Brothers and sisters, let us turn to Psalm 42:5, which says, “Hope in God.”
Okay, so I went for something simple, but cut me some slack here. It’s not like I went to seminary. I barely made it through confirmation class at the First Presbyterian Church of Fargo, ND.
Hope in God. For the sake of discussion here, I’ll buy that. But whatever one thinks about theology and scripture and competing interpretations, in the end we all have to acknowledge that God is, and always will be, mystery. If that’s true, then the command really is “Hope in mystery.”
If that’s the case -- if our lot in life is to place our hope in mystery -- then our ignorance need not frighten us quite so much. Our hope can root itself less in what we claim to know and more in that which is beyond knowing. We can get on that train without knowing the destination.
And, as long as I’m quoting the Bible, let me reach in there for one more to help me try to get myself out of this.
It’s important to realize things are going to get worse before they get better. The path I’m talking about is not a popular path. Confronting systems and institutions will not win us promotions at work or the easy company of friends. Instead, as the culture’s fear deepens, such ruthless talk will mark one as a threat, as someone to be marginalized, ignored, laughed at.
In the language of the Gospel, I’m talking about choosing the narrow gate. In Matthew 7:12-14, Christ says, “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
I don’t want to be melodramatic, but in my gut I think this task -- this burden I am speaking about -- engages us in the struggle that leads to life. And it is hard, and it will get harder.
But we will never be alone walking that path, riding that train, taking that journey. Let me turn to a secular version of this same call. In “Bread and Circuses,” a painfully beautiful song about the hypocrisy of much contemporary religion, Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant tell us, “The gates of hell stand open wide, but the path of glory you walk single file.”
If we walk through those wide-open gates of hell, we won’t want for company as we pass through. When we choose the narrow gate, we understand that there will be a moment when we will walk through it alone. But the song reminds us that we are not truly alone; we walk single file. That means someone is ahead of me, someone who can reach back to me if I stumble. And it means there will be someone behind me who will need my hand.
To be weak and yet hold onto hope -- to be human in the deepest sense, turning neither from the pain of this broken world nor from the joy that creation offers us -- is to remember the meaning of those two simple acts: A hand reaching, out of our need for the help and love of others, and a hand offered to another out of that same love. We will never fully understand that love; like God, it is mystery. All we can do is trust in it. But understand: In action, it is a harsh and dreadful love.
Part of our work today is to pursue politics today; in the present we must agitate for the policies we believe to be just, try to affect small changes, attempt to bring about the little reforms that can make big differences in the lives of individuals. That work goes on, and it is important work. It is our work.
But we also must understand that in a broken world, such reforms must come from a radical analysis, an analysis that goes to the root of the problem. And while we work to make this world kinder in the moment, we have to keep our minds on the ruthless task of preparing for the future, for the moment when the terrain on which we work will shift quickly. We will face choices we can’t predict. We will need a strength we don’t yet have. We will be forced to know and trust each other in ways deeper than we now know and trust ourselves. That trust comes in community, the kind I believe is being built at St. Andrew’s, a community-in-construction that has always lovingly welcomed me, a love for which I am always grateful.
Never has this radical work been more important, for I believe the time of change is coming and that moment when the path of glory will open is not so far away. That is the hopeful news. But in that hope, we must also face a ruthless truth: We are not yet ready for that moment. As a community, we are not yet strong enough.
Will we be ready in time? It is a question that haunts me. It is, I believe, a question that should haunt us all. It is the question that hope demands we face.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
--The problem is not simply George W. Bush and the gang of thugs who gave us the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. The problem is the brutality of empire.
.........The problem is that people who use violence have lost faith and hope, so they turn to violence thinking it is Justice. On the contrary Churches in America believe in violence, something that is beyond the real meaning of religion. When Jesus died on the cross he did not wage war. He won through love and faith. The fact that religion is separate from State is hypocrisy when real Christians work in the USA and pay taxes to build bombs and support a Phosphorus supporting military. It is not a question of Institutions it is about people who support them, and their crazy fantasies that violence begets goodwill.
--The problem is not simply Ken Lay and the bad boys of Enron, but the inhuman nature of corporate capitalism.
.......Making excuses for Ken Lay and their Capitalist greed is the chicken and the egg theory. America is built on greed, its laws are subjected to the conspiracy that getting is more saintly than giving. In fact that is why America since its beginning has always been at war. If I always give I always have faith. If I always take for more in greed I have lost hope. Capitalism is always hopeless.
--The problem is not simply sex and violence on television, but the fact that television is on, always on, in so many homes.
......Sex and Violence is television. Other shows of decency show the hypocrisy of America. If television was always good and was always on I don't think that is a problem.
--The problem is not simply the overt racism of the Ku Klux Klan but the polite ways in which we nice liberal white folks can so easily avoid the realties of how white supremacy is deeply woven into the fabric of this society.
......This is true..one need only see that from George Washington to George Bush II they have all been white men in the Executive Office. The so called Land of the Free names its Capitol Building The White House. Hows that for racism? We have dishonored Black Americans when we made them slaves in the first 100 years of American History and we still discriminate against them. We don't honor them in Society by having Black American Day. We stole Native American Indian Lands, killed and raped them, and live on those lands as squatters thinking we have ownership rights backed by the US governments. American Churches have no thought of guilt to this and participate in the continued hypocrisy... In God We Trust... my middle eye in the forehead we do.
We do not honor the real Americans who are Native American Indians with Native American Indian Day. When we correct and honor those we have hurt in the past, it shows our repetence and goodwill toward real Americans. We in this day are phoney hollywood actors and ignorant ibeciles in powers of change and dignity.
--The problem is not simply the men who rape but the men who let them rape without consequence.
....The idea that there is no consequence is to think there is no God. Native Americans, Black Americans were rape victims for hundreds of years, American prisons keep getting bigger and bigger, when Blacks start to fight back from those injustices in the past. Whitemen in America level illegal consequences while blaming colored races, and padding themselves with more of their fake white essence of purity. I believe those fake white flakes are chipping away, as God watches the gate.
--The problem is not simply the greed and stupidity of Donald Trump but the greed and stupidity of us all.
.....Donald Trump like Bill Gates and other Rich Hogs at the plate, support hypocrisy and impose their aristocratic authority over the lower financial account Americans. They neither give their all, but control their wealth through laws they create, and hide when the poor seek compassion and comfort. Their excuse is without the poor how would people know we are rich? No I don't think the poor are stupid, because if those men of wealth were really rich there would be no poor. Trump and Gates are phoney liars, and have no hope or faith.
Being lovingly ruthless is not easy. For the past decade, I have been slowly trying to come to terms with my own discoveries, and this is hard. They are discoveries of the extent to which this world is broken, why it is broken, and how it has broken me.
.... The world is ruthless, and the key and direction is to stamp out hypocrisy from the good narrow gate way. The answer is to to correct the injustices of the past, go forward with the work of the day, ending the stranglehold of the State and representative government, and allow real nonviolent religion to flourish.
by
Dom Jermano (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 40 diaries, 930 comments)
on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 6:18:25 AM
1 comments
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