This morning’s gospel lesson is one of those passages that people who say that every word in the scriptures is to be understood and applied in its plain and literal sense never seem to quote. Maybe it’s because, like us, they know that, in relative terms they are rich, well-fed, and highly thought-of. Taken as practical advice for living, these words seem assured to leave us broken, bruised, and naked. Indeed, by themselves, out of context, they have been shown to be deadly—applied as rules, they have instructed women to stay married and subservient to abusive and controlling drunks; they have told enslaved peoples to submit without revolt to their exploitation. So while they express the highest moral truth, and absolutely mean what they say, I think I am not off base in saying that these are words of poetry. And the work of poetry is making connections, making things whole that our ordinary, limited mind has broken apart.
These words affirm that the imagination of God holds the world in balance. They tell us that there is always another side to the story we tell ourselves about the lives we are leading and the worlds we inhabit. These are words that speak to us when times are hard, reminding us that life itself is a gift worth celebrating. They trouble us when everything seems flush and rosy, reminding us that nothing in this world lasts. They urge us to see through our anxieties about other people, about how they might mistreat or humiliate us, abuse us or rip us off, and see that they can never deprive us of our freedom to meet them on terms of respect. When we choose to believe that other people are like us, sharing our weakness and our dignity, we find new possibilities in the experience of what unites us, even with those who are mired in denial.
This freedom to act on the truth is the nonviolent power that Jesus wielded. His teachings are not abstract rules from on high, but they have real meaning because they were lived. He refuses to let his enemies, trapped in inhumanity by their fear and blindness, to define his own course of action and spur him to retaliation in kind. Grounded in the imagination of God, he keeps offering them the whole truth about himself and them, which is also known by the name of “love.”
Jesus speaks from the imagination of God and people can hear and see the power of God because they can see and hear him. Again, it’s like poetry, which is able to sing of the invisible because it breathes with what is sensed and thought and felt. We do not want to be poor, or grieving, or hungry, we do not want to be struck, or robbed, or defamed. We are afraid of these things, and of what we imagine what they would be like for us. But because Jesus spoke these words, and because he lived them, our fear is balanced by a totally new possibility—a joy that is not diminished by other peoples’ injustice. Because he himself was naked, broke, and bruised, and showed that no one really has the power to destroy us or separate us from God, we have come to trust Him more than our terror of loss or dreams of happiness. And instead of a dreaming of a place on the right side of a world permanently divided into poor and rich, weeping and laughing, hungry and satisfied, we learn to hope and work and sacrifice for a world of one united people—God’s people.
I got a call this week from a friend of mine who is the Associate Rector at a large Episcopal Church in a wealthy suburb in the Diocese of California. His parish had applied for a zoning variance so they could regularly host a vanload of homeless men as part of a rotating shelter program shared with some 15 other congregations in their area. He was calling me for moral support because these plans had touched off a violent storm of protest in the community. Neighbors of the church have been sending alarmist emails around town about plunging property values and the imminent prospect of unsupervised mentally-ill drug-addicted sex-offenders wandering their tree-lined streets. Legal action has been threatened, and the Rector and vestry are weighing whether or not to pull their application. Incidentally, the same thing happened last year, and they were hoping that emotions might have cooled off enough that they could get it done on the second try, but no such luck.
It is tempting to see this situation in terms of good guys and villains, loving compassionate Christians vs. hard-hearted elitist haters, and to want to marshal the forces of good for a decisive victory. But I think the approach that my friend and his church are taking is closer to the New Testament vision of holiness, which is to stay in the painful heart of the conflict. Members of their congregation have been converted to their need to do this ministry by their experience of serving the clients of this program at other churches and synagogues. Their imagination has expanded beyond their fears and stereotypes by meeting real homeless people. Similarly, they have not sought to meet the resistance to their plans with superior force, but to keep opening the door to actual face-to-face encounter with the aggrieved neighbors, looking for the opportunities for actual communication. This kind of patient, vulnerable, when necessary even suffering, witness has always characterized the truly great saints of the church. It speaks of hope that is grounded in the imagination of God, that sees beyond the tragedy of human divisions, conflicts, and contradictions to the divine comedy of Christ, the sacrificial victim enthroned above every rule and dominion.
This truth that is love, that sees and speaks the world whole, is the enduring power that orders and sustains the universe. It is the power that Jesus refers to as “The Kingdom of God.” When the prophet Daniel sees a terrifying vision of monstrous beasts, each more terrible than the last, arising from the sea to dominate the world, he turns to an attendant in the court of heaven who explains: these are the empires of the earth that rise and then fall prey to another, “but the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.” This is the kingdom that already is, already ruling in the lives of those who live not for the praise and worship of empires, but for the glory of God. But it is also the kingdom that is coming, the kingdom of the Son of Man. This Son of Man is Everyman, the common representative of what it really means to be human. But he is also what comes next, the one who shows us what we will be when the imagination of God is enfleshed in us completely, with love, and will, and power. To follow him is to journey deeply into the fear and longing that are at the heart of the space between ourselves and others. To trust him is to find there, in those very particular spaces, the wisdom to bring everyone together at last, the revelation of an end to misery and violence and injustice, and the power to do something about it.
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