Month: August 2020

A Prayer at the Beginning of a Strange and Difficult New School Year

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God of the Ages, who cares deeply about what transpires in both the sanctuary and the classroom; at both the dinner table and the school cafeteria; in both the comforts of home and the hallways of our educational institutions; through both in-person and virtual learning:

We cry out to you on behalf of students in these pandemic-laden days. Some of these students are very young, heading off for their first day of kindergarten. Some are a bit older, enrolled in elementary school or middle school or high school. Others are headed off to college, or perhaps into a new season of graduate study. Others are entering the workforce in order to begin a journey of lifelong learning. All of them are attempting to navigate the rhythms and demands of both in-person and online education, all the while cultivating a patience and a discipline that the realities of COVID-19 require.

Open the minds of the students, that they might be available to their teachers and receptive to meaningful learning, by whatever methodology it takes place. Open their hearts, that they might be compassionately attentive to the other people whose lives intersect with theirs in the journey of their education. Even now, O God, the faces of many different students are appearing in our prayerful reflection. Grant that, as the students learn about mathematics and science and literature and history and language and a host of other subjects, they might also learn a deeper reverence for the One in whom all knowledge is ultimately to be found.

We cry out to you on behalf of teachers, all of whom are working creatively and diligently to create environments that are safe for the students and conducive to their learning.  Strengthen them in their labor. Energize them in their task. Guard them against any cynicism that would make a classroom into a cold and unpleasant place. Deepen their love, not only for their subject matter, but also for the ones they teach. By the power of your Holy Spirit, equip these teachers to be the instruments of compassionate tutelage that you are calling them to be, so that their commitment to their students might find full expression, both in physical classrooms and virtual ones. Bless them with your comfort and encouragement as they balance their concerns for their own safety with their devotion to their students, online and in-person.

We cry out to you on behalf of school administrators and staff. College presidents, deans, financial officers, planners, and registrars. Superintendents, principals, vice-principals, and guidance counselors. Nurses, school psychologists, and behavioral counselors. Administrative assistants, receptionists, custodial staff, security officers, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers. These are the souls whose sacred responsibility it is to generate a safe and nurturing environment in which holistic learning might take place. Enable them to enter this season with courage and vision, since none of them have experience in doing their work during a pandemic. Bless them with an ever-deepening awareness of their purpose, and grant to them the strength to fulfill it.

We cry out to you on behalf of families, many of which are struggling in painful ways during this season of transition. Some parents are finding it particularly difficult to let their children go as they head off to school in this often-frightening world. Some children and youth are burdened by a sense of insecurity as they enter into a new season of life and learning. Other families are dealing with the heavy emotional weight of having to rearrange schedules and routines in order to accommodate their child’s (or their children’s) online learning. Weave the different threads of these family circumstances into the rich and vibrant tapestry of your grace, so that the members of these families might be drawn closer to one another and closer to you.

Build a protective fortress, O God, around our schools and our institutions of higher learning and both the physical and virtual classrooms that they offer. Guard them against violence, hatred, bullying, and hurtful manipulation. Make every classroom and office into a sanctuary for your presence, so that, through our system of education, many will be led to recognize that a reverence for you is the beginning of all wisdom. We pray this prayer out of a variety of faith traditions. Personally, I pray it in the name of Jesus, whose transforming grace is the curriculum by which his followers live, move, and find their being. Amen.

We Are Better Than This: The Perils of Weaponized Grief

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Both the inadequacy of my thinking and the limitations of my discernment have been regularly revealed over the course of my life. Please know that I am painfully aware of both as I write what I am about to write. I offer these words, not as one laboring under the delusion of absolute rightness, but as an openhearted seeker attempting to give voice to a deep internal struggle that will not go away.

My soul is sad. The collective resentment in our nation has inspired people in recent days to weaponize one grief against another, thereby distorting the profundity of both. Insufficient and caustic interpretations of current events and recent tragedies are producing bitterness more than they are illuminating truth.

Allow me to explain what I am describing.

The recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd (all of whom are representative of a much longer list of black and brown people) have painfully awakened our nation to racial injustice and inequity that have been too frequently ignored or tolerated. Their deaths, tragic and terrible, bear witness to what I have come to understand all too well from personal experience—that people of color experience a very different world than I do as a white male. This difference finds expression in law enforcement statistics and documented social narratives. It reveals itself through observed examples of undervaluation and mistreatment. It can be heard in the cavalier articulation of racial slurs, the perpetuation of institutionalized presuppositions, and an exaggeratedly fierce defense of certain flags, mascots, and statues. It hides in patterns, rhythms, and ideas that have become part of the sociological air that we breathe.

