Though Harper Lee was born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama, and I was born and raised in the Tidewater area of Virginia, we were most certainly distant cousins, as we shared descent from the Lee family of Virginia, enslavers, patriots, and traitors, though only she got the name, my descent being matrilineal.
I knew none of this when I was assigned to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” in high school, a shocking assignment actually, given the hold the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy had on Virginia curriculums all those decades ago. But there it was, this instant classic published just a couple of years before I was born, a book that was anti-racist and woke before those words meant what those words have come to mean.
“Mockingbird” is the rare “bildungsroman,” or “coming of age” tale, written from the perspective of a female character. Scout Finch, her older brother Jem, and neighboring summer-visitor Dill, watch events unfold as her attorney father, Atticus, is assigned to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. It is a trope all too common among white supremacists, imagining men and women of the African diaspora as bestial, impulsive, and hyper-sexual, a trope that watered the deep roots of the lynching tree.
I’d later learn that the character Dill was inspired by real life seasonal neighbor Truman Capote. I’d learn that the future authors maintained close ties well into adulthood, with Lee accompanying Capote to Kansas to research “In Cold Blood” while “Mockingbird” was in production. The relationship withered and died when “Mockingbird” became a Pulitzer Prize-winning success, though the perpetually petty Capote was himself already wildly successful.
I watched in dismay as an earlier draft of “Mockingbird” was controversially released as “Go Set a Watchman” in 2015, just months before Lee died at the age of 89. Everything about that affair was tawdry and tainted and undoubtedly exploitative.
I will not describe much of the novel’s plot. Many folks have read the book, while many others have seen the 1962 Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck, that year’s Best Actor. If you have done neither, I urge you to do so. It is sadly relevant to the time in which we live.
At the end of the eleventh chapter, in relation to one of two major side-plots, Atticus says to Jem:
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
This week, we celebrate the end of the liturgical year, the disordered order that is supposed to walk us through a version of salvation history annually, but really just carves out space for the seasons of Advent, preparation for Christmas, and Lent, preparation for Holy Week.
I have tried to preach the theme assigned for this Sunday many times. The Feast of Christ the King was invented by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as a counter to rising fascism. But as the Rev. Dr. Mary Luti has recently reminded colleagues, the pope’s alternative was rule by the Vatican, so the attempt to re-purpose it for Mainline Protestants is a bit off, Pius proposing replacing a secular autocracy with a papal theocracy.
Many of us have adopted language slightly less jarring in a post-modern democracy, swapping “Christ the King” for “Reign of Christ.” We imagine a world where the teachings of Jesus are a reality, whether that is through God’s just world for all unfolding in this reality, or through a dramatic and possibly apocalyptic re-ordering of the world, something along the lines of the Revelation to John of Patmos. We envision a world where those particular teachings of Jesus ignored in end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism are a reality, the rich and powerful brought low, the poor and vulnerable lifted up.
The feast, by whatever name you call it, draws on the mockery of the crucifixion, where Jesus was accused of being a false-king by Rome, a figure common in the popular uprisings of the time, crucified under a sign proclaiming him king, and accused of being a false prophet by the Sanhedrin. The royal archetype set the stage for later Christian theologies that depict Jesus as the heir to the Davidic Covenant, the member of that family line that sits on the throne of Israel forever.
But honestly, I watch the news. The rich have not been brought down.
Despite decades of advances in disease prevention, in improving the quality of life for people in developing nations, in improving literacy and education in formerly and currently colonized and exploited peoples, despite all of this movement toward a just world for all, the poor in the industrialized world, those with so many unrecognized advantages, have embraced self-destruction, nationalism and hate, as they have done before, as we seem doomed to do again.
And in the middle of the current decline, I can say intellectually that these cycles happen in history, that the net result is always positive, that the Rev. Dr. King was right when he said that in the long-term, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, but my heart hurts these days, my gut feels punched with every new atrocity, and that king / not a king we might want to throw into Boston Harbor like so much Orange Pekoe Tea is still in his whorehouse Versailles.
So yeah, I’m not going to stand up here and blather on about God’s just and caring realm this morning. It seems pretty far away, and you get that plenty of Sundays. Besides, next Sunday starts Advent, and we will embrace the season’s themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. There is happy clappy on the horizon.
Today, I’m going to focus on this imaginary saint, Saint Atticus Finch of fictional Maycomb, Alabama, a man who does the right thing, even when it is hard, even when a successful outcome is improbable if not impossible, a person Theodore Roosevelt might have described in a post-presidency speech delivered at the Sorbonne, one you have heard from our lectern before. Roosevelt said:
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
The person in the arena, Jesus riding into Jerusalem, not the blood sacrifice from a sick theology invented after his death, but Jesus riding in as a herald of a power greater than empire, a power greater than greed and fear, a rural folk-prophet so filled with love that broken people felt whole again in his presence, hopeless people felt hope, this man on a donkey that tradition tells us knew he was unlikely to live, a man who could inspire a different kind of King who also knew that he’d never leave Memphis alive.
I don’t know why some people are wired wrong from birth. I don’t understand the evolutionary advantage. And I know that horrendous evil sometimes re-wires its victims, crushing spirits that don’t always recover.
I recognize the powerful mystery of grit, of resilience. Hope matters, moments of joy matter, but I pray I am willing to step into the arena no matter what, no matter how muddy and bloody I might be.
You are here this morning, maybe out of habit, maybe filled with hope, and maybe determined like Atticus Finch standing before a racist jury, like King telling the crowd he has been to the mountaintop, like Jesus on a donkey, the crowd chanting “Hosanna” as Caesar’s brutal legions march in through another gate, Pontius Pilate on a warhorse. Jesus tells us that taking on the powerful and corrupt is going to be hard. He should know.
The blood at the foot of the cross, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, that isn’t the victory. You are the victory. The Jewish innovation, the idea that the only real ruler is that Holy Mystery we call God, impossible to depict as an idol, impossible to trap in a Temple, is still true. God is good no matter how you understand or don’t understand Holy Mystery, the utility of a personified deity, First Cause, serendipitous creativity, or just a placeholder, the unsolvable X in the equation.
Have courage. This is not God’s just and caring human realm. Not by a long shot. Yet the holy is powerful. The holy is blowing a whistle, warning the immigrant that abductors working for a white supremacist government are in the neighborhood. The holy is recording a video calling our military back to their oath. The holy is hanging a banner on the front of our church, telling those who feel unwelcome that here they will find love and acceptance. The holy is collecting pillows, so that mother and child escaping domestic violence have a place to lay their heads, not in a manger in another time and place, but here, in this city, in this precarious age.
Let us see it through, no matter what. Amen.