Repentance, or Why I Never Wash

Into our confusion, our terror and our questions in the aftermath of the Tucson massacre, Sunday's gospel text from Matthew 4 speaks to us with some of the first few words from Jesus' mouth:

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

What is repentance?  The Greek word used by Matthew, metanoeo, means "to change one's mind and purpose". The underlying Hebrew word, shub, denotes a turning back, specifically turning away from one's sins and back to God.

The definition suggested by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder is better than most:

To repent doesn't mean to grovel in self-hatred or pious sorrow. When you repent you turn around, change directions, choose a different path, or make a radical rupture. Repentance signals an abrupt end to life on auto-pilot or to business as usual.

The urgency Yoder describes is reflected in the Greek word kairos, which in Mark Chapter 1 Jesus uses together with "repent".  Kairos describes something extraordinary and utterly new, a rupture in normal time that demands a response or a reorientation. It seems as though the disciples described in Sunday's gospel almost instantly "got it", completely walking away from their lives and families and security and routines, and becoming "fishers of men".

Repentance is about change, radical change.

Human beings don't change easily, and every theory of human personality is expected to describe how "resistance to change" is to be explained. A colleague, disgusted with the excuses parishioners offered as to why they didn’t attend worship, offered "Fourty Reasons Why I Never Wash"; those "reasons", however humorous and exaggerated, illustrate just how hard change is for our kind. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• "I only believe in things I can see, and I can’t see bacteria";
• "I’ll start washing when I get older and dirtier";
• "People who make soap are only after your money"; 
• "I know someone who washes every day and still smells bad";
• "People who wash are hypocrites - they think they are cleaner than everybody else".

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" -- how can we hear these words for our day and time? Even as Republicans are working on their efforts to repeal the 2010 health care reform, I remember a powerful 2010 article by Frank Rich of the New York Times, where he said this:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. ... The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

In other words, Frank Rich suggests that ultimately the whole fight (back then and even now) is not about health care or any specific subject at all.

Frank Rich suggests that the whole fight has been about fear of change. 

Even as early as March of 2010, Rich warned that President Obama's “middle-of-the-road bill" had "incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric", with the result that "reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families":

from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

Looking at the events of January 8 from this angle, the violence seems even more senseless; my point is that human beings will go to great lengths to avoid change. No, not "Republicans will go to great lengths to avoid changes", but "human beings will go to great lengths", all of us.

President Obama's call for more civility in our discourse sounds good, but I think the problem lies deeper, much deeper.

• When some people in this nation think they need to stop change by using violence, that's a good indication that some form of dialog stopped somewhere way-back-when; that conversation needs to begin again: about who we are as a people, and about how diversity is part of our identity.
• And when, as Frank Rich suggests, a lot of the fear of change has to do with the fact that the new face of this nation doesn't look like the faces of those fearful ones, we need to have a conversation about the faulty idea of "other".  For Christians, there is no "other"; we are all one, children of the same Father.   

Many of us are used to singing a section of Psalm 51; some of us are singing these words every Sunday.  I wonder whether we know just how serious this stuff is.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

If God were to start acting like we do with each other, we would have been flung so far away from God's presence we'd never find our way back.  Each of us depends on God's grace and mercy in our everyday struggle, yet it's hard for the folks around us to feel the grace. The writer Anne Lamott names these reasons why she made her adolescent son go to church against his will:

The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want--which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy--are people with a deep sense of spirituality.

The kairos is here.  In this rupture of time, "business as usual" will not cut it, and living on auto-pilot won't work.  As Rumi says, "All the other [doors] are sometimes open, sometimes shut; yet never is the door of repentance anything but open. Come seize the opportunity: the door is open."

Rather than feeling helpless in the midst of the violence, we know how to find "a path and a little light to see by". We can show purpose, heart, balance, gratitude and joy.  We can reflect the grace of our God.  With God, we are always in the majority.

Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 51

The Arizona Shooting and the Myth of the Sacred Scapegoat

There are no coincidences. The universe saw it fit for us to get a taste of home-grown violence, a week before we hear John's assessment of Jesus, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29), and eight days before we commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose message of non-violence seems needed more than ever.

A right-wing political group publishes a map of US states and names of certain US politicians who didn't vote as expected, and adorns their states with crosshairs. On the face of it, it's nothing, just one small incident of verbal violence ... but it is conceivable that such verbal violence gives rise to a poisonous plant that grows and grows. For on January 8, one such plant exploded, quite literally, when one of the politicians included in said map, Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, got shot in the head. A gunman opened fire outside a supermarket near Tucson, AZ, and shot her and at least 17 others. Congress woman Gabrielle Giffords lies sedated in critical condition. Nine-year-old Christina Greene was shot dead. Six innocent people have been killed.

