It has been a heck of a week. At least no one shot up an elementary school, movie theater, or synagogue in the United States, at least as far as I know, so I’m going to score that as a win, though there was the shopping mall in Thailand. Everything else felt very much too much, the chaos in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, enough to fuel conspiracy theories on the right and on the left for years to come, the trauma of impeachment and retribution, neither of which I’m going to touch, a pastoral third rail sure to leave someone burned, probably me..
It started Sunday night. I confess to having watched the Super Bowl. It was the first time in years. My concerns about the devastating injuries on the field and the long term effects of brain damage off the field have not changed, and I’m not sure it is a problem that can be fixed. Nor has there been any movement on the systemic racism in the National Football League, from the hateful name of the Washington franchise to the notion that billionaire white owners can be political, but millionaire black players cannot. Still, I love the sport, one of only two team sports I’ve ever played, and the Super Bowl is as much a cultural event as it is a sporting event.
I was also on my laptop, which may be why I didn’t quite get everything that was going on in the halftime performance. I was thrilled that two powerful Latinx women were the stars of the show, that the Puerto Rican flag made an appearance with a blunt reminder that the territory is part of the United States and its people are our people. I was less thrilled with the bumping and grinding and general sexual acting out in what should be an inter-generational space, but then again, I’m an old prude who doesn’t like that sort of behavior when it happens in Pride parades either, and I am told in every case that I’m not culturally sensitive nor am I a good feminist when I suggest a little more discretion, from Shakira or Mick Jagger.
I totally didn’t get the children in cages thing that was going on until I read about the harsh clap back from white nationalists, who insist that only their politics are acceptable in the secular religious space of sports capitalism.
Children in cages seemed fitting on this week that the world acknowledged the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. But as I reminded some this week, it didn’t start with the Holocaust and the “Final Solution.” Nikolaus Wachsman’s gut-wrenching history of the concentration camps reminds us that the first to be rounded up were opposition politicians, the first to be mass murdered, the disabled.
I think most of us would like to be able to carve out a little safe space away from the divisive and angry moment in which we live, the echoes of history charging in our direction, though it may be a little naive to think the NFL was ever going to be such a space.
It is never easy to figure out where to draw the line, where to compromise, when it comes to our core values, if we choose to claim and exercise core values at all.
Take the coronavirus. Li Wenliang, the doctor who tried to warn authorities about the disease, died of it this week. He was successful in getting himself arrested and harassed, unsuccessful in sounding the alarm, for China is a communist regime. In fact, China is suppressing social media platforms that contain information on the outbreak.
One wonders what it might have been like had the outbreak occurred in a free and open country rather than an authoritarian one, a democracy where word would have gotten out sooner. Our economy is more tightly tied to this brutal regime every day, because we think we can profit without getting our hands dirty. The headlines are a pretty stark reminder that this is not the case.
This might sound strange coming from an old lefty like me, but being progressive, even being a social democrat, is not the same as being a Bolshevik, despite the efforts of some to slap that label on every movement for equality, opportunity, and justice. Stockholm is not Beijing, and the Soviet Union has been gone longer than many young adults have been alive.
I’ve been thinking about the chaotic news of the week as I wrestled with our gospel reading, Matthew’s account in which Jesus not only insists on the Hebrew Law, most of which the Gentile church would soon abandon, but also this important image, this teaching about a city on the hill.
In fact, the city on a hill teaching plays a critical role in our own congregational heritage, for the New England colony was meant to be a city on the hill in this very religious sense, and it all had to do with this question of where to draw the line, where to compromise, and exactly how much perfection and purity to expect from one another and from the very human institutions we create. Our religious ancestors struggled with how to be a salvation people in the world, a world where we can easily overlook the beauty and the miracle as we are overwhelmed with corruption.
