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“Lift up Your Hearts” Soon after I joined the staff of the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, I decided to train as a guide, feeling that I could be a better writer about the lessons of the Holocaust if on a regular basis I witnessed the deep impression our exhibition can make on visitors. It is not easy to live day by day directly under the shadow of humanity’s greatest crime. Each person brings different vulnerabilities to this searing exposure of the human capacity for evil, and there are moments when my heart is very sore because I am a priest. One of them is when we arrive at a photograph of the bishop whom Hitler installed as head of the amalgamated Protestant Church. There is the bishop with arm upraised not in blessing but in the salute of loyalty—‘Heil Hitler.’ There are many stories of Christian heroism and resistance but they never offset the crushing weight of evidence that the traditional Christianity entrenched in Germany had ancient flaws rotting its very core. I think of the research being conducted this year on Hitler’s “brown priests”, the Roman Catholic clergy who were passionately pro-Nazi. I think of the famous theologians who justified antisemitism and described Hitler as “the man sent from God.” I think of the sickening impotence of other-worldly piety. (There is a beautiful monastery overlooking the Danube where one can ask to look at the guest registers of those who were on retreat there in the early thirties. In one entry there is a lovely motto written by one of the devout retreatants, “From faithfulness to faithfulness”; the signature is Adolf Eichmann, the future technocrat of genocide.) Perhaps I can be forgiven for wishing that the readings from Holy Scripture that the Church gives us this Sunday were not the ones we have just heard. Perhaps you found them both serious “downers.” The prophet Micah delivers in the name of God a searing indictment of corrupt religious leaders. Prophets and priests who are in it for the money. Bogus seers. Spiritual guides on the make. Judges taking bribes. And then the teaching of Jesus: Jesus warns those around him of the hypocrisy that is endemic among the religious professionals of his day. They hide their own fatal flaws behind an elaborate front of religious piety. They are addicted to status and demand deference. Their moralistic attitudes and authoritarian judgments are deeply ironic. Their judgmental preaching is meant to imply their own moral superiority, yet it serves as a smokescreen to conceal their own spiritual emptiness. This sounds like one big downer. We have had plenty of opportunity to be disillusioned in our own time. The recent exposure of a corrupt clerical culture that placed thousands at risk by protecting pedophiles. The prosperity preachers pumping out their religious propaganda over cable TV. The terrifying ayatollahs, mullahs, and Christian fundamentalist neo-Crusaders. All of them piling on more painful evidence of the way religious leaders betray and exploit for ends that are in polar opposition to the life-giving Spirit of God. It is depressing to come to church to be lifted up, only to hear scriptures that seem to tell us the worst again of how religiosity can turn into organized resistance to the love of God. One big downer. But the Eucharist has at its very heart, the invitation “Lift up your hearts.” And we reply “We lift them up to the Lord.” How do these scriptures summon us out of disillusionment and depression into a place of creativity and hope? How are we going to lift up our hearts this morning? May I suggest first that we turn our eyes towards the Capitol, where the body of Rosa Parks is lying in state? Perhaps if we learn from her, our hearts will not only be lifted up, they may soar… In that single defining moment when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat we can see how God’s judgment actually works. It is all about place. Conventional religion serves as a buttress for human systems of power that put people in their place. The system underlying most human societies over the last ten thousand years could be modeled on the familiar motto of the tidy householder. “A place for everyone, and everyone in their place.” Religion serves as the ideal justification for maintaining systems of class, privilege and power. It can claim that the gods have created the castes, the privileged clans, that the difference between rulers and the ruled is of divine origin, that the balance of the sacred cosmos depends on everyone knowing their place in the hierarchy and staying within it. Jesus came to undermine that most entrenched of human myths. Tradition decreed that he should be a carpenter like his father and have a family. He didn’t. He uprooted himself from his place and deliberately became a wanderer—the Son of Man who has nowhere to lay his head. He uprooted others from their places. Businessmen left their fish supply businesses. Tax collectors unplugged from their dependency on the imperial Roman officials. Wealthy women abandoned their husbands and families and joined peasants in Jesus’ band of wanderers. Prostitutes uprooted themselves from their pimps. He wove this motley crew into a band of good news announcers with a single message. Everyone who was prepared to lose the place that society dictated, could find a new place in a new order that was suddenly becoming real among them. The code name for this new order was “God’s