I don’t know about you, but for the last four years it has felt almost…easy…to speak of doing God’s work of justice as a Christian in the public sphere. Wherever I looked on a given day, there always seemed to be something that I could get good and righteously angry at; some bully I could publicly stand up to and oppose, some terrible act of oppression by those in power and authority against which I could safely rage.
I even joked, on occasion, that for all the horrors we were facing, it was a good time to be a pastor with a focus on God’s justice, because you’d never want for work.
This whole time it’s been easy to sit on towers build of our own self-righteousness, because the baddies have been just so…bad…that we have’t really needed to spend any time on self-assessment. We haven’t needed to analyze our own complicity, or assess our own role in the terrible events that surrounded us.
After all, who has time to take a good look at who we are, or how we live our lives both individually and as congregations, when there are children being caged?
Who has time to sit down with our church leaders and talk to them about how to avoid gossip, and deal in fairness and mercy in the little things of daily life, when we could be attending a protest about mass incarceration?
Why should we bother questioning our devotion to white, male, capitalist, business-driven leaders dominating the scene within our community as elders, deacons, and lay leaders, when police brutality is a thing?
After all, there’s only so many hours in the day, right? We gotta take on the big things…
But, have you noticed how different things have felt this past week?
I know that, for me at least, it’s been really enjoyable sitting back, and appreciating a world without Donald Trump, and his corrupt, manipulative, indeed deranged supporters, holding power. It’s nice to spend time on Twitter without seeing his racist ramblings, to look at the politics section of the news and see stories appreciating some truly wonderful poetry, stories witnessing to the return of scientific understanding to American discourse on the pandemic, never once seeing that rambling lunatic, that sun-dried, brownshirted raisinette of other people’s despair, that high-school jock-slash-bully who never managed to do his own work for history class so he just put “Hitler” for every answer in an attempt to walk that fine line between statistical probability and edginess; never once seeing that guy in the news trying to lie his way into nuclear supremacy.
It’s been a relief.
Well…a relief of sorts, anyways.
But, as someone who has very much made a lifetime commitment to speaking to truth to, about, and around power…I have to admit that it’s been a little disconcerting.
I mean, for the past 4 years, it’s been really easy to be an advocate for the suffering, the oppressed, the poor, the immigrant, and all those in need. It’s been really easy to write, speak, and stand up to thee sort of virulent, destructive, demagoguery that makes the rich richer and the poor dead, to cry out at the injustices in our society that stand as an offense to our loving God, and to crack some admittedly cheap shots at a guy who, in addition to being a world-class moral abomination, also left us plenty of low-hanging fruit to take potshots at.
In short….Trump has been a clear and present danger to all that is central to practitioners of the Christian faith.
And now that he’s gone, replaced by a man who seems to be, by all appearances, a fairly decent if incredibly bland person, who is by no means an advocate for radical grace and mercy, but at least doesn’t seem to be actively delighting at the prospect of being able to weaponize the institutions of the state to murder entire classes of people he doesn’t like.
And, since I’m not inclined to immerse myself in crazy conspiracy theories that paint Biden as some sort of man/lizard hybrid, or a child-cannibal, or whatever new fiction is no doubt already spreading around in order to have a suitably morally bankrupt opponent in my own personal Crusade for White Jesus, that leaves me with the uncomfortable question we’re going to wrestle with today:
What now?
What does it look like, what does it feel like to act for justice when the moral arc of the universe actually does seem to be bending, if ever so slightly, towards justice?
Because the truth is that it’s much easier to act for justice, to advocate for grace and mercy for the suffering, freedom for the oppressed, and relief for the poor, when you’re advocating against comically, blatantly obvious oppressors. Against people we can easily understand as our enemies; and therefore as enemies of God.
When we have a clear and obvious enemy to fight, that takes the pressure off us. When we have a giant to slay, we don’t need to look at our own failings. When there are great and terrible moral crises ravaging the lives of the innocent, it’s so very easy, and not even necessarily wrong, to prioritize their immediate suffering over our own self-reflection and accountability.
