On Friday at noon a few of us
from St. John’s gathered with a few hundred other people for a rally in Walnut
Park. Our purpose was to demonstrate our
commitment to making this a community where the rights and dignity of every
person, and every kind of person, are respected, and where it is safe to be who
you really are. There were several
speakers, and some half-hearted attempts to get a call-and-response chant
going, but my wife and I agreed that the high point of the event was a speech
by a student, a recent graduate of Casa Grande High School.
I say “speech”, but what his
words really amounted to was a brief telling of his life story. Brought here by his parents from Peru when he
was three, he lost his father to deportation a few years later. As a teenager, he began to understand what it
would really mean for his to be undocumented when he went to one of the factory
outlet stores north of town to apply for his first job, and the application
asked for his social security number. He
was an indifferent scholar in high school, but managed to graduate, and somehow
was prevailed upon to enter Santa Rosa Junior College. It was there, taking courses in Political
Science, that he discovered his sense of purpose and potential. It was there he helped organize a union of
undocumented students to advocate for their future, and there he made the
Dean’s academic honor roll and was elected student-body President. And the loudest cheers of the afternoon, the
moment that made my own spine tingle, came when he announced that he had just received
word of his acceptance at UC Davis.
It was a variation on the
classic American dream, with one small twist.
As he came to the end of his story and drew his conclusions from it,
this student didn’t talk about himself. He
didn’t talk about his hard work, or stick-to-it-iveness, or the importance of having
confidence in himself no matter what. He
talked about others, the teachers and administrators, the mentors and friends, the
people like us in the crowd at the rally, who saw past the judgments and stereotypes
attaching to his immigration status, and saw him. They saw his humanity, and the gifts and
talents he could contribute to his community, and to his country, if given the
chance. And they encouraged him to lay
aside his fears and resentments, the hostility of others he had turned against
himself, and to come out of the darkness and into the light.
In today’s epistle reading,
St. Paul reminds the church in Rome that it is time; time to rouse themselves
from a life half-lived and to become fully awake. “Let us then lay aside the works of
darkness,” he says, “and put on the armor of light.” Which is kind of a strange image when you
think about it—the armor of light.
Because armor is what a person puts on for protection from attack by
enemy. And, I don’t know about you, but
when I am attacked my first instinct is to conceal myself; to hide what I am
thinking and feeling, who I really am, and what I really want. But in a world
still afraid of the dark, says Paul, we must find our safety by shining out as
beacons of light.
And this is an image that
appears throughout the scriptures. Our
reading from Isaiah today ends, “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light
of the Lord.” Jesus says in the Sermon
on the Mount, “you are the light of the world.
A city on a hill cannot be hid.”
John’s Gospel says that “the light has come into the world, and people
loved the darkness more than the light… But the one who does what is true comes
to the light.” But the question remains:
why would a tiny, oppressed minority like the Jews, or like the followers of
Jesus, whose safety you think would come from lying low and being as
inconspicuous as possible, want to come out into the light?
I think the answer to that
question comes down to faith—faith in the judgment of God. It is the faith that judgments of other human
beings have no real power over us, because they are usually mistaken. They
see only outward appearances, and are often based on ignorance and prejudice,
and envy and fear. It is only God who knows
what is in the human heart. Only God
knows what we have suffered and overcome, and what we deeply love and truly
hope for. So there is something no one
can ever take from us, even by taking our lives, which is who we are in the
eyes of God. Of course, that is small
comfort if we are hiding behind our own superficialities—thinking we are what
we own, or what job we have, what neighborhood we live in or who our ancestors
were. In such cases the light of God,
shining in the hidden depths of the heart, may come as a rude shock. It may involve the sudden destruction of what
we thought was important in making us who we are.
But it’s a different story if
we are already moving toward the light.
If we have already opened our hearts to the light of the disinterested truth,
and have fearlessly examined the things we’ve done for which we feel guilty or
ashamed; if we have watched the subtle workings of our self-regard and
judgmental or acquisitive thoughts toward others; if we have acknowledged to
ourselves our own deep-seated loneliness, our doubts about our worthiness and
need to be loved; if we have come to terms with the vanity of worldly
achievements, and our ignorance before the mysteries of the universe, and we
have honestly reckoned the brief span of our lives; then we have already begun
to see ourselves as God sees us. The last
steps into the light may still be painful to bear, but we will already have
learned to take the medicine of God’s compassion and love that brings hope and
even joy to the process of purification.
Of course, Christian hope is not
just hope for a personal inner illumination.
It is hope that God’s hidden purpose for the entire world will come out
into the light. For the authors of the
New Testament this hope was more than wishful thinking. It was the expectation of the inevitable. Not because they claimed to be able to see
the future, but because they believed in the promises of God. Those promises said that God had already chosen
a time and a place to come out of hiding, and teach everyone what all the struggle
and striving of history was ultimately for.
This was the message of the prophets to Israel, such as when Isaiah told
of instruction going forth to the nations from Jerusalem, to beat their swords
into ploughshares and learn war no more.
And for the New Testament apostles, the life and teaching, and death and
resurrection of Jesus made these promises came true. He was the light of God’s wisdom and will that
shone in the darkness of the world.
The church remembers Jesus
with praise and thanksgiving for the gift of this light, but also with prayers for
the further fulfillment of God’s promise.
Which sounds like two different things but it is not. One way I think we can see how grateful
remembrance and hopeful expectation hang together is by reflecting on Jesus’
own favorite way of talking about himself—as the “Son of Man.” In some places Jesus uses it to refer to the hardship
and suffering he has to undergo, like any human being in the world. In other places he uses “Son of Man” to speak
of the authority given him by God to cast out evil spirits, and heal sickness,
and forgive sins. And in still other
places it is as if he is speaking of someone else, a Son of Man who is yet to
come, who will bring the final, universal revelation of the mercy and justice
of God. These different uses do not
contradict one another, but create a full picture of the mission of Christ.
God’s compassion and
solidarity with our suffering is linked to God’s working to heal and forgive and
restore, and these aspects together set the standard for the coming judgment. The revelation of the Son of Man is our armor
of light, protecting us with the assurance that the judge of the world has a
deep understanding of our predicament, and views us with loving-kindness. It gives us the courage and the confidence to
join in his struggle to reconcile the world to God. He has revealed the light in which God sees
us, so there can be no retreat into the darkness of shame and fear, no going
back to the sleep of a life half-lived.
Because now it is only a matter of time.
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