The “difference” that I am describing inspires within me, not a sense of guilt, but a heightened attentiveness; not an apology for being white, but a recognition that being white grants to me societal advantages that people of color are not automatically granted.

At the heart of the cry “black lives matter”—a cry that resonates with particular clarity in the aftermath of the killings referenced above—is the conviction that the struggle for racial justice and equity must be taken seriously and embraced in order for all lives to be valued equally. The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd are heartbreaking affronts to our moral sensibilities. Their voices call to our hearts, beckoning us to affirm the sacred worth of black and brown lives and bodies in a world in which they are too often treated as though they do not matter.

The appalling shooting death of 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant at the hands of a 25-year-old black neighbor in Wilson, North Carolina is another recent tragedy, expansive in its scope. A precious young life senselessly lost. A family devastated. A community undone. Another act of unthinkable violence. Grief beyond words. A little boy denied the journey into youth and adulthood that he should have enjoyed. His killer, within a day, was apprehended, arrested, and charged with first degree murder.

The intersection of these profound grief experiences is precisely where things become complicated and troubling. Perhaps that fact should come as no surprise to us. Our stewardship over our grief, after all, is one of the most significant and complex forms of stewardship that we will ever practice. The content of that stewardship will either deepen a heart or harden a heart.

The burden in my spirit at present is that a portion of the nation is practicing what I am experiencing as a truncated or malformed grief stewardship. This malformation is taking the form of an all-too-familiar demonization of the media—as in, “Why has the media been so ‘deafeningly silent’ about Cannon Hinnant’s murder in comparison to the coverage of George Floyd?” Such language, of course, fueled by politicized fervor, carries with it an accusation against either the media’s perceived irresponsibility or assumed agenda or both. The consequences of this accusation are intensified resentment and more clearly defined battle lines.

The malformation also takes the form of a race-based subjugation of one grief narrative to another: “You say that black lives matter? I say that Cannon’s life matters! You say speak THEIR names? I say speak Cannon’s name!” The end result is that two experiences of grief are positioned unfairly and hurtfully against one another, thereby obscuring the realities that both experiences illuminate.

I believe that we are better than this. We are collectively wiser and more careful in our thinking than this. We are more compassionate and gracious than this.

When we pit the death of Cannon Hinnant against the death of George Floyd (irrespective of how noble we believe our intentions to be) and utilize the comparison a means by which to castigate the media, we run the risk of reducing the murder of a young boy to an instrument of demonization. Beyond this, when we utilize Cannon’s death as an opportunity to express resentment over the cultural energy that is currently being devoted to the work of ensuring racial justice, we unnecessarily kneel on the neck of the mattering of black lives.

It does not have to be this way. We can allow Ahmaud Arbery’s story be its own story. And Breonna Taylor’s. And George Floyd’s. And Cannon Hinnant’s.

For these multiple urgencies to be rightly honored, however, moral people have to resist the temptation to settle for insufficient and denunciatory interpretations that only serve, in the long run, to gaslight and obscure.

I believe that we are better than this. We have to be.

Jesus, a Canaanite Woman, and an Expanded Vision of the Kingdom of God

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 (Artwork: “The One with the Crumby Dog” by Ally Barrett)

The Lectionary Gospel for this weekend (August 16, 2020) is Matthew 15:21-28. It is a portion of Scripture in which Jesus finds himself confronted with a desperate and terrified Gentile mother whose daughter is “tormented by a demon.”

Interestingly, the same story is recorded in Mark 7:24-30. The primary editorial difference in the two iterations of the story is that, in Mark’s Gospel, the woman is a Syrophoenician, and in Matthew’s Gospel, she is a Canaanite. The common racial/sociological/religious denominator, however, remains intact in both versions of the encounter: This desperate mother is a non-Jewish female, meaning that she faces a two-fold dynamic that many in her social milieu would have been happy to highlight. First, she was a Gentile—a non-Jewish person—in a world where racial and religious categories were clearly defined, widely recognized, and fiercely maintained. And, second, she was a woman—a non-male—in a world where gender defined both social positioning and agency.