So easy, in fact, that we can very quickly find ourselves thinking that our own self-reflection and accountability don’t really play into it. We can find ourselves settling onto a hill of our own self-righteousness, so certain on our own moral superiority and absolute Spirit-driven rightness, that we can utterly fail to pursue those qualities of righteousness that God so fully embodies, and so too demands of us; the qualities of one who loves all, welcomes all, and invites all to the table.
So, what does God’s true righteousness look like, in action, apart from the holier-than-thou-great Crusader mindset so many of us have adopted over the past few years?
Well, if you were to single out and ask any random pastor off the street, after being entirely confused as to both how you identified them as a pastor at random and why you just dragged them off the street for a scriptural inquiry, they might direct you to look at the book of Jonah.
Jonah is a great example of what it means to practice righteousness. It is, in a great many ways, the story of engaging in God’s righteous behavior, whether you want to or not. In fact, when many of read through it, we often see it as a nearly foolproof narrative example for how to listen to, and follow, God’s clear-cut directions.
When we read the story, the sequence of events we tend to remember basically go like this:
- God says to Jonah, “Yo, Jonah! Do the thing!”
- In response, Jonah says “I am absolutely not going to do the thing!”
- Jonah gets on a boat, and commits himself to the holy and sacred, and above all well-thought-out mission of trying to sail a 8th Century BCE so fast that an omnipresent God can’t catch him.
God, in a scathing indictment of Jonah’s higher reasoning skills, says “LOL BIG FISH”
And lo, there was a Big damn fish.
Later on, said big fish has a mild case of prophetic indigestion.
God then says, “Did I stutter? GO DO THE THING!”
So…Jonah does the thing.
Repentance occurs and, for the only time in recorded history, a major nation repents entirely, and turns to God.
And that’s the game, right? Moral of the story is that if you listen to God, you’ll be used to make big, dramatic, world-changing, soul-saving repentance happen through the great and wonderful power of the almighty.
And if you don’t, that same great and wonderful power will rework the digestive track and culinary preferences of local marine life, and not in a way that you’ll find particularly enjoyable.
But, you might notice that this book isn’t titled “Jonah Potter and the Repentance of Nineveh.” In fact, the actual encounter with the nation of Nineveh, what we all too often think of as the focus of Jonah’s entire story…only shows up in this chunk of Chapter 3. The first two chapters are Jonah fleeing from God, and the last one is about Jonah being really….profoundly unhappy about what happened at Nineveh.
It’s almost like….the encounter with Nineveh is more of a background piece to Jonah’s story, and not actually the main point.
You see, when we read the scripture, we often read it looking for simple, easy to understand recipes for personal success, collective success, or just generally instructions for how to live a good and godly life. When we read through Jonah’s story, it’s easy to see the repentance of Nineveh and think, “Ok; God’s image of repentance is a wardrobe change and a few skipped meals.” But the story isn’t actually about Nineveh’s repentance; it’s about Jonah’s struggle with repentance.
Throughout the story, God isn’t trying to save Nineveh; an omnipotent, omnipresent God could do that much easier without repurposing wildlife to relocate an irate Hebrew would-be prophet. No, God is trying to save JONAH.
Jonah is a man who holds strongly to his sense of moral superiority. He knows what’s right and wrong, who knows who his enemies are, and who knows who his God is. He is so firm in his convictions, so utterly convinced in his path of righteousness that when the Almighty descends with a command that contradicts his self-righteous understanding of who deserves salvation, he tells God no; right to God’s incomprehensible face!
But the story didn’t end with Jonah grudgingly agreeing to do the will of the Lord, wandering into Nineveh smelling of ambergris and shame. It didn’t end when Nineveh did what they were always going to do in the first place, and repent and turn to the Lord. Jonah’s so-called success in turning the city doesn’t end the story; doesn’t give us our lesson.
Because Jonah continues to sulk, continues to sit, suffering in the conflict between his own self of self-righteous distaste at having saved those who he thought unworthy of salvation.
