if only christians were less judgy

 

If Only Christians Were Less Judgy (Luke 6.27-38)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

February 24, 2019

 

In 2016 philosopher Alain de Botton wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times that became their mostly widely-read essay of the year. It was entitled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”[1] In it, de Botton suggested that almost all of us who become married will do so with the wrong person. Yet he concluded that we can’t really do otherwise because there is no right person. Everyone out there is, he suggested, wrong for us. Everyone is a mess, everyone is flawed, everyone is frustrating. And so are we.

After hearing de Botton talk about it on the radio, and laughing out loud while I listened, I read the essay along with a couple more and found myself nodding in agreement. While there were one or two places I couldn’t quite go with him, his general idea was one of the most refreshing I’ve heard in a long time. None of us are perfect. And we shouldn’t expect that of anyone else. Yet so often we do.

I don’t mean to offer a complete recap of the essays here, but let me simply give you a flavor of what he means. We are each products of the romantic imagination that has largely to do with our feelings, we do not often have clear-eyed views of ourselves (our anxieties, hang-ups, and challenges), and we have been raised on love stories that stop at the beginning; namely, they place all the value on the process of courtship, skipping the mundane daily routines that follow. So we wander into marriage completely unprepared and find ourselves surprised to learn that not only is our beloved a frustration, but so are we. What Alain de Botton does so well is bring out the humor in this. Reading his essays, one is tempted to say out loud, of course, of course.

De Botton’s prescription for our predicament is to dive more deeply into our own humanity. Once we realize that we’re each our own kind of mess and that none of us is really going to fix the other ones or in turn be fixed by them, we can get on with the business of trying to live and love each other in mature and understanding ways. For de Botton this means acknowledging that no matter what kinds of loving relationships we have – with spouses, sweethearts, friends, parents, children – we are all still subject to simply being human. So we will all still be lonely at times, we will all still have questions, we will all still long for things, feel a little lost, wonder what it all means. . . The best we can hope for, he says, is that being human with others takes the edge off.

I read and reread his words, struck by how simple they were and how true they rang. And the more I pored over them, the less I realized I was thinking about marriage. I was rather thinking about church.

The churches I grew up in were relatively healthy ones, filled with good people trying to do what they believed was right. Yet looking back I realize how haunted they were by the romantic imagination, how they didn’t really have a clear-eyed view of themselves, and how they, too, told love stories that stopped at the beginning; in their case, giving one’s heart to Jesus without detailing the mundane process of trying to live with him every day. All too often the faith that was emphasized in the churches of my youth was hung up on the idea of perfection. Jesus was perfect and we were to follow his way, though we were far from perfect, which somehow preachers always managed to bring up. As I kid, I listened and wondered what they were talking about. You could hear them speaking in circles about sin and forgiveness, telling romantic tales about how once they were lost and had now been found, end of story. But, of course, such stories lent themselves to a kind of self-righteousness. Over time, everyone was expected to tell their own story about falling in love with Jesus.

I remember once during middle school at a youth camp, many of my friends were walking down the aisle in response to the preacher who asked them to come down and confess their imperfections. I wasn’t feeling it and so I didn’t go. I’ll never forget a friend coming back for me. You have to come to the front, he whispered. No I don’t, I replied. Yet I wasn’t objecting to the idea of imperfection; I already knew that I wasn’t perfect. I was objecting to the idea that if I walked down an aisle then everything would be fine, end of story. I was more interested in staying where I was and learning how to live an imperfect life with sincerity.

I share this because my own imperfect life has been guided by the teachings of Jesus more than any other figure. Not because I was in love with him and not because my romantic imagination thought that all would be well on the Christian way. But rather because his truth, like Alain de Botton’s, was playful, subversive, and much deeper than he first let on. To follow it was to immerse myself in questions that would leave me forever changed and changing. And there is perhaps no better example of this than this morning’s reading from the Book of Luke, which we could probably read every morning of our lives and be challenged by. “But I say to you that listen,” Jesus begins:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.[2]

As a preacher, I am tempted to stop here and simply count the number of things in these verses that Christians don’t do, though you probably heard them yourself and felt the tension well enough. What I’d rather do is recognize how non-judgmental this teaching really is. Self-righteousness is nowhere to be found in it. Jesus is hinting at a greater kind of love, beyond simply our self-interest or the expressions of love to which we have grown most accustomed. He’d like us to love in ways that are less romantic and more radical. He’d like us to see ourselves and others completely differently.

In his writing about Jesus, the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh focused on this passage from Luke. We included his words as our call to worship so everyone could take them home. If we are to learn to love our enemies, Nhat Hanh said, we must look deeply enough to see how like us they are. We are suffering. They are suffering. We are confused. They are confused. We are imperfect. They are imperfect. To see this is to develop compassion for ourselves and others such that we are no longer able to see them as enemies at all. “The idea of ‘enemy,'” Nhat Hanh wrote, “vanishes. . .”[3]

There is a reason I chose to bring a Buddhist teacher into our conversation. That is because it was from Zen people that I began to learn how to begin to practice what Jesus taught. Whereas the churches of my upbringing often read the words of Jesus, they did not always apply them. For in their stories of being saved from themselves, being lost and then found, they were always striving to leave their humanity behind in search of a kind of perfection. This allowed them to judge others they deemed insufficiently perfect. Perhaps you have also experienced this side of Christianity — Christians who judge and exclude, Christians who behave self-righteously, Christians who have no sense of humor, Christians who cannot accept that we are all simply human. Yet in my experience the teachings of Jesus are even more inviting than the examples of Christians can be off-putting. So I read the words, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. . .for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”[4] And I went and found Buddhists to teach me how to do that.

