Tossing Tables

There is a difference between anger and rage. Although related, they manifest in different ways. Anger is simmering, a constant heat that seethes beneath the surface. Rage moves on top like the roiling surface of boiling water. Rage is all at once and for all to see. Both come from a heat source - maybe even the same heat source - but they show themselves in very different ways.

In my own life this is how these two emotions play out. I live with some kind of anger at all times. Some of it is longstanding and political or ideological in nature; this anger hums underneath and I notice it only when an event or discussion draws up its heat. There is social anger on various levels - related to family, or to friends; to work, to life in my community. There is self-loathing, a constant anger that burns beneath the skin. At any given moment, with the right kindling or a rush of oxygen, any of these angers could become rage.

I don't like it when the rage comes. It has happened more in some seasons of life than in others. Stress brings it on pretty easily. Financial strain is definitely a trigger. Injustice is a rage producing machine; when something unjust happens - especially when it happens to me or those I love - rage is probably right behind. But still, I would prefer to live a life without rage, because rage is blinding. When rage comes on I find myself wanting to feed it; it doesn't exist in small doses and it isn't satisfied with half-measures. This is why rage is so dangerous in people who lack any kind of self-control. I myself do not have great self-control, but I've learned enough through self-reflection, contemplation, and conversation in deep relationships to know that rage quickly severs my elementary self-control.

Have you ever flipped over a table in a rage? When you're in a rage, there is something supremely satisfying about throwing something heavy. If I'm working on a task and growing frustrated with it - repairing a bike, piecing together a new tool - I can sense myself approaching the point of rage where I will have to throw whatever I'm holding. That violent physical act eventually becomes my only outlet. Once the heat has built enough it has to be released.

We Christians are fascinated with the story of Jesus in an apparent rage, throwing out the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem. It is a fascinating story, mostly because it's such a naked display of human emotion. This story might be a story of rage, and we could certainly tell it like that. It's not hard to frame Jesus as full of righteous anger, of representing a perfect and holy God upset over the desecration of a holy space. Religious folks love this narrative because it's relatable. We can make sense of holy spaces because we have them in our own lives and we protect them when they're violated. We like the idea of righteous anger, too. It gives us leave to give into the rage in our own lives, to let the simmering religious, social, and ideological anger burning beneath the surface explode in the open in defense of something we call sacrosanct.

The desecration of what we value can produce a righteous rage we almost crave. The opportunity to defend what is sacred to us is an action worth taking, even (or especially) in anger. We love to see Jesus in the temple tossing tables, kicking money-handling hacks in the ass, clearing out the literal and proverbial shit from the steps of a holy place. The word desecration more or less means "to make un-sacred." When someone takes what you hold sacred and undoes it, they destroy it. The most satisfying response is often to destroy them in return. Revenge is what rage is usually after.

But what if Jesus wasn't enraged by this kind of desecration, by a soiling of the temple itself? What if his rage was sparked by something deeper and truer? The professor James McGrath says that some scholars believe Jesus isn't so much trying to salvage the temple as he is expressing his anger about what it represents: an obsolete idea of where God is and how God is known. Jesus isn't enraged because God's house is being violated; he's enraged by the dogmatic conviction that God only resides in that specific place.

The teaching of Jesus is all about the nearness of God. "The Kingdom of heaven is at hand," he says repeatedly, a call to arms to those of his day anxious for freedom from Roman oppression. You can imagine the simmering anger in such circumstances: years of oppression by an empire that only just tolerates your presence as a people, that treats your community as an underclass, that conspires to keep you in an unaccepted status. It's a class system and yours is at the bottom, and along comes a man speaking the language of revolt. The heat is already there below the surface waiting for the right mix of oxygen and fuel to call up your rage to a boil.

You would be justified if you flipped a few tables, kicked some chickens and destroyed some property. If the Roman police came in to settle things down, you could be forgiven for throwing stones in a rage over the injustice of it all. But what would your goal be? To break a few tables, embarrass some political or business leaders? Would it slake your thirst for revenge to see the temple occupants cowering in fear, the money changers nursing their wounds? Would it be enough to simply want a clean, quiet place for your God to inhabit if your God wasn't even living there?

