This week… ugh. this week.
How does anyone preach on a week like this one has been? what could anyone possibly have to say? It’s the question that pastors around the nation faced, as we sat with events that seemed bigger than any words we could possibly find. Ultimately, of course, the response was the same one that we come to every time it feels as though we’ve finally reached the level of un-preachability: we preach the Gospel. We trust that the texts will have their message for us, even when we don’t have the words.
This week’s texts are timely, but I think most would be in this book whose focus lands so squarely on justice. John the Baptist stands in the wilderness, preahcing a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In John’s preaching, repentance is necessary. But John’s repentance isn’t about going into a room to pray in solitude and ask God’s forgiveness. John calls the people to a public act, a deliberate act for which one has to leave the known places of their lives, and enter the wilderness. John calls the people, calls us, out of our comfort zones, out of the places we have created to protect ourselves and all that we love. Repentance calls us to a place of vulnerability, as we engage with discomfort within and around ourselves.
We talked last week about perfection not being required, or even desirable, as humans seek to interact with the divine. God does not need us to be perfect, but calls us continually to grow, and develop, and become more than what we were yesterday. And as good as it is to hear that God does not require us to be perfect, there is still a big difference between doing our work imperfectly and consciously committing acts of violence. If we define sin by its literal translation from the Greek – “missing the mark,” you can imagine an analogy in archery – there is still a big difference between not getting a bullseye and not even aiming for the target in the first place. Perfection may not be what God desires in us, but neither does God want grace to become a license for evil, whether that looks like acts of violence or it looks like the refusal to stand up against injustice. Grace is not our “get out of jail free” card: grace is what makes it worth our while to repent, to acknowledge where we’ve fallen short or screwed up and to commit ourselves to doing better.
And that’s just on God’s side.
In this story in the Gospel, both John and Jesus were equally aware that their calls to repentance were not simply about human relationships with the divine, but about human life in community with one another. John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in the full knowledge that true forgiveness – true reconciliation and healing – requires accountability, empathy, and remorse. And that a community that cannot commit to those principles will eventually collapse into violence.
There have been a lot of calls since the presidential election for unity and healing, for forgiveness and moving on. Indeed, even in the past few days I have encountered multiple instances of people who expect that Christian love means giving a pass to those who have done violence. I don’t know where or how Christianity substituted the seeking of justice with the concept of a niceness that doesn’t ruffle any feathers, but I do know that no one clued in either John the Baptist, or Jesus himself, about that shift. Because all those calls for unity and healing, without the simultaneous call for justice and repentance, stand in direct opposition to the Gospel which we profess to follow. It is worth noting that John got arrested–and killed– for his work, because the calls to repentance that he proclaimed loudly enough to bring crowds from Jerusalem to the Jordan would have completely overturned the balance of power at the time. His work ran so counter to the ideas of calm and niceness and comfort that those in authority needed to remove him, silence him… and any who might come after him. They needed to put the oppressed firmly in their place in order to maintain the status quo, in order to maintain their own power.
Because the faith which sent John out into the wilderness – the faith which with he called us all to repentance – is the faith that seeks truth over civility, vulnerability over power, justice over comfort. It is the faith that asks us to repent. It is the faith that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable with the fallout of their actions and their silences. The faith to which John called us, the faith which we follow in the person of Jesus, is still the very faith that rejects the emptiness of unrepentant niceness and forgiveness without consequence.
In what has since become a statement of incredible irony, the author JK Rowling, in the Harry Potter series, noted that to commit acts of violence is to tear apart one’s soul. (Of course, she explicitly said that murder tears the soul, but since the books repeatedly lump the acts of murder, enslavement, and torture together as equally “unforgiveable” and meriting the same consequences, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that she meant that all acts of human violence are equally soul-tearing… did I mention irony?) And in this – unlike so much else she has recently said – I think she is right: the damage that we inflict upon others damages us, tears us apart, within our selves and from our communities. The only way, she notes, to repair that damage – the only way to heal a soul torn by its own violence – is to feel remorse, to feel the harm that we have done to another within our own selves. The only way to heal is to have compassion – literally, to feel with – the person we have harmed, a concept Rowling herself would do well to embody in her dealings with trans folk. She doesn’t use these exact words, but Rowling’s concept of healing is remarkably like the Gospel insistence upon repentance for the forgiveness of sins: a willingness to take responsibility, not only in words but to the core of ourselves, for the violence and harms we have caused, or even the ones we have allowed to happen before us; a willingness not only to take responsibility, but to repent before those whom we have harmed: to name, and feel, and own the deep and lasting damage that our violence, or our silence before it, have done to real people who are supposed to be our neighbors.
