Psalm 84 (Leslie Brandt/Corita Kent)
Boldness in a Broken World
The theme of Psalm 84 is “Boldness in a Broken World.” How do we experience the presence of God, the holy, the mystery, whatever word you want to use, the central question is: How do we experience the presence of God in this fractured, broken, world? And, how do we respond to this presence? I saw two stories in the news just this morning that brought this into sharp relief for me. One story was about a woman who is running for a national office. She wants to be a member of Congress. According to the story she is running as a “Christian nationalist.” That was the banner that I saw on the screen. This candidate said: “The government should not tell the church what to do; the church should tell the government what to do.” That is Christian nationalism. It is what I would call a top down image of God. God is the ruler, God has anointed or appointed certain people to rule in God’s name, and as a matter of faithful obedience to God, those chosen ones have a mandate to impose their beliefs and ethics on others. The church should run the government. That’s the platform that this candidate for the United States Congress is running on. Let’s call this form of government a theocracy–a political state run by the church. I want to contrast that with another image that I saw on the news this morning. It was the story of women in Iran who are today protesting in the streets against a theocracy. They are cutting their hair and burning their hijabs in defiance of the law and at the risk of their lives and arrest.
Think of these two stories in a theological context. What is the understanding of God? What is the meaning of faith? I describe one as a “top down” theology and the other as a “bottom up” theology. Top down theology imposes itself on others by decree. Bottom up theology comes from the life of the people and the community. In our broken, fractured, world, where do we experience God, the holy? How is God manifested in the presence of struggle?
In our education class we are watching a movie on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a member of the Confessing Church–a Christian movement that resisted Nazi Germany and the German Evangelical Church. The German Evangelical Church, was a nationalist church formed in 1933 that supported the Nazi regime. The Confessing Church said that as a matter of faith if had to oppose the Nazi government and its policies. We can think of the conflict between the Evangelical Church and the Confessing Church as a conflict between two types of faith–a top down theocracy and a bottom up theology.
Recently Public Television has been showing Ken Burn’s documentary on the Holocaust–the persecution of the Jews. On this Gay Pride weekend we should remember that the first groups targeted by the Nazi’s were the handicapped and the homosexuals. Jews had to wear the Star of David. Homosexuals had to wear the Pink Triangle as a badge of shame and identification. But now, the Pink Triangle has become a symbol of resistance. There is a Pink Triangle Park in the Castro District in San Francisco, commemorating the thousands of homosexuals, transgender and bisexual victims of Hitler’s regime. The organizers of the park said that it is “a physical reminder of how the persecution of any individual or single group of people damages all humanity.” It is not the only memorial. There is the Matthew Shepard Human Rights triangle in West Hollywood, the Pulse Memorial and Museum in Orlando, Florida, scheduled to open this year, several parks and memorial in New York, and a mural in Portland, OR called, “Never Look Away.” And there are other memorials in other countries around the world. I think we should have a Pink Triangle Park here, or something like it, that is in the tradition of boldness in a fractured world.
Camp Sunflower, a camp this congregation helped launch, that is a safe place for LGBTQA+ youth is a living witness to this tradition of boldness. So, too, is the ICT Pride Parade that many of us will participate in today.
I think of this tradition of boldness in a fractured world when I read these words from Leslie’s translation of Psalm 84: “Lord, look with loving mercy upon those who have yielded their destinies to you.” We take the actions we do not to impose our will or sense of morality on others, but to affirm the dignity of everyone. That’s the meaning of a “bottom up” theology.
I cannot separate the violence and lack of civility we see in our society and close at home, I am thinking now of recent events in one of our high schools. I do not know the details so I am not commenting on the specifics but on the level of violence in our fractured world, I cannot separate this violence from the polities of our government and specifically the doctrine of perpetual war, which one recent administration called a “doctrine of preemptive war.” I want to think about this doctrine and violence more generally from a theological perspective. We are in a difficult situation. I think the psalmist is asking us to begin with our understanding of the holy. Where do we place our trust?
Common sense tells us that the first rule of ethics is not to harm, and the second rule is the right of self-defense. In a fractured world, in the fog of war, understandably self-defense moves to the center of the argument. The fog or war makes it not only possible but necessary to adopt life-affirming and life-negating values at the same time. Howard Thurman describes our predicament in this book, Jesus and the Disinherited. He says that our life-affirming ethic draws us toward one community, and becomes compensation for our life-negating attitude toward another community. In this way, hatred comes to serve a creative purpose.
On the surface it is too difficult to love our enemy. It seems like a betrayal of our own moral code and of our community. Writing about racial segregation in the US, Thurman reminds us that White Christians convinced themselves that Black people preferred segregation, and so, for centuries and even to this day, removed themselves from the struggle for civil rights. The same pattern of thinking applies elsewhere. It is safer to assume that “they,” whoever “they” are, prefer the status quo, than it is to enter the arena of struggle. Thurman acknowledges that there is a moral social hazard in deciding to actually love our neighbor. It can be dangerous to believe that we actually share a common humanity with our enemy and act like we mean it. Once we acknowledge our common human, we can begin to address our common problems.
Reverence and respect. Simple words to say but when placed at the core of our relationships these words are revolutionary acts of boldness. Let me turn again to the Psalm where we read: “It is more fulfilling to be an underpaid clerk in the service of God than to be owner and director of some huge and wealthy enterprise.” This is not to romanticize poverty. It is not a declaration of class warfare. Rather, the statement hides a question: Where do we place our trust? It is a question, and an affirmation: Whatever our station, we must hold fast to the conviction that there is a Spirit, a power, a reality, at work within us and beyond us that is committed to overcoming the world of fear and division and hate. Each of us can live effectively and boldly in this spirit. So be it. Amen.