I think the idea of Jesus's rage in the temple is so much more compelling if we consider what he was really after - and what those who believe that Black Lives Matter are after. He didn't care if the temple was holy, because it wasn't, at least not in the dogmatic sense. Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Most Christians believe it's a reference to his own body, not to the temple he supposedly "cleansed" in a fit of rage. But what if it's both? He knew what was holy, what was a place of habitation of God, was not a place built by the hands of man; it was the hands of man themselves. The temple of God is each and every human being that God loves and values.

What if Jesus is not so much upset about the supposed desecration of the temple, but rather is pissed that we believe that God is so exclusive, separate and contained? What if he's angry not because of what's happening to a holy place, but because of what we've done to a holy people? Jesus was first and foremost a liberator: of the oppressed and forgotten and overlooked and undervalued. "Blessed are the destitute, the meek, the weary, the peaceful, those who are after justice!" In his ministry he was speaking to the overlooked members of society, those for whom a god in an ancient and storied temple grounds in one of the wealthiest cities in the world would have no conception. What if this very idea enrages Jesus: that the God they've inherited has no knowledge of their plight?

I don't begrudge anyone their rage right now, and I doubt Jesus would either. I also don't think any of us want to turn over all the tables only to end up with a whitewashed tomb of a country as a result. If your rage only cleans the temple grounds instead of letting loose a God of liberating love, then your rage is all heat and no light. Our rage should be collective; and our demand should be equality: of rights, justice, and peace for all people. Too many people for too long have been outside the temple hoping that those inside would let God loose. Now is the time for tossing tables. It's the time for letting justice loose.

The Rich Young Ruler / The Straight White Male

There’s a story in the Bible commonly called The Rich Young Ruler. The man runs up to Jesus and asks what it takes to be accepted by God. Jesus appears dismissive at first - “Why do you call me good?”, “You know the commandments.” - but the man persists and Jesus is moved with love. “One thing you lack,” he says, “go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” The man is disappointed, and he leaves, ostensibly because he can’t, or won’t, do this hardest of things.

 

In the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing anger this latest injustice has stirred, I’ve been thinking about my own place in American society. I’m a straight white man, middle class and reasonably successful. I’m living the American Dream: a wife and five kids; a home I own and can pay to maintain; a job that covers my bills and then some; health insurance (and good health); two cars; and lots of opportunity for the future. In real dollar terms in America, I’m not wealthy. But in real cultural terms in America, I am The Rich Young Ruler.

 

I recently read a post on Facebook from another white man wondering aloud about his privilege and what he can offer in a moment like this. One thing he said struck me: “It’s hard for me to say I’m part of the problem, but this is the privilege I have: to do so does me no harm.” It’s true for those of us who are white in America, and particularly accurate for us straight white males. We occupy a position of supreme cultural dominance, a position that’s hard to admit to and also hard to contemplate, mostly because we’ve come to consider that dominance a desirable social default.

 

Taking a stand against systemic racism by someone not directly affected by it is easy. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but until taking a stand incurs an actual cost - of comfort, of well-being, of a measure of that privilege - it’s hard to see how the system will change. There is a moral inertia within our culture that keeps the boulder of privilege in motion while simultaneously limiting the acceleration of equity and justice.

 

It’s not hard to recognize that you occupy a place of privilege within the culture; in an inequitable society, privilege is simple to spot. The sharp distinctions between the privileged and oppressed in our culture is both real and visible, and this visible reality in its very existence helps to maintain the status quo of inequality. We can SEE who is black; we can see poverty in poor neighborhoods; and we can see privilege: in the quality of neighborhoods and their schools, in the quality of education and opportunity the privileged obtain, and in the significant and persistent disparity in wealth between whites and non-whites.