If Muslims published pictures or names of US politicians with superimposed crosshairs, our government's response would be severe. But unlike in that case, the terrorists at the root of this violence are no anonymous strangers we can "take out" with a surgical strike. This is terror grown at home: way too close for comfort. The discomfort is palpable in the accusations flying around these days.

Others have begun to reflect about how those who incited violence should be held responsible, and how such violence can be prevented in the future. I am concerned with what's underneath: What gives rise to such violence, not just in deed, but already in the words that come before the deeds? In this proudly egalitarian society, we need to ask who sows violence, who feeds and nurtures it, and to what end. Before my reader gets weary of who I might blame, here is a hint: everyone is implicated.

John's words about Jesus are a good way to start some theological thinking: "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!". We have carefully polished these words and made the sentence part of our Sunday liturgy, but the underlying imagery is rather bloody. In Old Testament times, the scapegoat was the tried and true way to get rid of the sin of a whole nation, and that is what the Gospel of John has John the Baptist refer to.

The French philosopher and literary critic René Girard suggests that indeed, the need for a scapegoat has been there since human beings have formed communities. The collective violence of a people demands that there be a victim that will die and unite everybody in one purpose.

Girard describes scapegoating as one of the oldest mechanisms to fend off social crisis. At some point, when feuding threatens to dissolve the community, spontaneous and irrational mob violence erupts against some distinctive person or minority in the group. They are accused of the worst crimes the group can imagine, and then they are lynched. In the wake of the murder, communities find that this sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution. It "clears the air."

William Holman Hunt: The Scapegoat 

The sudden peace confirms the desperate charges: If the scapegoat's death is the solution, the scapegoat must have been the cause. Since everybody else is allowed to remain unconscious and nobody else is held responsible, violence rises again, until the next scapegoat is found. And on it goes, in endless senseless unconscious repetition.

Scapegoating is with us still. The prescription is that divisions in the community must be reduced to but one division, the division of all against one common victim or one minority group.

Now, René Girard holds that, unlike all other myths of the world (which support scapegoating and generally are on the side of the "mob" perpetrating it), the stories of the Bible tend to rehabilitate the victims. He says the main difference between mythology and biblical stories is that

instead of speaking in his own name, the biblical author chooses as his hero the principal victim, whose viewpoint prevails in an account that does not suppress the persecutors' version but regards it as deceptive. 

In particular, Girard says the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is the story of a failed sacrifice. He says that Jesus’ death is told in such a way as to utterly cut the legs out from under our rationale for scapegoating, victimization and violence. Unlike when mythical sacrifice succeeds, in the case of Jesus' death, peace does not descend, and the memory of the murder is not erased. In the case of Jesus' death, an odd new counter-community arises, dedicated both to the innocent victim whom God has vindicated by resurrection and to a new life through him that requires no further sacrifice.

"Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" The Lamb of God, Jesus, is the lamb that God is offering to the sacrificial monster. Who is the sacrificial monster? Humanity. It is us who demand sacrifices to keep our order. It is humanity's sacrificial inclinations that are exposed in the story of Jesus, so that we can no longer blame it on God. We can no longer say 'God wanted that sacrifice.' John the Baptist says, "This is the Lamb of God."

This is not our lamb given to God. This is the Lamb of God given to us -- to us, those who demand sacrifices.

What Jesus exposed is that we humans keep order by sacrificing some for the sake of others, while justifying it with our gods. THAT is the sin which Jesus takes away. We don't see that our sacrifices create victims, because we blame it on God and justify ourselves. Our bloodthirstiness and our enslavement to the sacrificial mechanism -- Jesus the Lamb of God, the crucified victim of the institutions in which we abide, came to reveal this to us in his death and resurrection.

When the temples of sacrifice ceased to be, sacrificial institutions of order did not fully cease to be. At the time of Jesus, the sacrificial order shifted from the temples toward the Law. The Apostle Paul began the Christian task of exposing the Law, too, by showing how the Law was yet another sacrificial order that Jesus came to replace with God's righteousness, a justification by sheer grace.

As if commenting on what happened in Arizona, Dr. King said,

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.  Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

We are invited to accept Christ's invitation to abide in him, and in him alone. He came to take away our sin -- and along with it, to take away our reliance on the institutions of sacrifice, institutions that promise us life but only bring death. The Good News is that Christ came not just to take away our old shelters, but to offer us a new one: to abide in his love. Jesus came to replace the Temple and all other institutions of sacrifice.

"This is the lamb of God". The invitation is before us. What is offered to us is a way out of the vicious circles of violence. The sacrificial monster doesn't have to be fed any more, because we know better. We are aware now; we understand the mechanism. We know that our sacrificial systems only bring death. We know where life is.

"Look! Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"  Here is a promise to embrace. Here is a promise to hold on to. Here is liberation for me and for you.  Here is Good News to proclaim to the world.  Go, tell it on the mountains, over the hills and everywhere!

John 1:29-42