Let’s step back a few years. The Protestant Reformation in England was a sort of half reform, motivated not by theology, but rather by the king’s desire for a male heir. Nonetheless, Protestant thinking, especially thinking from the Reform branch associated with Zwingli and the Zurich reform, found its way to Scotland and England. Most people cared about religious issues back then, centuries before cultural secularization, thought that how you practiced religion mattered, so it wasn’t all an esoteric debate among cleric and kings.
The reform minded folks in England generally split into two factions, though with some fluidity between the two. They asked questions like: Did it matter whether there was a bishop, a presbytery, or congregational autonomy? Did it matter what the clergy wore when celebrating communion?
The most hardline group came to believe that the Church of England was beyond saving, that the areas where they disagreed with the church were so profound that they had to separate from the church, hence their name, Separtists. Many found refuge in Holland, though, modeling the future of Congregationalism, the exile communities split several times, once because someone didn’t like how the minister’s wife dressed. A small group eventually got on a boat, Pilgrims in search of a new place where they could live their faith without being contaminated by the sins of the Church of England.
Some of the non-Separtists decided that the things they had been fighting over weren’t really that big of a deal, were non-essentials in the church-speak of our tradition. Others thought some of the areas of disagreement were essential but stuck in there to fight it out, hoping to purify the Church of England. They even started a civil war and took control of the whole nation for a time, executing the king. Some of those Puritans had already crossed the Atlantic, committed very explicitly to creating a colony that was Christian and Congregational, in the words of scripture, a city on the hill, to be seen as a model for others.
It may surprise many to know that neither the Pilgrims nor the Puritans were even slightly interested in religious freedom or the separation of church and state. They could not have imagined any world in which one could separate religious values from civil conduct. The Massachusetts colony was a congregational theocracy, so much so, that when Anne Hutchinson claimed that she had received direct revelation from God, and that the outward forms of faith didn’t matter, she was expelled from the colony.
The questions facing both the Separtists and non-Separtists, the Pilgrims and Puritans, were not all that different than the questions we face in our own engagement in the world, the non-stop world, the questions I ask myself when it is game night, when I go to the store, when I am in a restaurant and I’m given a plastic straw.
We are called together as a community by our core values, but how we live that out is for each of us to discern. For Jesus, that meant a code of 613 laws. His conflict with the Scribes and Pharisees wasn’t about obedience. As the gospel reminds us, they were scrupulous on their observance. The conflict that Jesus had with them was that they followed the letter of the Law but not the spirit, that they used the Law as a weapon to bludgeon others, the same way some Christians use the Bible, and almost everyone uses parliamentary procedure, not as tools, but as weapons.
Jesus tells his followers to be a “city on a hill,” a light that is not hidden but shines out for all. He most certainly didn’t mean it in the way the Massachusetts colony took it, withdrawal from the world. If Jesus wanted that, he could have joined the apocalyptic community in Qumran. He clearly meant to transform the world, by being an example in the world, by being light in the darkest places, which also carried the meaning of revealing truth.
And here we are, with our portable bushel baskets in our pockets, ready to break them out anytime our beliefs might offend others. We call it being polite, being civil, when we avert our eyes, bite our tongues.
I don’t know the answer. Better to turn off the television, cancel all my subscriptions, listen to music from an earlier age on permanent rotation. But I’m just not wired that way. As tempting as a cabin in Montana might be, that isn’t the city on a hill for me.
In 1931, the anarchist Emma Goldman wrote of her life:
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
Beautiful and radiant. Maybe that is the best answer I can find, in the words of a Jewish street rabbi in the first century of the common era, in the words of a Jewish anarchist in the twentieth. Maybe the city on a hill is a loud and sparkly halftime show where two powerful women can be who they are, who use their positions of power, hard won, to speak out for those at the margins, for those in our ghetto colony of Puerto Rico, for children in cages, and for all of us who dream of a better world.
It has been a week. And tomorrow, God willing, will be another. May you sing a song of freedom and justice under the light of love, shaking your booty if it still has some shake, or not, but always, always finding joy, even in the storm, for God is good, you are more miraculous than you realize, and love always wins in the end. Amen.