In the story, the Gentile woman begs Jesus to provide deliverance and healing for her daughter. Jesus, at first, ignores her, offering her the pain of agonizing silence in the midst of her maternal anguish. Had she expected the silence? Perhaps. After all, her gender, race, and religious identification were all wrong for the scenario. She was a non-Jewish woman, living on the other side of a covenant community’s line of demarcation. It may have been that Jesus’ silence was all too familiar to her, like a stale but recognizable air that she had to breathe in yet again.

The disciples, no doubt taking their cue from Jesus’ initial silence, implore him to send her away. It is the nature of discrimination, I suppose, to identify the outsider, label her, and work for her dismissal. This is precisely what the disciples do: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” We do not normally like to think of the disciples of Jesus as perpetuators of discrimination or rejection. But discrimination and rejection are exactly the response that they offer to this hurting woman.

Those of you who are parents, imagine being treated so dismissively and disrespectfully if you were seeking help for your hurting or troubled child. Allow the pain of that imagined situation to become one of the hermeneutics that you bring to this Scripture.

But, no worries, right? Because Jesus is there. Surely Jesus will immediately rebuke the disciples for their discriminatory proclivities and hard-heartedness. Surely Jesus will immediately speak up for this hurting woman, thereby redeeming her suffering and restoring her beloved daughter to health. Surely Jesus will quickly manifest the love of God’s heart toward this woman and her daughter. Right?

Well, not exactly. At least not immediately.

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus says to the woman when he finally emerges from his initial silence. (Translation: “I was sent only to a particular people, and I’m afraid that you and your daughter are not a part of the people I was sent to save.”)

Again, utilize your imagination so that the gravity of this moment is not too quickly sidestepped. Ponder what it would feel like to be met with abject rejection from a healer about whom you have heard so much, simply because you were not a part of his preestablished theological itinerary.

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

The woman, stunningly, refuses to leave. She kneels, daring to show respect and reverence in the face of abject rejection. Then she speaks, with an even greater sense of urgency: “Lord, help me.”

Jesus responds to her by moving from the already-articulated rejection to a pointed insult: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Translation: “Since I was sent specifically to the Jewish people, it would be inappropriate to take their designated salvation and offer it to ‘dogs’ like you and your daughter.”)

By the way, I am not exaggerating or distorting the text. This is Jesus. The One whom Christians embrace as Messiah. The One in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell. The One who gave his life for the world but who, in this moment, seemingly dismisses and insults a heartbroken woman who is kneeling before him on behalf of her hurting daughter.

What would you have done if you were the woman who had just been called a “dog” by the healer from whom she had come to seek help? Personally, I probably would have been looking for a quick exit out of the encounter. If the rejection had not already inspired me to head for the door, the insult would have completed the task. Personal dignity is at stake here, not to mention the dignity of her daughter. This woman’s sense of urgency, however, seems to be far greater than her vulnerability to rejection. Instead of leaving the presence of the man who had just insulted her, she finds her voice and speaks directly into the insult: “Perhaps you are right,” she essentially says to Jesus. “Perhaps I am just a dog. Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

Remarkable, is it not? This Gentile woman, dismissed by the disciples, insulted by Jesus, somehow finds her voice, pushing back against the very insult that still permeated the air around her. She takes hold of the imagery that Jesus places before her and expands it so that she and her daughter might have a place in it: “Perhaps you are right, Jesus. Maybe I am lowly in the scheme of things. But do not even lowly animals deserve some crumbs and scraps from the table so that they do not starve?”

When Jesus recognizes that he has been met heart to heart and word for word by this woman whose determination seems to be every bit as deep as her concern for her daughter, he transitions from rejection to embrace, from insult to affirmation: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” We are told that, instantly, the woman’s daughter is healed.

Thanks be to God for the miraculous healing and the transformational grace of Jesus that it illuminates! But, what about the strange and painful journey it took to get there? Yes, Jesus ultimately restored the woman’s daughter to health. But what do we do with a Jesus who initially ignores, rejects, and insults?

Like many of you, I have experienced several sermons that have taken great pains to tidy up this moment of Scripture. I have probably even preached some of those sermons. “Jesus was only testing the woman, helping her to arrive at a faith response that she would not have been able to generate had he not put her through rejection and insult.” Or, “Jesus intended to heal the daughter all along. He simply had to drive the woman into a deeper desperation before the healing could be fully realized.” Or, “Jesus didn’t really mean the rejection or the insult. He was simply helping the woman to access a deeper sense of belief in the healing power of God.”

