C Proper
9 14 Ord NH BFC
Gospel of
Thomas 64, 70
July 7,
2019
Almost all of the New Testament is about identity. And one of the iconic ways this is made
evident is through baptism. John the
Baptist says that, “I have baptized you with water but another one comes who
will baptize you with fire.” Our
identity is the head of wheat that feeds ourselves and the wider world. But there is chaff—stories which still
operate within us to tell us we are less than divine—and those need to be
burned away . . . as fire is the great purifying instrument in the ancient
world.
It is a countercultural act to love that which is within us, to know it
as divine. Black Elk said it best, “I
had a dream and because I did not live my dream, my dream was making me sick.”[1] We are called to live out the dream that is
within us, to call it forward so that it may be made manifest . . . as it sparkles and lights upon the earth.
Even more so, we are told from an early age that which is within us and
these bodies that define our boundaries
are not normative and only have value when they can be turned into dollars,
commodified, or receive approval from a dominating, ever-changing gaze.
As our recent Bible study group knows, I believe Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved,
is one of the most important stories told in our time. It is one of the true tellings we have of the
Gospel of Mark and takes place just after the Civil War, outside the slave
south, where freedom seekers seek to make new lives for themselves in
Cincinnati, Ohio. Morrison based the
book on the real-life story of Margaret Garner who had escaped slavery just
before the Civil War began. In the
story, Baby Suggs, an escaped slave herself, who took no official title, was
unrobed and un anointed but let her great big heart beat in front of her
people. She was an unchurched
preacher. When summer came, Baby Suggs
holy would invite her people to the Clearing where she would invite children to
laugh, men to dance, and women to weep.
Pretty soon it all got mixed up and women began to laugh, men weeped,
and children danced. Morrison tells the
story further:
She
did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not
tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its
glorybound pure.
She
told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.
That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
"Here,"
she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.
Yonder
they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd
just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder
they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use,
tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up
and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your
face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they
ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and
break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from
it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch
away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to
love it.
This
is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.[2]
What Baby Suggs knew and wanted all of those freedom seekers to know was
that the message the Domination System tried to tell them was a lie—that their
flesh, and hands, and mouth and bodies were only meant to be worked, produce,
bound, milked, and ignored. This did not
recognize the Divine found within them and on them and through them.
We have been given a
false self that destroys all of us. Even
as a white, straight, cis-gendered man, I no longer want to bear the false
power and load as normalized divine. It
is too much. I am often broken and
ragged and hurt and I need to be loved in that space. I can’t keep up the illusion. It is too much. I am often not capable—and so I need the help
of others. I am often not strong or
competent—and so I need the strength and wisdom of others. I am often not loving—and so I need the
divine called forward from all of you.
Because I have seen it in you, the ability, the wisdom and strength, the
love, and it is truly glorious. Truly
glorious.
White male supremacy is a false self that has
me failing time after time. Because it
is false, it is so fragile that it is often defended with violence—defended
with violence so that people do not dare speak the truth. It is formed through domination and, defacing
the children of God. It is unsustainable
chaff that God needs to be allowed to burn or it may burn down our planet.[3] This saying from the Gospel of Thomas relates
that if we do not bring forward the true divine identity, our true identity
within us, it may very well destroy us.
As Daniel José Camacho relates, “[O]ur true self is
relational, is greatly loved, and is inherently pleasing. The true self is peaceful and does not build
itself through domination of others. The
false self is violent and formed through domination. The false self eschews relationality and
pretends to be utterly independent. The
false self is hatred, is internalized self-hatred, is a child of God
vandalized. The false self is always
depleted, in need of great approval, greater success, greater results.”[4]
We are capable, powerful, wise, and strong but we don’t
have to be all of it all of the time. We
are baptized, in all of our diversity, into a community of hope that begins to
recognize the divinity within us and within people who are absolutely not like
us. They might look at you and see
someone odd and strange and goofy . . . and yet, glorious divinity. You might look at them and see someone so
differently odd and strange and goofy . . . and yet, glorious divinity. As Camacho writes, DNA testing, which has
become so popular these days, can be
meaningful and tell us a little bit about our ancestry, but DNA testing cannot
perform the memory of a baptism which affirms us as beloved and divine. You . . . in your oddity, strangeness, and
goofiness, you are gloriously divine. No
longer the lies that require our violence.
No longer the false stories that require our need to deface and harm
another.
I am a big fan of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. I read two of her incredible anthologies from
women of color when I was in seminary and felt like each writer from those
anthologies opened up my heart wider and wider to a world of pain and gifts and
struggle and wisdom far beyond what I had ever known. In her book, Borderlands, Anzaldúa
writes about the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound that is not only at its
physical location. It is found within
us, how we see each other and how we see ourselves. She hopes that we move past false racial
personalities to know our true identities.[5]
Race itself is a fiction—a recent one in human existence
used to justify genocide and slavery.[6] As a white male, I do significant damage when
I pretend that I can erase years of history and harm by pretending I don’t see
race. It keeps me in power not to see it
because race has been repeated so much that it functions in the background and
drives our whole narrative. Race makes
what is going on at the border justifiable as domestic and foreign policy. As a fiction, race needs that power over
through violence and domination to continue the illusion. And it responds in a sweeping way to try and
harm any who would call out its lies. For
those of us who are well meaning, race causes us to pause just long enough so
that children can be separated from their parents, locked in cages, and
sexually assaulted without us storming the castle and saying, “This wrong! It must stop!
It can be no more.” God’s truth
is that these are people, families, children, with a wisdom of struggle and
survival, of strength and resolve, of beauty and wisdom, I may not even be able
to comprehend. If we do not allow that
divinity to be recognized in them, will they ever be able to bring it forward
in the future? These are God’s children,
God’s beloved—relational, greatly loved, and inherently pleasing. Nobody is calling them into the clearing to
laugh, or dance, or weep. And so will
they know to love their own skin? Will
they know? Why am I not at the border
now to tell them it is all a lie? Why?
We are gloriously divine.
And we are to call forward that true self within us so that God’s truth,
not the vicious lie being told at the border, so that God’s truth may go
marching on. Amen.
[3] Daniel José Camacho, “Who am I?: What DNA Doesn’t Tell Us About Identity” Sojourners,
July 2019, p. 27.
[5]Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Consciencia de la
Mestiza,“ Feminist Theory Reader:
Local and Global Perspectives ( New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 186
[6]Audrey Smedley, “Origin of the Idea of
Race,” Race: The Power of an Illusion, PBS, November
1997, https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm.
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