Though many know that I was once a member of the on-stage audience of kids for an episode of “The Jim and Tammy Show,†starring Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, few will know that I once served as a youth “ambassador†during a Billy Graham crusade, trained to stand up front during the altar call to receive children who were ready to be “saved†as the congregation of thousands gathered in the arena sang “Just As I am.†The call to ministry, if you believe in such a thing, goes back to my childhood.
Graham, who died this week, was a Southern Baptist, as was I during my childhood. Despite being a Southern Baptist and from North Carolina, Graham supported desegregation, and was a close friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Graham made some missteps around race too, but no one is perfect.
More conservative than not, Graham was still able to engage with others who did not share his particular interpretation of scripture. To be sure, he was not out there marching for marriage equality, but he was not quite the hate-filled demagogue that his son, Franklin, has proven to be. So while he described himself as an “evangelical,†meaning he sought to share what he understood as salvation through Christ with others, I am hesitant to call the elder Graham a fundamentalist in the way the term is used today.
Christian fundamentalism actually has its roots in Presbyterianism, and became a defined movement in 1910, when the Presbyterian General Assembly adopted a statement of five fundamentals of Christian faith. A series of twelve books called “The Fundamentals†came out that same year.
While the term fundamentalism developed within the specific context of American Protestantism, it has come to be widely used, not just for those who engage in a selective religious literalism, the pick-and-choose scripture that seems to always say what the haters want it to say, but also more broadly used for all of those who are intolerant of other beliefs, or who engage in hate-filled acts of intolerance. Islamic extremists are described as “fundamentalists,†and some forms of Islam look remarkably like Fundamentalist Christianity, right down to the misogyny.
The Buddhists attacking the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are described as fundamentalist in some media accounts, though to all appearances, this is just another case of racist tribalism dressed up in the trappings of religious difference. Still, it gives Buddhists a bad name.
Some might even use the term fundamentalist to describe the intolerance of the left, where differing belief is silenced on campus, though I am not completely sure that racists and fascists should be given a platform. But my all-time favorite use of the term fundamentalist may well be for a brand of intolerant atheism, for the term fundamentalist is about as toxic as any word can be for that group, yet it is an apt descriptor of their bile.
And they are absolutely fundamentalist in the sense that they are intolerant, specifically intolerant of those who believe in something transcendent that some of us happen to call God. Instead of using the term atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens described himself as an anti-theist. He described Billy Graham as a “self-conscious fraud.†When asked what he believed to be the “axis of evil,†he replied “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.†He was brilliant and mean and snarky and thoroughly unpleasant.
Yet Hitchens and I agree on one point. He was one of at least two people called to the Vatican to testify against the canonization of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, better known as Mother Teresa. Of course, he was only chosen because his statements would be so over the top that they would not be taken seriously, but he, along with others, are accurate and damning in their critique of the saintly nun. Despite raising millions of dollars every year, the clinics run by the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nun’s she founded, lacked even the most basic medical care under her leadership. There were no analgesics, for Teresa felt that the poor must suffer like Christ on the Cross. There was no palliative care for the dying. The order, which could afford to reduce the pain of the suffering and dying, chose to allow suffering. Yet, as she aged and her own body began to fail, Teresa did not choose to suffer like Christ, but instead received topnotch medical care, even a pacemaker.
The “poor suffer on earth but will receive a heavenly reward†line of thinking is nonsense, the sort of justification of power and privilege that led Karl Marx to call religion the “opium of the people.†Jesus heals people. He doesn’t tell them to “suck it up, buttercup.â€
Yet, despite her flaws, Teresa embodied the humility seen in today’s gospel, taken from John’s extended account of the Last Supper, a text often read on Maundy Thursday. Service to the poor is dirty and icky. Healing lepers in Galilee while Tiberius was Roman emperor was dirty and icky. Caring for lepers and the dying in the slums of Calcutta was dirty and icky, and still is, as it was for Francis in medieval Assisi. Washing the feet of men who had spent all day walking dusty roads in sandals was a little dirty and icky too.
Today, in those churches that still try to perform a washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday, it is usually difficult to find anyone who will allow the pastor to wash their feet, because it is just too weird. What I find weird is what we consider weird.
And in Rome, a Jesuit pope estranged from the Jesuits takes a Franciscan name, and washes the feet of juvenile offenders, some not even Catholic. For despite his conservatism, and Francis may be the only Latin American Jesuit who did not support Liberation theology, our modern day Francis has come to embody the humility and service we find in our reading.
I don’t know what flipped the switch for Francis, made him so focused on the poor and on humility. Perhaps it happened during Argentina’s “Dirty War,†a period of violence and oppression under the rule of a nationalistic junta during the 1970’s and 1980’s. We do know, with some certainty, what drove Teresa from the safety of the classroom into the streets, from school uniforms to puss-filled sores. First was the Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed 2.1 million. Then, in 1946, as the British prepared to end the Raj, came Direct Action Day, with 4000 dead and over 100,000 left homeless in clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta.
It is almost always a direct experience of suffering that transforms. Even Siddhartha, the Buddha, is believed to have started the path toward enlightenment after witnessing disease and death in an ancient kingdom northwest of modern day Kolkata.
I know that my passion for building a just and caring world, always there, crystallized I stopped looking past people in New York City, and really started to see them, allowing myself to see the ways people were broken and abandoned, to see the ways they injured themselves and others. I remember like it was yesterday the moment it suddenly occurred to me that the elderly woman panhandling on the subway platform could be my grandmother, as the same age, that she probably was someone’s grandmother. I can to this day see the station, the woman, the angle down the steps.
I am so thankful for those who can afford to give generously, but I think there is something to be said for the direct experience of opening our eyes and our hearts to brokenness, not from a brochure, but from the broken places. In fact, I think there must be a direct experience of brokenness. There is something to be said for washing the feet, for being present with the vomit and the stench.
Jesus wants us there in the ditch with the man who has been robbed, bleeding and unclean.
Jesus wants us in the broken places, with the broken people, for it takes a broken heart to let in the light, to let out the light.
Just as it is hard to allow in new experiences and new understanding when you already know everything. It is hard to feel the touch of the divine when you are wrapped in the cold steel of fundamentalism.
We don’t need to suffer like Christ. A beggar in Kolkata needs to die in pain? Nonsense. Suffering is just a fact, and brokenness is just a fact, because we are fragile and fickle and finite and sometimes utterly wretched to one another. We are hope and fear and all too often, wound way too tight. We think the things that matter to us are the things that matter, because we are embodied selves.
Life is good for most of us most of the time.
And then we see the bodies in the street like Teresa in 1946.
Then our friend hears the C word.
Then addiction claims a loved one.
Then we see the father lashing out in his rage and anger as he says “No more. No more dead children.â€
Then we see a panhandler who looks a little like grandma.
Are we willing to truly see and take on the pain of the world when we have our own pain?
What does it take to drive us to our knees, not in prayer that God will re-order the universe and make it all right as we define right, but drive us to our knees in service, making right what we can in whatever small way we can?
Are we strong enough to sit with brokenness?
We might not get it right all the time, but what better place to start the journey than on our knees.
Some of us have come from the broken places. Some of us have gone to the broken places. There will always be broken places.
I don’t think it is enough to cut check anymore, however well intentioned they might be, for a check will not restore life to a child with a gaping hole through their body.
John’s story is that Jesus knows he has less than 24 hours to live as he gets down on his knees. A few hours later he’ll be on his knees again in the garden. We don’t need to debate the historicity, for story operates beyond the literal and this is our story, a story that has driven people to their knees for 2000 years.
Less than 24 hours to live, and here in John’s gospel, this powerful lesson in humility and service.
May the Spirit send us into the ditch and off to the margins, sit with us in the broken places. May we spend more time on our knees.