I will turn 68 later this month—don’t worry, to aid in your birthday
shopping, I’ll place a full list of my sizes in Parish Notes—and earlier this
year I celebrated 40 years of priestly ministry. On the whole, these make a
couple of nice milestones. As happy as I am in my personal and professional
life, I am sad to say that, as I look back over my life and ministry, I have
never experienced a national mood as distressing and depressing as the one we’re
in right now.
That’s not to say living in America has always been smooth
sailing. The tensions over the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were
significant, and the ongoing struggles for gender and sexual orientation
equality have taken their toll on all of us. But something about this moment
feels different. America has always been torn between two competing visions of
our national purpose—one expansive and communitarian, the other narrow and
individualistic—but we now have a president who seems intent not only on
systematically undoing the expansive policies of his predecessor but also on
inflaming the nation and world in the process. It has gotten so bad that I’m
not sure both sides of our national divide could agree on the weather outside or
even the time of day.
After a seemingly endless stream of
presidential enormities, this week saw the administration’s “rescinding” the DACA (“Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals”) program. Around 800,000 undocumented young
Americans brought to this country as children are now at risk of being deported
to countries they’ve never seen. America is the only home they know. The bad
news here is not only the ugliness of this action. The worse news is that
millions of otherwise rational Americans think ending DACA is a good idea.
As followers of Jesus, how do we
make our way through such a national time of enmity, distrust, and bad faith? How do we deal with a president who
violates virtually every norm of Christian faith and practice? We are dealing
here with real wounds, real injuries, real betrayals—again, not the kinds of
problems easily or swiftly resolved. In today’s gospel [Matthew 18: 15-20],
Jesus tells us this:
If
another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when
the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that
one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so
that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If
the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the
offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a
Gentile and a tax collector
Jesus is speaking to us here not as a nation or a family
but as a church. It is not very likely I could get an appointment with the
president to tell him my concerns face to face, so I doubt I can follow Jesus’s
prescription to the letter. But the principle seems a sound one: speak directly
to the offender, bring others in to help you out, take it public if there is no
response. Robert Mueller, I hope you’re listening.
You and I live in a society where neither side can trust
or even engage the other. We are dealing with leaders who disregard or betray
Christian and humane values at every turn. How do we make our way through this
time with integrity?
When I served as dean of a seminary I taught a course on
the theology of Shakespeare’s late plays. The older I get, the more I find that
Shakespeare has an answer for almost every serious question we can pose. The
play that comes to mind is Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale, a
play that is neither a comedy (though it plays like one) nor a tragedy (though
it feels like one) but a romance—a genre somewhere in between the two. It
concerns a king named Leontes who becomes so insanely jealous of his wife
Hermione that his violent and erratic behavior leads to the death of their son,
the loss of their daughter, and what appears to be the death of Hermione
herself. This is a play in which people do unspeakably bad things to each other,
and those actions have tragic—or near tragic consequences.
Yet all is not lost. The end of the play brings not only
life; it brings forgiveness—real forgiveness for real wrongs enacted—and with
it the possibility of a new community built now, in W.H. Auden’s words, “on trust instead of threats.”
If I am not under the illusion that
I could arrange a sit-down with the president, I’m certainly sure that I have no magic up my sleeve that
would turn his heart of stone into a heart of flesh. So I am not really
interested in attempting reconciliation with the 45th president of the United
States, a man who has said he has no need of confession. But I am interested in
how we can, together, restore our national community to life.
I don’t know about you, but I have let the 45th
President of the United States and his shrinking base of aggrieved followers
take up far too much space in my mental world. If I am going to be open to any
kind of reconciliation or renewal, I need not only to stop obsessing about both
his obstreperous tweets and his cruel and heartless actions. I need to turn my
attention instead to those injured and at risk from his words and his policies.
I need to make common cause with those who are in literal, material, spiritual
danger: undocumented immigrants, especially the dreamers; the poor, especially
those without healthcare or housing; people of color, especially those menaced
by white supremacist groups blasphemously calling themselves Christian; the LGBT
community, especially right now the transgender soldiers who seek only to serve
their country; and of course the millions of women and children and all who are
regularly placed in jeopardy by the callous policies regarding reproductive
rights and education put forth by this White House and Congress.
You and I in the Christian community are called to work
toward reconciliation with those whose values and actions violate and betray
the values of compassion, justice, and peace—the values of Jesus. Real life is
not a situation comedy. We do not reconcile with people by getting into a group
hug with them. We reconcile with them when they repent—literally “turn around” and
behave justly and nobly. But we do not, we cannot, wait around for them to
change. We begin by making common cause
with those who really are in jeopardy. As followers of Jesus, our job is not to
make peace with oppressors. It is to make
common cause with the oppressed. Solidarity must come first. Reconciliation
will come in God’s own time. Right now, we have our own work to do.
There are plenty of urgent tasks to choose from, but
president’s heartless, cruel, and mendacious ending of DACA calls for a
response from the entire faith community now. We need to respond with words
first, but shortly thereafter with actions. And making our church and community
a sanctuary for those in danger of deportation seems like me the clearest and
most obvious place to start. There are already many dedicated people in Santa
Barbara at work on the sanctuary movement, many of them in this parish. I
believe it is time for Trinity Church to build on this individual and work and
to step in, as an entire parish community, to the ecumenical and interfaith
work of standing with and for those in this community at risk of deportation. I
believe it is time for us to give (yes) our dollars, but also our time, our
energy, and maybe even our church space to serve as a support and sanctuary for
the dreamers, their families, and all undocumented people who live and work in
this city.
Today is “Welcome Back” Sunday. It is the day when our
full range of parish ministries and programs swings back into life. What better
way is there for us to come back to church than to get back to work? It is not
enough for us to think good thoughts on behalf of the oppressed. It is not
enough even for us personally to confront intolerance, bigotry, and oppression.
We must do that together as church. We must corporately stand with and for
those who are up against it. We must publicly speak to those who would oppress
and abuse them.
We are all, in a sense, like Hermione—the dead or
near-dead heroine of The Winter’s Tale.
We are so stupefied by the cruelty on display in Washington that we’re
almost as good as dead. We desperately crave new life. But there is no ingenious
dramatic ending that will give it to us. Instead, there are the hearts and
hands and minds of people like you and me who want to follow Jesus and serve
those he would serve in this place and moment. Together we can do this.
Together we can join with people of faith and good will to help strengthen a
sanctuary movement here that will serve as love’s counterforce to this
administration’s callous malevolence. Then perhaps we will get their attention.
The outcome is not in our hands. We may never reconcile with those who want to
deport our friends and children. But as we draw closer to the undocumented, we
can do something greater. We can, together, build a new community built on
trust instead of threats. And that, I believe, is what Jesus is calling us
right here and right now, in this place and in this time, together to do. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment