Actions that hurt--and heal

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

I spent most of last Monday digging up an old, leaky irrigation system in the front yard, and I brought a portable radio outside with me, to listen to while I worked.  After a couple of hours of informative programming on a listener-sponsored community station, I decided I’d had enough of that for the day and turned to one of my guilty pleasures—sports talk radio.  And in that world the news was all about a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers named Colin Kaepernick, who has been remaining seated during the national anthem before the team’s pre-season football games.  The first time he did it, no one noticed, but at last Sunday’s game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a reporter saw him, and asked him about it in a locker-room interview after the game, at which point Kaepernick declared that he was sitting in protest of the oppression of African-Americans and other people of color in the United States. 

The hosts of my radio talk show felt compelled to weigh in with their opinions about what Kaepernick had done, and then they opened the phone lines and took calls from listeners who expressed their wide-ranging and contradictory views.  As the week went on, this controversy spread across the media landscape, with everyone from Kaepernick’s former coach, Jim Harbaugh, and 49ers legend Jerry Rice, to the Republican Party’s nominee for President publicly expressing their disapproval.  Meanwhile, some current and former members of the armed services, not wanting to let others took offense on their behalf, “tweeted” messages of support at #VeteransForKaepernick.  At the 49ers final exhibition game on Thursday, at “Salute to the Military Night” in San Diego, Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid knelt on one knee during the anthem, in what they intended as a gesture of mingled defiance and respect, and tens of thousands of fans in the stadium got to contribute their voices to the conversation by booing Kaepernick lustily every time he was on the field. 

Clearly, Colin Kaepernick has touched a nerve by taking this stand, or rather, this seat or this knee.  He has aroused countless people to want to have their views be heard on what they think of his actions, and whether his taking them is justified, whether he is personally qualified to be making this protest, and whether the way he has gone about it is appropriate or offensive.  And I personally am not immune to this reaction.  But I’m going to spare you my opinions, because I think today’s scripture readings point us in a different direction.  They are asking us to think, not about what Colin Kaepernick’s protest means to us or to others, but about what it is actually like for Colin Kaepernick.  When all his teammates and coaches, and the owner of the team, and every one of the fifty-thousand other people in the stadium who were physically able to do so rise to their feet in a ritual of unity and love for our country, a ritual you yourself have proudly participated in hundreds of times before in your high school, college, and professional careers, what is it like to sit, alone, on the bench? 

Jesus says that this kind of loneliness, this alienation from other people, is what we can expect when we join his movement.   We can expect to have moments when we are estranged from the groups we thought we wanted to belong to, and even from the person we thought we would be to be loved and accepted by them.  It is an estrangement that can turn us into enemies in the eyes of our nation, our church, even our family: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” This is a hard saying, and it’s natural to think, “Jesus can’t really mean that—he must be overstating the case.” And in a sense he is, but the purpose of the exaggeration is to underscore his essential point: that following him means sharing his commitment to doing the will of God whatever the cost.  We have to be ready for those moments when we know what we must do to be faithful to the truth of our lives, when even though it is certain we will be misunderstood and hurt people we care about, and in those moments we have to be willing to act. 

If we’re lucky we are never called to do this at the cost of our health, our freedom, or our lives.  But the point is that we are never truly free unless we give God the freedom to tell us what to do and how far to go.  We are never fully alive if we are not willing to lay our lives on the line in response to the Spirit’s stirring of our conscience.  And if we are fortunate enough to live in a society where Christians are the majority, where social deviance and political dissent are widely tolerated, it shouldn’t serve as an excuse to take fewer risks with our freedom, or stands on our conscience, but as a license to take more.   This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go out looking for courageous stands to take; the naturally-unfolding circumstances of our lives give us ample opportunities to take difficult and unpopular actions.  Even those actions we recognize as especially heroic often turn on a fairly straightforward personal choice.  Rosa Parks had no idea, when she refused to give up her seat in 1955, that she would catalyze the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights movement.  She was simply, she would later say, “tired of giving in.”  Yet as this example shows us, it is actions, even modest personal ones, that really count.  They have far-reaching effects that words do not. 

Actions create stories, and symbols, with the power to move other people.  In July LeBron James and three other professional basketball superstars stood together and made speeches, at a nationally-televised awards ceremony, about racial division, systemic failure, and violence both by and against the police.  It received a polite murmur in response, whose tone was generally appreciative.  But those speeches were a blip on the meter compared to the volume and intensity of the reaction that Colin Kaepernick got, by sitting alone, saying nothing.  His action transformed an obligatory ritual that rarely gets a second thought, into a highly charged symbol of our country’s congenital wound of racist oppression and violence, a wound that has never healed, and continues to tear us apart.  And in the days since, as people have passionately argued with each other about their interpretations of what he did, that disunity has been visible for everyone to see.  Whatever you make of Kaepernick’s action, it is hard to dispute its effectiveness.   

Of course, there is no greater example of the power of an act to transform a symbol than the one given us in the gospel.  Jesus’ teachings about the forgiveness of sins and the blessedness of the poor, about loving one’s enemies, and the subversive, hidden nearness of the Kingdom of God, would surely have been forgotten centuries ago if he had not been willing to die on a cross.   In doing so, Jesus changed that cross from a sign of terror and despair at the ruthless power of the Roman state, into a symbol of unconquerable freedom of conscience, and faithfulness to the will of God.  And God’s act of raising Christ from the dead completed the transformation, so that now the cross is a symbol of the truth of all that Jesus taught, of justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, of abundant life’s victory over death, a sign of promise even to those without a hope in the world, that their suffering itself is eloquent, and God is listening. 

And for those of us who have something left to give the world, and come to Jesus to take up his cross, it is the sign of our freedom and our mandate, in gestures of protest and works of mercy, to act like him.  The importance of these actions is not measured in how much they shift the balance of political power, or even lessen the suffering in the world.  In those respects, they often seem to be so much spitting in the wind.  But they are also important as signs of resistance and hope.  They create symbols and stories that inspire and provoke, encourage and infuriate, chasten and embolden, others to act.

Death's counterfeit--or God's glory?

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

In 1994 I was in Berlin, and one day during my visit, I took a commuter train north of the city to a suburb called Oranienburg.  There I got off, and walked a few blocks from the train station to a place known as Sachsenhausen.  What I found there was field of symbols, representing conflicting stories about what happened there, and why.

The first such symbol meets the visitor at the entrance to the place, an imposing two-story guardhouse with an arched entryway underneath in which there is a wrought-iron gate.  And worked into the structure of the gate itself are bars that spell out the notorious motto of the Nazi concentration camps—Arbeit macht frei—which means, “Work makes you free.”  It is a note of historical interest that one of the notable forms of “work” to which the slave laborers of Sachsenhausen were put was the manufacture on a massive scale of counterfeit foreign currencies—English pounds, Swiss francs, American dollars.

And this single fact encapsulates, in a way, the whole world of the camp, and of the Nazi state of which it, and other camps like it, were the quintessential expression.  It was a counterfeit social order, in which people were punished and killed for that which was no crime, in which the “work” which supposedly made them “free” had no productive or beneficial purpose, in which the whole system, which was supposed to be saving civilization from barbarity and chaos was in fact a vast and barbaric criminal enterprise. 

We can see this now with no difficulty at all, having the 20-20 vision of hindsight.  The Nazi system and its demonic ideology is long vanquished, reduced to rubble, and so is the counterfeit worker’s paradise that took its place.  In the center of Sachsenhausen a massive granite column built during the Communist East German period.  It is both a memorial to the thousands of leftist political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war who died there, and a monument of victory, celebrating the Russian army that liberated the camp and crushed Fascism.  And next to the column, almost as a wry aside, was a newly-installed interpretive sign noting that Sachsenhausen remained in operation for another decade after 1945, as a place of internment for former Nazis and other enemies of the new, Communist state.

That sign was itself a symbol of victory, a claim to have woken from the nightmare of the past, in the clear day of a new liberal and democratic Germany, where the truth about Sachsenhausen could now be told.  It is a reunited Germany at the center of a pluralistic Europe, that has moved beyond the nationalistic and ideological conflicts of her history into political, cultural, and economic integration.  And this Europe is a linchpin of new global order of unprecedented productivity, opportunity, and prosperity, where work really does make you free.  Of course, more than twenty years after 1994, it is less clear than it was how lasting that order will be.  And it remains to be seen what irony people a century from now will find in the symbols it produced to demonstrate its goodness.