 

It would seem that seeing social disparities will move us to change them, but this is obviously not true. I think that seeing such stark inequity reinforces the notion that it’s somehow natural. Poverty is so persistent and widespread - Jesus said famously, “The poor will always be with you” - that we take for granted that it will continue to exist. Those of us who are privileged to live in nice neighborhoods free from the blight of poorer ones aren’t scrambling to ensure they’re brought up to our level. Visible poverty has a way of making us thankful that we’re not experiencing it. It sends us running to our ideas of merit and hard work and allows us to complain about those people who can’t get their acts together.

 

There’s a reason the rich young ruler couldn’t simply follow Jesus while maintaining his wealth. The path of equality and justice requires, well, equality and justice. And contrary to our notions of the goal of equality - that meritocratic, capitalistic, and distinctly American ideal of everyone having a chance to get rich - Jesus was pointing to a simpler way to make everyone equal: give up your privilege. We Americans of privilege are pretty blind to the starkness of what Jesus commands here. After 250 years of conquest of the natural world, and after more than a century of a growth-mad focused economics, we’ve been conditioned to believe that wealth is both universally attainable and desirable. Privilege is what we’re all supposed to be seeking.

 

What then are the privileged to do? The temptation for those of us who are comfortable, who sit atop the unspoken and obvious American sociological hierarchy, who haven’t experienced oppression, is to look for ways to wield our privilege in the interest of equality and justice. This may be why wealthy individuals set up foundations and fund pet projects whose goals are alleviating various social ills - hunger, disease, poverty, environmental damage. To those with privilege and a platform, it seems obvious to leverage that platform in the name of social progress. If you have a voice, they say, use it. And so we have a lot of famous people of privilege amplifying the discontent of the oppressed; putting a megaphone to the mouths of the voiceless. Unfortunately, when you amplify silence you still get silence.

 

Whenever there is racial upheaval in these United States, we white folks have a habit of trotting out Martin Luther King, Jr. in all his nostalgic glory. MLK is our great American secular saint, a kind of megaphone in and of himself to those of us privileged enough to have a voice. King himself had a voice: he was eloquent, handsome, charismatic, and passionate. All of his great skill as an orator and statesman, mingled with his great faith in the goodness and justice of God, helped him gain a voice in a country that said he shouldn’t have one. Having a voice cost him dearly, and yet he never attained privilege. How could he? I don’t just mean because he was black - that alone ensured that, in America, he would never have privilege. I believe he refused to consider achieving privilege. King knew about The Rich Young Ruler and the demands Jesus makes. To him, Jesus - and the justice and love and promise he embodies - was worth the sacrifice.

 

Privilege is a self-perpetuating state; once you're in it's hard to get out. It is comfortable, a state we covet above all others. It’s also desirable because we’re conditioned to desire it. It's not just a goal, it's *the* goal. How then can we “check our privilege” when we want it so bad? We need an incentive, but it’s not going to come from outside of ourselves. The Rich Young Ruler wanted to know how he could obtain a higher plane - of spiritual revelation, of religious fortitude, of existential success and peace - but he hoped he could get there with his privilege intact. The message of Jesus is that you can’t. What Jesus is telling us privileged ones is that privilege isn't the goal, it’s the stumbling block. It’s not the path to peace, it’s the assurance of chaos. It’s not the mountaintop to obtain, it’s the slippery slope that keeps you from reaching the peak.

 

I don’t understand how to get to the kind of equality and justice that MLK dreamed of. I can’t come to terms with what Jesus says is required. And I don’t want to give up my privilege, even though in a sense I can’t. Until it is a privilege to be human; unless the mere glory of being alive as a member of the community of mankind is itself a privilege we recognize and refuse to violate in our social compact; until we have all been to the mountaintop together, privilege will be something that I either accept and live with, or something that I spend the rest of my life trying to live without. I know which path is the harder path, and the likelier road to justice. I know what I’ll have to give up. I’m not sure if I can.

Narrowing

One of the most enduring ideas in Evangelical Christianity has to be the Narrow Way. If you don't know the scripture, I'll give you the New International Version so you can get the full Evangelical experience.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)

My experience hearing this scripture interpreted has been through the lens of Salvation. Or at least Salvation the Evangelical way. What Jesus means here, we were told, is that very few will get to heaven and many will go to hell. That's because it's hard to follow Jesus, I guess. Or maybe it's hard to hear the good news of a narrow path to salvation in order to avoid eternal conscious torment. Hard to be certain even with utmost certainty. That was the Baptist way, anyway.