The story is about Jonah wrestling with the growing self-awareness that the soul that was most in need of saving wasn’t theirs.
It was his.
You see, the truth that God brings us through Jonah’s story, the truth I think we all need to wrestle with today, is that our faith isn’t transactional. We’re not looking for the right actions to put in to that holy slot machine, in order to get it to pay out in salvation for ourselves or others. We’re not looking to produce numbers of conversions, rack up our testimonial count, or fill up the offering plates.
We’re not tasked with standing tall in our self-righteous assertion of our own moral and ethical superiority, taking on false Gods and genocidal prophets while calling all the world to repent and start acting right.
We’re not meant to be the model of faith to which we force others to adhere.
The story of Jonah is about we, as he, are tasked with looking into ourselves, and seeing the ugliness of our own hatreds, the hypocrisy of our own biases, and the deep and abiding inequalities that run through our practice of faith.
We’re tasked not to see others in need of repentance, but to see ourselves in truth, and seek repentance for ourselves.
THE GREATEST SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE ISN’T EVANGELISM, IT’S REPENTANCE AND SELF-CORRECTION
For four years, we’ve been telling ourselves that Trump is the problem.
For decades, we’ve been placing capitalists in seats of power within our churches, measuring the success of God’s work in terms of full pews, overflowing offering plates, and profitable management of our facilities.
For centuries, we’ve been telling ourselves that if it’s not popular, than it must not be right.
For even longer, we’ve been telling ourselves that American Christianity is the faith, and that the two things are inseparable.
But God’s work isn’t dependent on our own self righteousness. The work of the kingdom doesn’t change to suit who we call our enemy, who we hate, or who we might prefer to think of as a friend.
So…yeah. Things in the United States are honestly better this week than they were last week. The economy is slowly clearing up like acne on the face of a 23-year-old who just cleared the worst ravages of pubescent dermatological terror, the country has started treating climate change as an actual existential threat rather than a children’s bogeyman that can be defeated by closing your eyes and humming loudly, and we’ve managed to go a full 7 days without a concerted attempt by domestic terrorists to overthrow the government.
But…there are still kids in cages.
The American military is still at work in the world, ending lives in pursuit of economic gain for the wealthiest American capitalists.
The poor are oppressed, the homeless are cold, and the sick go unhealed. The immigrant and the refugee are neglected and expelled; black and brown bodies are still getting beaten and murdered while their murderers hide from the consequence behind a dime-store child’s excuse for a badge.
The Shaman may have been removed from the Senate floor, but the cult still stands strong.
It’s easy to do good and holy work when we have an easy target, like the Trump administration. It’s easy to fill ourselves with grand feelings of self-righteousness, to stand filled with glorious purpose and demand the advent of God’s justice at the peril of God’s judgement.
It’s easy to do all that, when the focus is on converting Nineveh. On correcting the evils of other people
It’s a bit harder once Nineveh puts on their sackcloth, and we find our hearts still troubled, our feelings unresolved, and our souls unfulfilled.
Because the story was never about Nineveh.
And our story was never about Trump.
Our story is about God, and God’s justice.
Our story is about a Go who calls us to repent. A God who calls us to confront our own complicity in the sins of a nation, to confront our own biases that provide the fertile soil in which this fascism grew and flourished, and to confront our own internalized hatreds which whisper to us in the secret chambers of our hearts that we, and we alone, know who is worthy to be saved.
My friends, today we rise and go out into a world that remains as desperately in need of us as it did last week, last month, and last year. But it doesn’t need us as saviors, doling out righteousness with our right hand and condemnation with our left.
What the world needs from us is awareness of our imperfection and complete lack of righteousness, the humility to serve without commanding, and the temerity and persistence to stand in all the places where there is hurt, suffering, and pain, and say
Here I am, Lord. Let it be as you will, and let me be of help, even if only a little. For I am but a small and broken piece, but today I am here, and today I will serve the Lord.
Let us go out, and serve God together.
Comments