went on to shape how I identified myself and saw my world.

How does the identity you choose, the person on offer to you by and in our marketplace or our political forum, shape your desires? How do those desires shape your image of how you relate to others in the world? To other persons with other identities, whether those identities are perceived as such by them or by you? Whether we “help” them or not, whether we imagine them as “above” or “below” us, do we identify with them in Christ? Are we, in the concrete particulars of our everyday lives (not just “spiritually”), beckoned to divine union with them in Christ?

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in other words, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.

“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13

So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.”

***
Monday, Day 2:

But do not let yourselves be called Rabbi…Neither let yourselves be called instructors… – Matt 23: 8, 10

Entering into the story requires translation. And, I don’t simply mean translation from Greek to English. I mean translation between one world and another. As Michael said it in his sermon, the terms “Rabbi” and “Instructor” were part of their set of interwoven systems by which one was centered and honored, and another was excluded and shamed. But who among us desires to be called “Rabbi,” or “Instructor”?

So, what are such systems for us? I desired to be called “Architect” or “Nurse” rather than “waiter” or “server.” Our systems are based on commodification driven by revenue generation. In our consumerist system, the first choice of the consumer is of which identity her or she wants to be branded with by and in the market. And, in order to participate in the system, this choice is always to reach upwards toward the social and economic capital of the column which is our territory and our personhood.

By what consumer identities have you sought to reach upward towards economic and social capital in our marketplace of desire? I did it with “Architect” and “Nurse.” Frank Lloyd Wright, pictured here in his nobility, was a model of this for me. I had to be laid off three times, get fired basically twice, and then purposefully go work as a server again for a year, before I even began to learn to embrace God’s “election” into His role for me as his disciple. In grace, I was able to accept those circumstances as divine pruning. "Discipline begins in the house of the Lord."

So, in the midst of this system of our choosing upwards, what does Jesus have to say to us? What is that role that he has for us in our world as his disciples? Don’t reach upwards like the world does, he says. “because you have one instructor, who is the Anointed. And the greater among you shall be your servant.” “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for…” He is not calling to any place to where he is not showing us the Way in his very own flesh. This became especially poignant for me when, after working as a “servant,” I later realized that the people I was working with and didn’t want to be like were mostly black. And, the people I wanted to be like – the people who had more honorable and prestigious identities with greater social and economic capital - were mostly white.

Do we seek to be “instructor” or “Rabbi”, where Jesus calls you to be servant? How? What does that mean for you? Can you hear it as Good News as God beckons you to enter into shared life of divine joining, of shared struggle and endurance with those who are not like you? Is that the voice of freedom from a burden that’s not yours to bear? Can you, do you want to submit to learning from and hearing the witness of fellow African American brothers and sisters rather than presuming to be their “instructor” and “Rabbi”?