“Come,” says the Lord-I-Am,
“Let us be wise together:
If those whom I call to true service
will truly humble themselves,
and pray with whole-life repentance,
I will heal their land….”Jesus said, for those who will listen:
“Blessed are those who lament, who mourn,
who cry with those who cry –
for it is they who will be comforted”– Isaiah, Chronicles, Matthew (my paraphrasing)
This mini-series amidst America’s crisis today continues from the previous post of this blog, “Crisis”.
Please note that references in parentheses (-) refer to books of the Bible unless otherwise specified.
Prefatory Note:
There are seasons
in everyone’s life
when it’s time to reason,
submit to the knife.
No game, no hypocrisy –
though some may try
to live the lie,
by that they will die.
The word-of-the-Lord
is a double-edged-sword:
it’s open-heart-surgery
on whole-life-perjury.
So come, says this Lord:
Let us face this music,
it is by this word
that I heal the sick.
– A reflection on Isaiah 1-11, 52-53; Matt 8-9, 11-12
A Stream of Tears
Sometimes, and ultimately when human words too often utterly fail to do justice, God’s Spirit-inspired words do. In such seasons, new mercy, God’s kind of justice, comes to us still in every long night, through word-song-prayers of lamenting. Lament is a thing – that many of us do not like. The fact is, though, such seasons happen. When they do, the question is, is there anything to say or do or pray that can be real and not hypocritical? Here, too, God saves us: God provides words or songs of lament.
You may have noticed earlier that with the dark-night-of-our-cultural-soul that was 2020 in America, I found less words for this blogging journey. I feel I was often pen-paralyzed by grief for our utter train-wreck of a nation. My heart cried out too deep for words, often in sheer protest. I felt overwhelmed by cold-blooded political corruption. I was most left in shock by majority American religious culture, so often silent in the face of oppression and hate and violence, now, worse, widely fueling and “preaching” more darkness with the worst of them.
Though in some hope of deeper repenting, I was too cowardly to speak out myself strongly enough soon enough. Oh, there was reason for this – not good, but reason, or so I thought. I’ve come to learn something troubling – though Jesus prepared us for this, too (see Matt 10). If I (or any of us) speak the most challenging point of Jesus’ central message most needed in American culture today, the true prophetic revelation of God that needs to be spoken especially to majority American religious culture, we risk abject rejection. Let’s not kid ourselves – because that religious culture is not. If we emphasize Jesus’ true active love for neighbor, instead of hateful prejudice and discrimination… If we promote Jesus’ compassion, instead of forcing legalistic moralism upon all of society at all costs by all means except compassion… In sum, if we witness instead today for the truest way of the original Jesus, we are inevitably rejected by wide swaths of white American “conservative” fundamentalist religious culture. It won’t matter what quarter you’re standing in, as I and many of this generation have experienced: Rejection will come from wider family, friends, white churches, co-workers, possibly (likely?) from our current religious “community”. I expect many committed to that religious culture will not read this blog again, once this confronts the challenge to say what must be said – though I pray such expectation will yet be too much for many humble hearts.
Simply put, for time too long, there I was, one committed, trained, and usually excited to serve the true Jesus-word of the loving God into the world, no matter the cost, amidst hatred slaying love, amidst injustice mocking compassion, and I remained much too silent. “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner!”
A Song of Silence
Simultaneously, strangely, in this culture that is never just white or black, in a parallel aspect of this experience, it was also good that the white man that I be was rendered rather speechless for a while. Let’s get serious: what do white people have to say today, when white culture has spent centuries in America inflicting hatred on everyone else, and then faking silent “ignorance” and “amnesia” of those injustices? We might ponder a relevant exemplary proverb:
It is one thing to be a silent
cold-hearted-racist;
It runs in the same spirit
to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
As most white majority religious culture in America is proving again through this unending history of rank prejudice, with what the majority of white religion does and does not speak about all this, the world knows better than we: both our silence and speech are too often a foolish roar of sheer hypocrisy.
Still, especially in deep searching silence, by God’s sheer grace, I hope I have struggled to seek from the heart to listen anew, and more deeply, to voices of truth and love and hope. When one does, I find that one shining reality speaks these true voices back: they live and sing still, mostly these days from brave black believers. In fact, when one does a re-think of these matters through American church history, and if one does a pre-think of these trends still running forward, one must conclude today: when true historians write up these happenings a couple centuries from now, they will be compelled to observe that the true “evangelical” spirit, the good news of God’s whole new reality of love coming in Jesus (Jesus’ gospel of “the kingdom of God”) was generally not running through white majority self-righteous fundamentalist cultures, but was living true still especially through the movement of black believers in the Jesus of compassionate justice.