Because we cannot say that we didn’t know: only that we refused to see.
The acts of terror and violence this week happened on the day of Epiphany, and in that we must hear our call. The feast of the Epiphany marks the arrival of the Magi to honor the Christ child: it is a day, a season of illumination, of revelation, and letting ourselves see what is right before us. For we remember that the Magi expected to find the baby in Jerusalem and allowed their human understandings to send them off course. Their encounter with the child opened their hearts to the truths they had not understood: the power that Herod would not willingly give up, the violence he would be willing to commit in that process. Epiphany is that moment in our liturgical year when we set aside our understandings of the world as it is, and allow our experience of the Christ child, the reality of God-made-flesh, to break us open to all that we had refused to acknowledge before. This season of illumination throws the world around us into stark relief, changes our perspectives, holds up a mirror before us, and demands our accountability – demands that we take a good, long, honest, vulnerable look at ourselves, at our actions and our refusals to act, and all of the consequences of our deeds. The events of this week are a powerful mirror, setting before us the sins of this nation, of this society, and we are called, as surely as if John the Baptist’s voice rang among us, to go out into the wilderness – the places we are afraid to travel – to step willingly into our vulnerability, and to repent. Because the actions of those who committed violence out of fear of losing their power are a reflection of our unwillingness to believe what our marginalized neighbors have long been begging us to hear: that our nation has forever been one that upholds the power of whiteness, of maleness, of Christian nationalism with tremendous violence and utter impunity.
The events of this week show us, with a terrifying clarity, that white nationalists can plan and organize an insurrection (they had shirts printed, this wasn’t impromptu) with little to no resistance; can occupy the locations of power and authority in this nation and walk out again, most without even a scratch… and they know it. They flaunt it. Because they see, even if we refuse to, that this is indeed who we are. The events of this week force us to look at a nation that our neighbors of color have long described to us, have long begged us to acknowledge… and repent. Repent of the ways that we have refused to acknowledge racism. Repent of the excuses for police brutality. Repent of the silence that keeps us comfortable in our whiteness, in our gender or sexuality, in our citizenship, in our Christianity. The events of this week show us the stark reality that marginalized people cannot express their grief and pain at their oppression, cannot demand justice when they have been wronged, but that white people who simply do not want to share power – whose main purpose is to demonstrate to everyone watching just how much they can do and get away with, just how dangerous they are willing to be for the sake of their own power – can throw violent tantrums with minimal consequence. The events of this week show us who we are, even as our faith reminds us who we are called to be.
It will feel like a wilderness journey, as we venture out of the comforts of our known locations, out of the safety of our privileged experiences, and into the insecurity where so many of our neighbors are forced to live. It is a journey we must make with intention: willing to hear with remorse, and engage with responsibility, as we step closer to the baptismal waters to which we have been called. Because the Good News remains, even in the horrors of an insurrection, even in the wake of violence and terror: there is still the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare a way, even here, even now, for our God. And he may not be dressed in camel’s hair, her diet may not consist of sticky insects, but still they call, in the hopes that we will respond: proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Still they call: proclaiming a muddy, cold, uncomfortable accounting that will begin the process of mending the damage, the violence that white supremacist patriarchy has done to our souls, both individually and as a society. Still they call: proclaiming that the vows we made in our own water still hold us, still call us to be more than we are, still offer us the promises of grace in the face of sin.
The Good News is that the illumination of the Epiphany – the clarity we gain from our encounter with the incarnate God – remains before us, beckoning us to look closely, to look beyond our comfort, knowing that even in the unbearable clarity of revelation we are encouraged and held by the one in whom we find new understandings. The Good News is that there is a way to heal the soul-tearing damage of human violence, the rending of the Body of Christ and the bonds of our communal being, not through the niceness and civility that put a pretty façade on evil, but through the mountain-lowering, valley-smoothing, earth-shaking acts of repentance, of compassion, of justice that are possible by grace.
This week has shown us who we truly are, if we are willing to look, and see, and understand. It has offered us as well the opportunity to participate in healing, to repent of the damage we have done or have not prevented, and to seek in humility and love to carve a new path, to prepare a new way for our God. This has been a week that calls us anew into the wilderness, in confidence that there is a path forward, into the waters, that we may hear anew the voice that speaks grace as we emerge from the waters of repentance: the renewing promise that we are God’s beloved children in whom God is well pleased.