Responses
to Violent Christendom 2
Matthew 5:46-48, John 1:38
September
17, 2017
I have taken two
youth and young adult delegations to southern Mexico. For each of those delegations I have provided
packets of information so that everyone might be prepared, briefed,
conscietized with all of the history, political dynamics, religious history,
and human rights issues found in that area.
Surprisingly, very few of the young adults and even fewer youth read
even one of the articles I have worked so hard to prepare for everyone. “Come on!
All this work! Wasted!” One of the youth even had the audacity, in
the delegation evaluation, to say, “I wish someone had shared all this
information with us before the delegation started.” Grrrrrrr!
I oughta!
What I learned from
that first delegation, though, helped me to prepare mentally and emotionally
for that second delegation. They would
ignore my carefully prepared packets.
Even though I would supply the packet, I anticipated that. What I found was that repeated questions,
spoken throughout the delegation, elicited answers from the first day to the
final day where I saw tremendous growth among everyone. I asked the youth to look around at the
beauty of Chiapas, the sun coming up over the waterfall at Misol-Ha, the water
at Agua Azul hitting the limestone to become a brilliant blue, and I asked,
“What do you think God intends for these people?” Over time, I began to hear these young people
move from naivete to the anger of injustice experienced by the Mayan
people. Some of them would later tell
me, that question, I still hear it being repeated in my head, “What do you
think God intends for these people?”
Imagine that question repeated into the natural beauty of a State like
Montana. What do you think God intended
for Crow, Blackfeet, Northern Cheyenne?
I have always
wanted to work with faith educators to develop questions for all stages of
life, often repeated, asking for self-examination and reflection. When she was just a wee thing, Sophia often
asked whether we thought God was male or female. During our best days, we would turn the question
right back to her. Her early years were
spent insisting that God was certainly a male.
But the question, asked over and over, I believe has moved on her and
made her the ardent feminist she is today.
Dr. Cornel West is
fond of quoting Socrates who said, “An unexamined life is not worth
living.” Dr. West will also go on to say
that Malcolm X and Black music relate that the examined life is painful. "When you're well-adjusted to injustice
you need to be awakened, you need some unsettling. It is impossible to talk
about democracy and politics without then beginning with this Socratic note,
which raises the terrifying question about who we are.”[1] Dr. West has a fundamental belief that people
of faith, as critical thinkers, must be willing to questions their assumptions
around race, gender, and religion. In
the same manner, people of faith must be willing to challenge authority with
their questions.
Rev. Dr. Martin B.
Copenhaver, President of Andover Newton Theological Seminary, wrote a book in
2014 titled, Jesus is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 he
answered. In that book, Lauren F.
Winner, author and professor of Christian spirituality at Duke writes of the
purpose of questions:
1.
Questions elicit information
2. Questions inspire people to discover something new, to
unearth new knowledge.
3. Questions also persuade:
this is how hotshot courtroom attorneys win their cases. They ask questions of a witness, but those
questions make an argument, and ultimately the chain of questions persuade the
jury.
4. Questions stimulate thought.
That’s why good teachers ask questions of their students rather than
just lecture at them.
5. Questions forge intimacy.
Winner believes that’s why you can leave a conversation with someone, having
exchanged questions, feeling incredibly connected. Not the questions of an interrogation, but
the questions of someone who wants to know you, understand you, and trusts that
you have deep answers to share.
6. Jesus used questions to disarm others who came with
malevolent intent.
7. And, finally, questions have a way of provoking discernment
internally and within our community life.[2]
Copenhaver goes on to write that Jesus
is not the ultimate Answer Man but the Great Questioner.
I
believe this defines Jesus because it reflects the particular contours and
textures of faith and perspective and path.
An examined life can be painful.
Sometimes Jesus is not being so charitable and a deep thinker. He is deflecting. He is keeping himself alive when, to answer
questions, would welcome, at the least, dismissal and verbal attack, and
probably, at the most, violence.
Questions protected him in a disparate power structure. We should be honest about that.
Also, it is to
remember that in asking over 300 questions in just the short three years of
public ministry we have an understanding from Jesus about a God that welcomes
diversity. Jesus isn’t so concerned
about people who are his peers, his equals getting it right. By asking questions instead of providing
answers, Jesus honors the idea that they might have an answer different than
his own. And Jesus seems to be ok with
that. Think about the broad creativity
and beauty of a God like that—a God who honors more than one answer to
important questions. With a God like that we can be fearless in
pursuit of wisdom, truth, and justice because the universe . . . the universe
is wide open.