Matthew 7 is pretty beautiful in terms of teachings, and to me summarizes Jesus wonderfully. Even Jesus thinks so, inasmuch as he says, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (verse 12)." For the first third of this chapter he talks in terms that have fairly baffled readers, offering opportunities for pretty wide-ranging interpretations. When Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you," what does he mean? And the injunctions not to "give to dogs what is sacred" or "give pearls to pigs" are downright bizarre on their face.

The Narrowing Class - those Christians convinced of their narrow view of salvation -  will have answers. They will have received answers over years of Bible Study and Sunday sermons. The interpretations they've accepted invariably support the Narrowing view, the sense that most people won't get it, most people won't accept the hard truths Jesus prefers. I suppose they will believe that they have removed the planks from their eyes and have a clear view of the specks obscuring everyone else's vision.

I personally believe that Jesus is right when he says that the road to destruction is wide. Being human is difficult. Part animal, we're always looking for the easiest way to survive and thrive. Part god, we feel the tug of compassion and empathy for other humans in our path. For most of us most of the time, meandering down the wide path is our default behavior. Being selfish comes easy; avoiding the difficulties of thinking of others is perpetually tempting; focusing on our own success is usually our only priority. If most of us are doing it, we must be on a pretty wide path or else we wouldn't all fit.

If that wide road leads to destruction, then what does destruction look like? The Narrowing Christians would say Hell, but that's too easy. I think destruction looks like narcissism. It looks like prioritizing your own success. It looks like doing to others what you don't want done to you, and doing it to them because it's convenient or easy. Ultimate destruction is the evil of treating everyone else like shit and in the process thoroughly corroding your soul.

I think that most Christians have an inkling of what the narrow path means because I believe that all people do. If God is written into our living fabric, if the divinity within each of us is the God of the universe, than we're all tuned in to a common understanding. The narrow road is generosity. It's magnanimity. It's kindness, selflessness, and grace. The narrow road is empathy and mercy. It's all of the things that are hard for animals who are focused only on surviving, but easy for a God who never dies and is made entirely of love.

Sungods

In many ways and at many times throughout history, human beings have worshiped the sun as a god. Really there is nothing more natural for humans, a fact you’ve easily noted if you’ve ever stood in the warm sunlight on a crisp fall day and felt the perfect symmetry of the moment – the hot, bright light beamed from unknowable distances, the crisp chill air hovering against your mammalian-warm skin, the way that time stops when you close your eyes against the sunlight and bask in its ubiquitous brilliance.

Sun worship is about as human a pastime as you can imagine. And why not? The sun brings the new day: new promise, warmth, the beginning of they cycle of life once more. The sun makes things grow, which is the promise of life. The sun has a rhythm that we can predict, and predictability is the definition of human security. And the sun is mysterious. What is it? Where is it? How can it be everywhere and also just right there – way up high and white hot bright, so shiny and intense that it’s impossible to look at, impossible to simply and directly see?

The default view of the divinity of the sun is wonderful in so many ways. The beauty of the sun is that it connects every living thing on earth together. No one above ground avoids the sun’s presence, and the connection among humans is strongest. The sun’s presence in our lives is the great universal, the unifying theme of human experience. It transcends time and place and culture and, except for the tricky nature of idolatry in some instances, even religion.

The sun’s resemblance to a godhead is fascinating. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, God is an omnipresent and omnipotent deity whose judgment none can avoid. Like the sun: everywhere, all powerful, equally applicable. The sun doesn’t care where you live or what you believe, it will burn you if you spend too much time exposed. The sun is coming for you…or is it? The sun is simply doing what it does when it washes the world in light and heat and UV rays, when it punches up the chlorophyll of greenery, when it burnishes our melanin. Like God, the sun acts according to its nature; naturally it’s hot and bright and so massive that the planets in our solar system are irresistibly drawn around it in an eternal and mysterious dance. Theology should be so beautiful.

