“The Plentiful Imagery of the World”

I’m tired of white supremacy. Weary of death. Tired of injustice. Tired of witnessing sadness and loss and depletion and fear that our people carry from day to day. I’m tired of living my own. And it’s so easy to get lost in rage and resentment. To transform prophetic indignation into partisanship and retribution. To become poisoned by our principles, like Matthew today.

Folks often tell me that they don’t care for the Hebrew bible and its angry and violent and vindictive God. Folks tell me they prefer the Christian bible and the gospel stories filled with love and grace and gentle kindnesses. I have always replied, and I repeat now, that every word of violence found in Hebrew scripture is retold in the Greek, and that every word of forgiveness and justice spoken in the gospels was uttered first by Israel’s prophets and foreparents. Today’s scriptures are the object lesson.

Matthew is exposing a family fight today, and that gospel is willing to say that God rejects the cousins and kin who reject the Matthew community. The gospel is willing to say that God has destroyed their city and their temple. That God will do the same with any who are passing themselves off as genuine believers but are tares and goats, bad fish and children who say they will go out to the vineyard but do not. Matthew’s righteousness has soured and has become resentment, has turned and become a mirror of the hatefulness and exclusion that the Matthew community itself has suffered.

Obviously, I say this with a deep sense of sympathy and compassion for Matthew. I wouldn’t at all mind getting to decide who will be tossed out into outer darkness, chewing the inside of their own lip with their teeth. I’ve already started a list. I would like there to be consequences for mine enemies. Mine racist, transphobic, climate change denying, anti-vacc enemies.

But it’s important to know that Matthew’s oppressors are people who had more in common with them than were different. I have friends who are poverty activists and poverty scholars who defend Matthew and admire Matthew for its moral clarity and its urgency. Matthew is a justice activist. Matthew has incisive critique. Matthew is like any of us in many ways… but also any of us whose righteousness has been eclipsed by self-righteousness… so probably all of us at one time or another. Maybe one or two of us right now. (I’ve already admitted to having a list of mine enemies I’d like to send to hell if there were a hell.)

But I want to admit to you, as well, and this feels harder to say in many ways, that I cannot find a God of Love in the king of Matthew’s parable, or in this feast. Not in a king who sends troops to destroy his own citizens and cities who decline his invitation; who binds and casts out a diner (whom he oddly first calls “friend”) who did accept but didn’t have the right clothes?; who invites so-called “good and bad” alike only to shame and reject some of them. And I’m not able to understand Mercy and Justice in a feast that is conditional. I know that this passage is colored red in the did-Jesus-say-it color-coded bible, but this king is thinking how I think. And a sovereign deserving of all our heart, soul, strength, and mind probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, use my playbook. Or Matthew’s. This king has my impulses. And Isaiah insists that its God isn’t like me, that its God’s thoughts are not my thoughts nor its God’s ways my ways. God is higher, Isaiah says. I imagine that means better at grace than me and Matthew. Better at patience and whatever it is that forgiveness is. I’d like to imagine that means not being vindictive, not being violent, not being a bully. That seems like a reasonable bar for a merciful, just, and loving God.

Maybe God doesn’t have to be all the things everyone thinks a God should be, maybe doesn’t have to satisfy all the images and all the roles and all of the human impulses for punishment and judgment and attrition. Maybe what we call God isn’t something that hurts us, ever, even righteously, even tough-lovingly, but is always the things that correct us and that comfort us and save us.

Maybe every God we hear about in the bible isn’t a God that we have to contort and bend to fit into our understanding of God. Maybe every God we hear about in the bible isn’t God? Maybe we don’t accept without question the stories of God as killing farmers, burning cities, smashing the heads of enemy babies against a rock, sending a bear to eat a bunch of boys who called Elisha “Baldhead,” or killing disciples for stealing money and lying about it.

That God is certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that God is the pine-scented air.

And so, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, what if we replaced the king of Matthew’s parable with the Shepherd of Psalm 23? What if we scrap violence in all its forms, all its allegories? What if, instead of a feast preceded by murdered messengers and revenged merchants and burned homes, what if we instead have the divine meal of Psalm 23? Instead of death and retribution and rejection, what if we assume that whatever is divine is also provision, restoration, comfort, universal …

I’m not saying life is all cornflowers and honeybees. The psalmist knows that life is filled with loss. That we walk through a valley of deep shadow. That death surrounds us, discrimination and violence, sick family, addiction, living overwhelmed by need and responsibility and worry. The valley of death is the very center of the 23rd psalm, and its presence is assumed by the verses before and pervades the verses after it. There’s no denial, no erasure, no pretense.