But in the meantime, people were making the most of that open space to transform the symbolic landscape of Sachsenhausen.  I saw this in the camp’s “infirmary,” where doctors trained to comfort and heal practiced a counterfeit of medicine, torturing living human subjects in the name of scientific experimentation.  I happened to visit that place at just the same time as a group of pilgrims from Israel was laying wreaths of fresh flowers on the operating tables and saying prayers for those who suffered there.  And in another place, on the outer wall of the camp, there was a memorial to the members of the thriving gay subculture of Berlin who were rounded up en masse and died in Sachsenhausen.  It was in the form of a giant pink triangle, the badge, analogous to the yellow star for Jews, that Nazi laws forced homosexuals to wear.

In this way, persecuted groups have turned symbols of horror into defiant signs of life.  They say we will not accept your attempt to erase the ones we love from the face of the earth.  It is too late to save their lives, but it is still possible to preserve their memories.  We may not know their names, but we know that they lived, and we know how they died.  We remember, and even honor, the instruments of shame and death that were applied to them, as symbols of our refusal to hide the truth that these were human beings, whose torture and murder no rationalization could ever justify. 

The cross is just this kind of symbol.  For many centuries of the history of Christian art, the cross was a prevalent symbol, but until the later Middle Ages it was rarely, if ever, a crucifix.  That is to say, it did not depict a dead or dying man hanging on it.  This was because the cross is more than a memorial to the death of one person.  It had a more universal meaning, as a reminder that the imperial system of Rome, that was supposed to bring law and order, progress and enlightenment to its subject peoples, was a brutal counterfeit that relied on the terror of the cross to keep its slaves in line. 

It was a reminder that the Romans had their collaborators in putting Jesus to death, the Jewish elite who decreed that it would better for an innocent man to die in a travesty of justice, than to allow his imagination of the kingdom of heaven to stir the common people up to challenge their subjugation.  It is a symbol of all our human pretensions to decide for ourselves who is in possession of goodness and truth and who is a threat to these, to decide who is fit to live and command, and who is condemned to slave and to die.

And it is a revelation of the humanity of the victims that such pretensions inevitably make.  The cross is a symbol of the witness that these victims bear.  When we remember the martyrs, we remember human beings whom systematic violence tried to erase, whose example of true humanity shines out all the more for being engulfed by darkness and falsehood.  We recount the gruesome details of their deaths because we wish to honor their courage, and the price they paid for standing firm in the truth.  Without memory of the manner in which they gave their lives, the truth for which they laid them down is in danger of being lost, and without that truth how can there be compassion, forgiveness, or restitution?

But the cross is not only the sign of those who died heroically in the cause of truth, whose names we hold in honor.  It stands for hope of remembrance, and thus of compassion, restitution, and forgiveness for all the countless victims of murderous violence whose names are unknown, who died for no good cause, and with no particular nobility or courage.  And such hope could only be hope in God. 

That is why the earliest crosses in Christian art, and countless crosses throughout the centuries down to the present day make no attempt to present a historically accurate representation of the cross on which Jesus died.  They are geometrical forms, often highly stylized and adorned.  Because the cross is not simply a memorial to the suffering and death of Jesus; and it is not only a disclosure of the falsehood of every rationale for terror, violence, and murder; it is first and foremost a revelation of the glory of God.  The cross is a sign of God who is life, whose love of life reached into our world of death in the person of Jesus.

Because he gave himself to the cause of life, the life that is the free gift of a loving God to all creatures, the forces of death gathered around Jesus.  Because he spoke the truth about the mercy of God, that is for the unjust as well as the just, for sinners as well as the righteous, for the poor and persecuted and afflicted as well as the proud and powerful and prosperous, they showed him no mercy.  But Jesus did not turn away from the end that meets all human life in a world enslaved to death.  He accepted its sentence, and suffered and died like all its other victims.  Yet he died without submitting to the power of death, without succumbing to fear or self-pity, or crying out for vengeance.   He completed on the cross the work of his life, of giving glory to God who is love that is unfazed by hate and life that has no traffic whatsoever with death.   And so his cross became our enduring symbol--of what death is not, and of who God really is.