But
too often Christian faith, perspective, and path have been co-opted by an
imperial, Violent Christendom that provides frames for a closed circuit,
circular reasoning. The answers within
that system have been carefully crafted so as to not let new information in.
When we engage
evangelical or fundamentalist relatives or friends, we do not engage people who
are unintelligent or unread. On the
contrary, those who have this circular system down pat have a necessary
brilliance to recall all the answers or even manage a god who has this weird
balance of love and power that makes for a charitable despot, or the loving
father who doesn’t want to but has to dole out this necessary discipline. Don’t
make him get out the belt!
One
of the real struggles in engaging a friend, relative, or even an acquaintance
from the religious right is that they have very often worked very hard to learn
those answers and frames and all we can do is argue within that closed,
circular system. As a result, we end up
walking away at the futility of it all.
Or we feel stupid that we cannot respond with the same confidence they
seem to have in their faith, the Scripture verses they can quote, the intimate
language they can use to describe their relationship with Jesus and God.
But
here’s the thing. We were born as
spiritual beings. All of us. Each of us has an innate knowledge and
experience of the Divine that shares important revelations about the
universe. We need to trust ourselves
more. Yes, faith is hard work. Things like tradition, Scripture, study, reason,
experience, creation, the historical saints, and the present-day saints found
in community provide important foils to sharpen and deepen our faith. Heck, I love the ongoing Facebook exploits
of Dan Struckman as he learns about life from his dog, Gunther. I say that with a smile but not as a
joke. We need to trust ourselves more as
spiritual beings.
Then
we need to ask questions. Sometimes
someone, even a family member, engages us around issues of faith in a way that
is aggressive and violent. And we need
to simply deflect so we might create space or distance. Most often, however, we need to ask questions
to do as Jesus did and elicit information, create the potential for
self-examination, and trust that the person in front of you might grow and
develop as well. Repeated questions,
over a period of time, can begin to work through the hardest of defenses
against growth and maturity. In the
story of Elijah the prophet, God continues to ask, “What are you doing here,
Elijah?” It is not so much that God expects
some right answer from the prophet. God
is moving Elijah out of his fear and depression to where he shall go from
here. For people who value social
justice, the question from the prophet Micah and the resulting answer form the
basis for our faith. What does the
Living God require of you?
We
will not have the right questions all the time.
We will make mistakes. But
finding those faithful questions is a part of our faith journey. When we engage someone from the religious
right, asking simple questions like, “The way you describe your faith, you and
your God sound so angry. Why is
that? The Bible sounds important to
you. What other things besides the Bible
are important to your faith? How many
transsexual friends do you have? How do
they feel about your beliefs? And God
would want to punish them?” Continuing
to question to see just how far the hate goes is an important part of the
Socratic method and self-examination. In
the hands of some of my best teachers in law school, we would watch as the
professor would take the right answer of one of our colleagues, said confidently,
and invite them to walk further and further out onto the branch as the
professor began sawing on that tree branch.
I still remember all the blood draining out of my face when our Civil
Litigation professor decided that I would be invited out onto the branch. Needless to say, it did not go well.
Good,
faithful questions are meant to be repeated so that our own inner wisdom
emerges. Because we are all spiritual
beings from the get-go. Our response to
the religious right, as we engage them, should not be the right answers but
faithful questions repeated. “Why are
these hurricanes stronger? Do you think
God hates immigrants as much as you do?
How do you define love if it is not about taking care of people’s
material needs? What do you think God
intends for these people?” The answers
aren’t as important as a trust that all of us our spiritual beings, working out
what it means to be faithful to the deep questions. And then the most important response to the
religious right is to live lives of integrity, compassion, and justice. “What is it that you are looking for?” Jesus asks.
Well? Amen.
[1] Dr. Cornel West, “Dr. Cornel West preaches on
Socratic question,” The Georgia State
University Sentinel, March 1, 2005, Vol. 72, Issue 19, p. 1.
[2] Rev. Martin
B. Copenhaver, Jesus is the
Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and
the 3 he answered (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon Press, 2014), Lauren F. Winner, Foreword.
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