But it’s no accident that when the psalm is most desperate, closest to the valley of shadow, that then is also the time it is closest to what is divine. Before and after, God is in the third person: God is my shepherd.  God makes me lie down. God leads me in just paths, as is befitting the name of God. But when the psalmist moves into the valley of deepest shadow, when the poet is surrounded by enemies, then God is at its most personal and most present: You are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me. You spread out a table. You anoint my head.

I don’t know about you, but this is what I need for my spirit and my faith. This Shepherd. The last thing I need is a king who hits me and binds me and throws me out. But, honestly, I don’t want a God who will do this to the people I hate, either, if I’m really honest with myself, because sometimes the only difference between me and mine enemies is twenty minutes. Am I so righteous, really? that I’m never the hypocrite, never hurt anyone, never deprived someone of their dignity or respect? No.

Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world. What if the God we imagine doesn’t throw anybody out? Not people who come to a wedding without the wedding robe. Not people who reverse carbon emissions caps. Not people who voted differently from me. Maybe not even people who target trans folks and try to reverse marriage equality or hoard wealth.

Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world. What if the perfect divine that we imagine doesn’t take sides between us? Doesn’t chose between Matthew versus Matthew’s cousins? Doesn’t choose between people who believe Black Lives Matter and people who love the flag? Between trans women of color and people made violent and transmisogynist by hegemonic gender values? Between me and the rest of mine enemies?

You prepare a table for me in the presence of mine enemies. Think about that: mine enemies are there, as well, at that table, at the feast. Isn’t the Shepherd preparing a table for them, then, too? Surely mine enemies aren’t just there to watch me eat. Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, when my head is anointed with oil, when my cup overflows, what if this God anoints all the heads and overflows all the cups? Makes the sun to shine on the evil and the good, Matthew got that much right, makes the rain to fall on the so-called just and the so-called unjust. What if God doesn’t divide us into sheep and goats, into wheat and tares – into just and unjust?

What if God understands that not everything is either one thing or the other, one side or the other? That some people think Black Lives Matter and love the flag? That some people love and fight for trans women of color and still are trapped in and beguiled by hegemonic masculinity? What if God knows that the difference between me and everything and everyone I hate is sometimes only twenty minutes? This is a hard saying.

Of course this doesn’t mean that there is no right or wrong. I’m confident that racism is still God-damned, and poverty is God-forsaken, that a loving God takes sides against violence and sexual violence. Importantly, though, I’ll not say that God makes this feast for both Trayvon Martin and also his killer George Zimmerman, or for both the dozens of trans people killed this year so far and also their murderers, for both the Muslims and Sikhs and other brown people systematically detained at airports and dragged off planes and digitally strip searched and also the agents who degrade them and the politicians who create the unjust policies, for both the Israelis and Palestinians killing one another. I won’t speak for every harmed person; it’s not my place to decide, I don’t think, what that open table means for everyone, what universal cup filling and anointing means for communities I’m not a member of, or impose my interpretation of universal table-making on these families and survivors of hate and harm. I’ll speak just of me, sitting down to table with the people who have harmed me, and I will wonder for myself about the plentiful imagery of the world.

I’m not asking us to give up our longing for comfort when everything is awful and hard. Of course that is part of an impossible, divine spirit. I am, though, wondering about giving up our need for retribution against fellow humans who make things awful and hard. Maybe even if they did it on purpose. Maybe even if they aren’t sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world.

I’m not asking for us to give up our ethics, our compunction for justice, or our anger at injustice. Of course that is part of an impossible, divine spirit. But I am, I think, hoping that in our zeal for fairness, we don’t require harm or death to balance the scale. I am hoping that we don’t deify our revenge by calling it God.

I’m asking us to speak of the plentiful imagery of the world, to imagine an ultimate reality whose mercy doesn’t make sense, which Paul called a skandal, an absurdity. I’m asking us to conceive of an impossible grace, a collective peace that is beyond our understanding.

Imagine power that is not corrupt. Imagine strength that is not violent. Imagine special treatment, for everyone.

I’m just asking us to imagine a parable – and a paradigm – where a Shepherd provides a balm to the afflicted, provides green pastures, still waters, provides love and compassion, an overflowing cup to so-called friend and so-called enemy alike, as if those names are not opposites. As though we are enmeshed, interdependent, comingled. As though “our” salvation depends on “theirs.” As though love and comfort, kindness, mercy is what saves and redeems and atones.

LITANY, Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
          The crystal goblet and the wine…
                -Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Peace.