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, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5.

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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?