You’ve heard the story before, but the short version goes like this: an open heart, a reasonable attempt at meditation, and a gentle sense of humor showed me that we are all a mess and we are all on the path. Time spent quietly breathing let me sit with the questions of why I myself can become so judgmental, why I am so quick to make assumptions, why I could possibly think I am better or different than anyone else?

It is a great relief to realize that perfection is not the goal; humanity is. And our religious practice may help us to more deeply understand what de Botton was saying, or what Jesus was, that we are all quite profoundly imperfect and that none of us is really going to fix the other ones or in turn be fixed by them. Rather, we might just get on with the business of trying to live and love each other in mature and understanding ways. Can you imagine if Christians did this?

On a good day the answer may be yes. Because on a good day in our church and in Christian communities around the world, there is a great deal of compassion, understanding, and love. Many of us have remained Christians because, regardless of our past experience, we have found communities like this one and been nourished by them. Yet we must always confess that on a bad day the answer may be no. On a bad day in our church and elsewhere, we still jump to conclusions, we make assumptions, we judge each other and feel self-righteous. Every day we should remind ourselves that Jesus taught us to go easy on that stuff. He taught us that if we live a little more forgivingly, we’ll find that it comes back to us. The more human we are with each other, the better everybody does.

In the words of Alain de Botton, we are each “radically imperfect in a host of deeply serious ways.”[5] And in the words of Jesus, this is not really a problem. Not if we’re willing to forgo our harsh judgments of each other and be quick to be humble, peaceable, and kind.

Amen.

 

[1]Alain de Botton, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” The New York Times, May 28, 2016, accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html

[2]Luke 6.27-31, New Revised Standard Version

[3]Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 79.

[4]Luke 6.37, 38b, NRSV.

[5]Alain de Botton, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person and Other Essays (London: The School of Life, 2017), 38.

a way out of no way

 

A Way Out of No Way (Isa. 43.18-19, Lk. 6. 17-49)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

February 17, 2019

 

When she was a girl, Pauli Murray asked her grandmother a question. Sitting at the breakfast table, she asked why her grandfather always got three pancakes and she only got one.[1] It wasn’t right, young Pauli reckoned, that everybody at the table didn’t get the same number of pancakes.

I’ve been reading about Pauli Murray for two weeks, but I’m not sure anything distills her life like the story of her question at the breakfast table. Because she spent decades trying to ensure not only that everyone had a seat at the table, but that the meal was shared equally.

Pauli Murray was, in the words of writer Kathryn Schulz, “a poet, writer, activist, labor organizer, legal theorist, and Episcopal priest,” who “palled around in her youth with Langston Hughes. . .[and] James Baldwin. . .maintained a twenty-three-year friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and helped Betty Friedan found the National Organization for Women.”[2] She also helped lay the intellectual framework for the civil rights movements for people of color and women in her legal writing, which was first relied upon by Thurgood Marshall’s team and later cited by a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Yet before Pauli did any of these things, she asked for more pancakes. And it was that questioning of the way things were, asking for something she had not seen, insistence on her own dignity and value, and expectation of a change that seemed to define her. Throughout her life, Pauli Murray made a way out of no way.

As I read about Murray, the words of the old prophet Isaiah kept coming to mind. They played almost as voiceover to the pages of books and articles I pored across. According to the prophet, the Divine voice assures us that the way things have always been is not the way they have to remain:

Do not remember the former

       things [says Isaiah’s God],

  or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing;

  now it springs forth, do you not

           perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

     and rivers in the desert.[3]

And I think this was Pauli’s faith. She pushed back from the breakfast table and set out into a world that really didn’t provide an easy path for a young, black woman born the granddaughter of enslaved people. Yet she made the path for herself with a little faith, a little hope, and a lot of love. However improbably, she followed her bachelor’s at Hunter College with law school at Howard University, where she was the only woman and also the top in her class. There she encountered a pervasive sexism, which she termed “Jane Crow,” alluding to the additional hardship which her black brothers did not have to endure. After Howard, she received two graduate law degrees, an LLM from Cal Berkeley and a JSD from Yale, yet she still had trouble finding steady work as women were not often welcomed into law firms at the time. And she also bore the scars of certain rejections: the University of North Carolina had rejected her for being black and Harvard Law School had denied her admission on the grounds that she was a woman. So she made a way, but it was not without a fight and never without great personal cost.