reign.” And not only could anyone have a place in it, everyone could have the same place in it. In fact the feature of this society was there was only one place for each and for all, making all equals. And that place was the heart of God. Everyone had a place indeed. We all need one. But that place was at home with God in intimacy. Jesus had the power to initiate everyone into the same place that he had with God. And that place was, as he fully realized at this baptism in the Jordan, as God’s beloved in whom God is well-pleased. That was our place too. There is a common idea that the heart of Jesus’ message was that God loves us. That is absurd. No one has ever been crucified for saying that God loves us. But Jesus’ actual message of a new order in which all are equal by virtue of their union and intimacy with God made it inevitable that he would be crucified. What could be more dangerous to conventional religion and the standard model of human society than the message that all could become equal by claiming a new gift of intimacy with God? How could you get people to stay in their allotted places if they got hold of this dangerous message about equality with one another and equal intimacy with God? How could you get them to stay down where they belong if they rose up in the power of this new dignity and freedom bestowed by God acting through his Son? What would happen to society if people got the idea that their status was not something dictated by their birth or the powers that be but was a divine endowment, glorious in its potential? What could society bestow that was more glorious than union with God? And how could you control and suppress a dynamic community of people so diverse that their only common feature was that they all experienced the gift of intimacy with God? There was no place in the old established order for Jesus or his band, so he was driven out of it quickly. Leaders of the best religion and the most advanced empire conspired to crush him. They weren’t fools. They knew how subversive his message really was. And after his resurrection, so did those who responded by spreading it more and more, constantly enlarging the new community. The dynamic remained the same, a powerful feed-back loop. The more people accepted the gift of oneness with God in Christ, the more detached and free they became in relation to gender, race, social status, nationality. The more they took their cue from Jesus and unplugged from the rigid systems of family heritage, and a traditional religiosity that revolved around ritual purity, the freer they were to innovate and invent the Church, a community based on love in which there was room for everyone. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28) Who can doubt then the gospel is the secret of that subversive act by which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat? Those who know their place in the heart of God have the freedom to refuse the place dictated by society and choose to shape their own destinies out of an inner conviction of their dignity and worth. Notice that Jesus proclaimed that the meek would inherit the earth. He did not counsel them to wait for an afterlife. So the meekness of Rosa Parks, far from being resignation, was a meekness that claimed equality on the earth in the here and the now. No doubt the authorities scorned her for asking for the earth, in insisting on equality. Well, in a way she was asking for the earth. And it worked…just like the Beatitudes promised. So by looking across the city to the Capitol, we can find fresh inspiration for lifting up our hearts. The gospel is as potent today as when it was set ablaze by Jesus who said that he came to cast fire onto the earth. Perhaps what we most need is a fresh attitude to our history. It can seem like an awful long time since the community of the gospel gathered after Jesus’s resurrection. We can become oppressed by the weight of history and the terrible failures of what congealed into the form of Christendom. Constantine’s cooption of the Church, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the grotesque religious wars, the sickening failures that allowed the Holocaust… But Archbishop William Temple, one of the most admired Anglican leaders of the last century, used to say. “We are the early Christians.” I was asked by a parish in the year 2000 to help design an educational program to celebrate two thousand years of Christian history. I suggested that a group of parishioners train to present in turn dramatic representations of successive lifetimes since the resurrection. It was as surprise that only thirty were needed! The gospel has already profoundly shaped the world, and alternatives to the gospel have been discrediting themselves quite spectacularly. As soon as we courageously turn to the mystical core of our religion, the actual offer of intimacy and intimacy with God through Jesus here and now, its fire can blaze up again in all its immediacy and freshness. We can be completely undeterred by the failures of past Christianities, if we realize that our authority comes from the future. God sets us free from the burdens of the past by summoning us to be co-creators of his future. Lift up your hearts. Come now to communion, communion with God in intimacy through the sacramental indwelling of Christ in your bodies, communion with all the saints, including the newly arrived sister of Christ Rosa Parks, who offered herself to bring God’s future into our present life. |