What I love about the sun that can be hard to love about the gods of human theology is its unassuming criticality to life. Without the sun there is no life, yet it doesn’t need prophets and profiteering preachers to sing its praises to elucidate that reality. The sun is literally at the center of human life, a fact that is central to human understanding, that can’t be denied. It’s worth worshiping because its existence is complimentary to our own.

We could just as easily curse the sun for sunburns, droughts, desertification and death. It would be simple to blame the sun for the perils of winter, bemoaning its relative absence for causing frostbite, sickness, and dark dreary peril. Surely we could build a theology of spite and anger around this great bright force that seems to control our days and seasons, this inescapable light that fills every exposed crevice with gold, only to slink away in the evening and allow the darkness to drench the world again, for a time, for a season. What is this godlike orb that it has such pull on our very existence?

If we fail to see the divine nature in everything that is, we’re left instead with the void of the divine all around us. The sun is an easy candidate for divinity, but why not all of creation as well? Let the sun be a god, and its light be divinity shared with the world. Let the grass then also be gods, and the trees, and the birds in them. Let the rocks by so divine that they cry out their own names, the name of the God who has made all things and inhabits all things and is, even now, making and remaking all things. As a flower goes to seed and seed becomes another flower still. Let that be divine. Let it be the same God that hangs in the sky each day, promising renewal, warmth, danger, mystery, and moments of perfection.

Gospel Ordinary

The Gospel is the good news that Jesus preached. If you had asked me in my youth what that good news was, I would have answered something about salvation from sin and the death and resurrection of Jesus. I think you’re likely to get the same sort of answer from an Evangelical Christian of just about any protestant denomination. A Google search will most certainly produce similar insights.

The angel who told the shepherds about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth said, Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. That angel was relaying good news (Old English god meaning "good" and spel meaning "news, a story”) to an earthy, quiet group in the middle of the night. That angel was sharing gospel, and that gospel was the birth of a poor baby in unromantic circumstances. The good news was that human life, no matter how humble, is glorious.

Church is an interesting thing to experience. I’ve spent most of my life going to one church or another, and the thing about attending an American Evangelical Protestant Christian Church™ is that it’s tremendously normal. If you go to church, no one will necessarily notice. However, if you go to church and get involved and exhibit the characteristics desirable for the practice – obedience, piety, religious fervor, devotion to the faith – you will usually be celebrated. The churchgoing experience provides opportunities for ordinary people to be celebrated by peers.

It feels good to be celebrated, and it’s likely that most of what we do in life we do in search of being celebrated. Friendships have mutual celebration as their foundation; well, good friendships do. We’re drawn to people who make us feel good about ourselves, even if that feeling is fleeting. To be human is to be social, and to be social is to be insecure. While we each possess insecurity to varying degrees, we all possess it nonetheless. Every human being wants to be celebrated, to have our insecurity assuaged. Ideally we will be celebrated simply for who we are.

Herein lies the good news of Jesus of Nazareth; the man who, as a baby, was celebrated by a sky full of angels simply for being born. Born to a young girl who knew very little about life. Born to a young carpenter who was probably quite poor. Born in an animal pen in a dusty backwater town. Born like all of us are – humbly, writhing and bloody, made in the image of a creative deity who surely imbues our existence with meaning.

The Gospel then is a celebration of each one of us, and spreading the good news is as easy as loving every other human simply because they are. You don’t have to possess the right skills, exhibit the proper behavior, recite the creeds correctly, or believe the same stories. It shouldn’t require anything of you for us to celebrate the miracle of your existence. And it shouldn’t require anything of us for you to do the same in return. The good news is that we’re all human, we’re all in the same boat, and we all contain mysterious multitudes. To be in this world is to be divine.

I don’t know just who this man Jesus of Nazareth was, or whether his mother really was a virgin, or if his birth was the culmination of a sweeping divine narrative of reconciliation and spiritual redemption. I can’t attribute motives to his life, the ways he taught common people and ran in the circles of society’s rejected class. But this much seems obvious – that Jesus brought good news to people, and celebrated them for who they were without requiring anything of them. Personally I like that kind of news.