Perhaps one or all of these interpretations is accurate. Perhaps Jesus was simply leading the woman into a painful but important test, helping her to join him on the sacred ground upon which he is already standing. If you embrace such a reading of the text, I certainly will not divide with you over it.

What must be taken seriously, though, is that the text itself does not suggest such an interpretation. Nor does the text itself imply that Jesus was offering to this woman something other than an authentic, if spontaneous, response. Beyond this, even if this were a test to which Jesus was subjecting the woman, would it lessen our discomfort at all to think of Jesus testing a suffering woman by means of a rejection and an insult that would have seemed all too real to her, even if they were not “real” to Jesus?

When we think of Jesus’ Incarnation, his mystical journey into human flesh, we tend to make some assumptions. We sometimes assume, for example, that, as the Son of God, Jesus came into the world already holding the totality of his Father’s expansive and comprehensive worldview. We assume that Jesus never had to experience any growth, any change, or any development. If that is the theological assumption with which one approaches this Biblical story, the only alternative is to conclude that Jesus’ dismissive insult toward the woman is indeed nothing more than an elaborate, albeit hurtful, test, offered en route to his hidden and redemptive agenda.

But, what if (and, please, bear with my prayerful exploration)…

…What if the Son of God came into this world fully prepared to expand his vision and understanding of his own ministry? What if Jesus’ Incarnation is not only a glorious event (which we rightly celebrate at Christmas) but also a progressive journey, impacted and shaped by every one of his encounters, including this encounter with a Gentile woman? What if the Word becoming flesh required the vulnerability of growth—vulnerability in which a Jesus (as human as he was divine) allowed himself to learn through experience that the Kingdom his Father sent him to inaugurate was even more expansive than what his disciples (and perhaps the Gospel writers) had originally believed?

In other words, what if Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman is less of a calculated test and more of a kairotic moment in which Jesus experiences a genuine and existential confirmation of a more expansive vision for his mission and purpose, triggered by the brave prompting of a Gentile woman who simply would not go away?

If that were at all the case, then Jesus, in his stark encounter with this desperate woman, calls to mind the very church that is built upon his Lordship and governed by it. Every day, the church, like Jesus with the woman, is confronted with the challenge of reconceptualizing pre-conceived categories in order to manifest more fully a divine love and grace that stubbornly resist categorization. The church’s long and ugly history with racism and bigotry bears witness to how frequently we have been content with distorted vision and malformed worldviews. In practice, the church has often bailed out of the story at the point of insult and rejection instead of joining Jesus in the work of embracing the “other” and seeing the world differently.

It makes me all the more grateful for this Canaanite woman, who dared to see past the boundaries that the people in her world were all too eager to enforce. Her voice speaks God’s very heart into a painful moment, reminding even Jesus of what he was coming to understand more clearly in her presence—that there are no mutts in God’s ever-expanding Kingdom (or Kin-dom) and that no one is excluded in the salvation that God is envisioning for this world and offering to it.

If you have read this far, you might be at the point of saying, “No way! The Jesus I love and worship wouldn’t have needed to change or grow. It was just a difficult test for a woman who needed precisely the hard push that Jesus was providing.”

Perhaps you are right.

Personally, I am intrigued and strangely comforted by the thought of a Jesus who loved us enough to enter fully into every portion of the vulnerability of the human condition—including the vulnerability of having to grow and learn. And, when Jesus found himself confronted with the possibility that his mission was even more wide-ranging than the people around him had initially assumed, he did not blink or back down. Instead, he stepped beyond the well-enforced boundaries in order to bring salvation to a Canaanite woman and the Gentile world that she represented.

I am praying that the church never forgets who its Jesus is, especially in an age when the work of dismantling sins like racism and bigotry is more urgent than ever. Like Jesus, may his church dare to engage with the “Canaanite women” (marginalized and desperate souls) who are standing somewhere nearby, wondering if there are any “crumbs” for them from the tables we hold sacred. Like Jesus, may we hear the Word of God in their voices. May we sense the calling of God in their outcries. And may we discern the very face of God in their freshly illuminated countenances.