Listening this way, hopefully long enough to repent in the true way of whole-life-change, which actually leads to new action of love, proven by commitment to compassionate justice for all, is a virtue some people steeped in white cultures may yet learn in Jesus, someday hopefully before it’s too late. As the marching continues and grows in the coming new reality of God-in-Jesus, I pray to be in those numbers: those who listened when we had the chance. So let us reason together and follow Jesus’ new way forward. As Jane Austin also observed for us to ponder proverbially (in her delightfully relevant Pride and Prejudice), the humility needed for such deeper wisdom and virtue may pass too quickly.
So hopefully, in response to a season of sheer terror, but with listening that may yet turn out to be a new beginning, and hopefully with much more deep pondering, repenting, and its true-fruit actions of love still to come, this is not too late nor too soon to share the outcries of my heart. I am still crying, learning anew the surprisingly deep value of Jesus-biblical lament, for our time and our generations, for our peoples and our cities and our cultures. Yes, it is time: a time to cry, to cry for a very long time, until our tears become a time of new action in new fruits that the world can see actually reflect the true Jesus.
So declares the LORD-I-AM:
“I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your religious assemblies.But let justice roll on like a river,
true love like a never-failing stream!For the days are coming, I declare,
when the harvest of blessing will be unending,they will rebuild the cities and live in them,
they will make gardens and eat their fruit.– Amos 5, 9; Ruth (see NRSV, NIV).
A New Culture
Many artists have been helping us do this through this season, many of them black. A black preacher helped us do this, for those with ears to hear, in the impossible commission to preach of such seasons in a memorial service for George Floyd. I seek simply to add one more humble voice to a growing chorus: a characteristically black gospel choir, with many Latino and Asian and Native voices joining them, and hopefully more and more white voices as well…
With this multi-racial prayer (from Revel 5), I feel I am a religious refugee, not at all at home in white fundamentalist-style religious cultures that may claim to form America’s religious majority, and which falsely claim to carry the “evangelical” torch, but speak and act and think publicly more like tradition-enslaved and cult-like enclaves drinking the Kool-Aid of yet another white-superiority spirit of fascist darkness. As Jesus taught we can know by the fruits, that white American fundamentalist religious spirit today has nothing to do with the fruits of the true Spirit of Jesus (Matt 5-7, Gal 5, just for starters).
Ironically – but quite possibly for all the best – we white spiritual refugees today need a miraculous hospitality, as a sheer gift, from the very people our white religious cultures have violated beyond measure. I can only hope they may find the grace-full love for us that our religious cultures have not given them, and we may yet learn this from these brothers and sisters beyond all imagining for white culture. And I offer this with one pulsing conviction. if we actually learn to lament truly in this season, to cry and listen and pray with all who cry out of suffering for Jesus’ justice, there may be hope for us still.
So we need to face and embrace this music of Jesus-Biblical lamenting – just as Jesus began weeping his love over human brokenness at Lazarus’ tomb, and continues weeping his sorrow over religious cultures that claim to be Jerusalem (the biblical symbolic-reality of the city of God, the community of God’s true people), even while they refuse to be gathered into Jesus’ new community of compassionate anti-racism love (Psm 46, John 9, Matt 23, Revel 5).
So we need to cry with those who cry, and serve however we can to share Jesus’ compassionate justice in anyone’s crisis. This faith is not a generalized, mystical, vague exercise of empty-minded ignorance, that denies the suffering and injustice and disease around us. Our Jesus-biblical life-vision is not one of foolish denial that won’t even wear a simple face-covering in hope of helping to stem the spread of a real disease that has killed a million Americans. A “spirituality” of denial, escapism, and selfish privilege, is the worst definition of lament, repentance, prayer, salvation, discipleship, or hope I have encountered in my travels through this world. And as with any form of such false religious culture, there is no truth in its typical claims of self-righteousness that “justify” cold care-less attitudes. Instead, Jesus-biblical lamenting walks alongside people with care and compassion, IN the midst of particular crises, specific injustices, real painful suffering, actual darkness. That is the way Jesus’ way stares the darkness of suffering and injustice in the face, to embrace the music of lamenting blues with a flute of faith: there has to be a better way, Jesus’ compassion is a way to care for everyone – and we’ll keep cryin’ out to God ‘til it all happens…
So, to embrace lament bluntly
by penetrating words of rough poetry –
will we hear and do the call of the seer,
to humble ourselves in true living-prayer?:
Wade in the wata’,
wade in the wata’, chil’en,
wade in the wata’ –
God’s a-gonna’ trouble the wata’…
For next steps into the courage of facing this crisis and our call to serve in its midst, I urge us all to view the movie Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace.
This mini-series responding to America’s crisis today will continue in the next post of this blog.
Readers are also encouraged to explore more reflections in this series: Culture Contact.
God so loved the world… God is love!
Then I saw a new heaven and new earth…
and the tree of life…
at the middle of the great street of the city…
and the leaves of the tree
are for the healing of the cultures.John 3; 1 John 4; Revelation 21, 22
Leaves of the City 