The Golden Ass

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.

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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?