lenten compassion (on Ukraine)

To hear Brandi read the essay instead, click here: https://youtu.be/KsdKNSJ9W0Q

Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to save his country. This weekend he spoke directly to Israeli lawmakers, and begged them to intervene on Ukraine’s behalf. Israel, among other nations, has been brokering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. In the nine minute speech, he asked a question that haunts me in an age where many American Christians live as if it is holy to ignore the pain of others: “Mediating without taking sides? You can mediate—but not between good and evil.”

Zelensky has a word for all of us. Many of us were rightly raised to compromise, to find middle ground, to keep the peace whenever possible. While these actions can create communities of belonging, they also provide cover for evil, destructive behavior.  When we confuse peacemaking with peace keeping, we ignore abusers and call it healthy. For anyone who wants to follow Christ, mediating is necessary. We should do all we can take can to promote peace around us. However, there are times when calling for peace or health in a community requires calling out those who block access to peace and health for all. To not specifically name neglect or abuse—wherever it may be found—is to call the status quo good, ignoring the lives of hurting people.

Zelensky’s words hoped to remind Israel of how ugly evil becomes when people choose to look away. Hitler openly demonized Jews and others for most of his rise to power while the majority of the world acted as if apathy, or both sidesing, or handwringing passivity, or not-my-probleming were appropriate responses. When people with power keep the peace instead of actively making peace by speaking up in precise ways, vulnerable people get damaged.

This week our readings remind us that God’s word points us to a Beloved Community that actively values compassion. In this kin-dom, we trust that God takes our pain seriously, asking us to do the same. In the community of God, we can’t expect for ourselves what we won’t also claim for others. I’m not okay if you’re not okay, because we are tied together, bound by both our shared humanity and divinity. This week’s readings remind us that apathy is not a spiritual gift, that staying-out-of-it is not the way of Christ.

I hope you have time to think about how costly love and compassion often are this week. We expect it for ourselves, and there is an invitation here to imagine how we might offer it to each other. When God claims us, God invites us to belong to the Beloved Community in a way that wraps us up in the healing of each other. What a beautiful thing, to belong to each other.

Week Four:  We belong to God and each other

“Isaiah was not rejected simply because he told Israel to worship Yahweh. He was rejected because Isaiah realized that true worship of Yahweh had implications for how one treated their neighbor.”                                                                                                                                  –Esau McCaulley

“But how sobering, that I can bring forth out of my thought-world into the external world either that which leads to life, or that which produces death in other men…we must understand that the reality of communion with God, and loving God, must take place in the inward self.”                               -Francis Shaeffer

 “Contemplative prayer deepens us in the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everyone and everything around us keep suggesting the opposite.”                                                                                      -Henri Nouwen

3/23 Ps 103; 131

3/24 Isaiah 43:1-7

3/25 Ps 1:1-3; 23

3/26 Habb 3:17-19

3/27 Luke 9:46-48

3/28 Ps 106:1-8

3/29 Eccles 3:1-8; Ps 13

MLK's evolving legacy

This week, a repost about the remarkable life of Martin Luther King, Jr, the status quo he challenged, and the comfort he disrupted.

I read today that in 1966, a Gallup Poll measured Martin Luther King, Jr’s favorability at 33%, while 63% of those polled disapproved of him.   This was over 10 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched King to prominence and focused the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement.  This was 3 years after King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the Washington Mall, unifying the call for freedom and the need for jobs with his singular voice.  This was 1 year after the successful march from Selma to Montgomery, a march that was attempted 3 times, where white and black civilians linked arms, allowing their conviction and hope to propel them to walk across a bridge and a state, some sacrificing their wellbeing or very lives as civilians and policeman brutally, openly, attacked them.  The violence broadcast in the month of the march woke the conscience of a nation, encouraging the Congress of the United States to support the Voting Rights Bill.  Dr. King was the face of a movement that not only lifted up the spirits of his fellow African American brothers and sisters; he also required the gaze of a country to confront the indignities they suffered by observing the sacrifices they made.

Dr. King and the SCLC forced the country to observe their status quo.  Their bravery was remarkable, but it was effective because it created a setting in which African Americans and their white allies were vilified and attacked for doing every day life: for sitting on a bus on the way to work, for walking across a bridge, or for ordering coffee at a lunch counter.  These acts of resistance were brilliant because they were mundane.  Everyone knows what it is like to order a drink expecting to receive one.  Although not many white folks knew what it was like to be black, they could certainly understand what it meant to be refused service just for existing.  To be beaten just for walking in your Sunday best. 

Dr. King and the SCLC reminded the country of visceral, instinctive compassion.  The images captured and scenes witnessed were so uncivil that they “announced that hurt is to be taken seriously, that hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness” (Bruggemann).  Those living in the white majority would most likely have argued that society could not be characterized as full of hate; rather, they were full of civility and kindness and would remain so as long as African Americans stayed in their lane.  This type of delusional break from reality is only possible when compassion and empathy are dead.  This is how the antebellum South could be remembered as a place known for genteel manners, kind hospitality and gorgeous vistas in settings in which bodies were chained, whipped and forced to work in the glare of said gorgeous vista.  We cannot hold onto both ideas at once, so we ignore the ugly and mythologize the good.  Dr. King was both wildly unpopular and most effective because he exposed the average citizen to the flaws in their own mythologies.  Truth tellers are often avoided (Cassandra, anyone?), and Dr. King kept showing the country the truth of the everyday, mundane trauma African Americans experienced, dispelling the delusions that America was a land of respected and kind free people who rewarded hard work.

In 1966, the actions of Dr. King disrupted the status quo in violent ways.  The actions of those in the movement forced people to realize there is a vast difference in order and in peace.  Those “more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity”…people “who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” would not and could not find Dr. King ‘favorable’ (King).  Dr. King’s actions boldly broke the beloved mythology of ‘separate but equal’, a centuries-long commitment of society to silence dissent to such a degree that, according to King, “we have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated.”  The demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement proclaimed that the status quo of society destroys the inner lives of African Americans.  They explained that waiting “for more than 340 years for [their] God-given and constitutional rights” leads a person to be “plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodyness’” (King), your own humanity cries out to simply do mundane tasks—like taking a bus, taking a walk, or taking a sip of coffee at a counter—with dignity.  Dr. King’s actions made him unpopular in the moment because he demonstrated the injustice and unsustainability of the status quo so cherished by white people with power.  His actions, and the violent reactions to them captured on film, forced society to engage compassion as they realized everyday, mundane hurt is “an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness” (Bruggemann).  63% of Americans didn’t favor him because his actions destroyed their delusions.

Dr. King’s words also made him unfavorable with a very powerful group of people in the South: White Christians and their churches.  Dr. King, always willing to collaborate with those who followed Christ in the work of doing justice and making things right for their neighbors, forcefully outed those in the church who chose power over sacrifice, acting as the “arch supporter of the status quo” (King).  Indeed, his words claimed that—especially for Christians—the measure of peace cannot be the absence of trouble, but must instead be the flourishing of all people in great and mundane tasks.  He wrote, “somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny….I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”  For a Church committed to theologies of victory and favor, committed to a status quo maintains power for their glory, such words of interdependence wound deeply, demonstrating why he was unpopular.

Each of us must decide if we will be a peacemaker or a peacekeeper. There is a vast difference, and the lives and wellbeing of many hang in the balance. Apathy and ignorance are not spiritual gifts.