In her autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, Pauli wrote of how she had determined to struggle to find or make a way for herself:

If there were moments of deep despair in those years, there was also the sustaining knowledge that the quest for human dignity is part of a continuous movement through time and history linked to a higher force. Years later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed the same concept when he said that in the struggle for justice one has “cosmic companionship.” Pitting my intelligence against the ludicrous authorities who enforced an irrational set of arrangements and, above all, learning to harness my emotions to an innovative power instead of exploding in a fury of destructive waste were challenges I could respond to. Somewhere along the way I adopted the slogan, “Don’t get mad, get smart.”[4]

So Pauli got smart by educating herself and strategizing with others about how to move forward in the struggle for civil rights rooted in the equal dignity and value of every person. She wasn’t mad, she was smart. And she didn’t want to harm, she wanted to heal. But the road to healing was a vision that not everyone shared. It was a way out of no way. Not everyone could see it.

The old writer of Luke tells a story of how Jesus saw it. As the story goes, Jesus comes down and stands on a level place, a plain, and begins to teach those who are gathered to hear. He starts with a series of beatitudes, also echoed in Matthew Chapter 5. “Blessed are you who are poor,” he says:

for yours is the kin-dom of God.

   Blessed are you who are hungry now [he says],

   for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now [he says],

   for you will laugh.[5]

The verses begin as a beautiful comfort before becoming more of a challenge:

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you. . .for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.[6]

The second part of Luke’s sermon on the plain then adds something that Matthew’s beatitudes do not contain. Following the blessings, Jesus adds a series of warnings or woes:

But woe to you who are rich [he says],

   for you have received your consolation.

   Woe to you who are full now [he says],

   for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are laughing now [he says],

   for you will mourn and weep.

   Woe to you when all speak well of you,

for that is what their ancestors did to the

false prophets.[7]

It’s quite a vision, not only of the sharing that is to come, the table that is to be set for all, but also of the redistribution that will require, the balancing of accounts, as it were. If we were to put it in the language of our opening story, we might add: Blessed are you who have one pancake now, for your plate will be filled. But woe to you who have three pancakes, for you have taken more than your share. This kind of talk makes people uneasy, a fact that Pauli faced her entire life. Yet what Pauli was offering was a vision of what Josiah Royce, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others would call the beloved community. She was dreaming of a world where we would see the beauty and dignity in every sister and brother, where we would love and value each person inherently, and where no blessings or warnings would be needed because we would simply share the pancakes. She was dreaming of a new way. And she was struggling to find it.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Pauli Murray’s biography is her lifelong attempt to come to terms with her identity. Today we would likely understand her to be transgender. In her time, Pauli only knew that she loved women but did not feel as if she were a gay woman. Rather, she felt more like a man who had been born with a woman’s body. None of this was included in her nearly six-hundred-page autobiography, but it has been found in her personal notes and papers, in her long and loving relationship with Irene Barlow, and in her petitioning of doctors to x-ray her in the belief that they might find hidden male organs to explain her gender confusion.[8] So even as she advanced the causes of people of color, women, and other groups who had been discriminated against, even as she made a way out of no way for them, she could not always find the way for herself. To read her memoir and her poetry in this light is to hear that she, like all of us, struggled to understand who she really was and how to more fully live into herself. Perhaps if she were alive today she would prefer different pronouns. I hope that as we welcome dear transgender friends into our lives and our community of faith, we will remember Pauli and all who have struggled before.

Yet even as she remained a person in process, Pauli’s life path brought her to at least one place of poetic fulfillment. Later in life she entered the General Theological Seminary in New York in order to train for the Episcopal priesthood. The fact that women were not eligible for ordination at the time did not dissuade her. As she neared the completion of seminary, however, changes were put through and Pauli became the first woman of color ordained as an Episcopal priest. A month later, she offered communion at the small chapel in North Carolina where her grandmother had once been baptized as a baby, while still held in slavery. Pauli stood at the altar as the living symbol of a new way. And as the voice of welcome to the table.

After communion, she shared that the service was so beautiful to her because she tried to look every person in the eye and see him or her for who they truly were, equal in dignity and value, so beautiful in their own unique way. She also shared her strength. When asked if perhaps she felt her grandmother looking down from the balcony where enslaved persons had once sat, she said, “Oh no, my grandmother was much closer than that. She was right behind me.”[9] With that she smiled and looked off, perhaps imagining the long way she had come. Perhaps dreaming of the way she still had to go.

“Give me a song of hope,” she once wrote, in her poem, “Dark Testament”:

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.[10]

 

In gratitude for the life of Pauli Murray, let the church say,

Amen.

 

[1]Patricia Bell-Scott at the “Rediscovering Pauli Murray” panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, May 19, 2017, accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVpfudHHsVI

[2]Kathryn Schulz, “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2017, accessed online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray

[3]Isaiah 43.18-19, New Revised Standard Version.

[4]Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage(New York: Liveright, 2018), 300.

[5]Luke 6.20b-21, NRSV.

[6]Luke 6.22a, 23b.

[7]Luke 6.24-26.

[8]Drew Gilpin Faust, “Catching Up to Pauli Murray,” The New York Review of Books, October 25, 2018, accessed online at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/catching-up-to-pauli-murray/

[9]See “The Reverend Pauli Murray: 1910-1985” at The Episcopal Archives, incl. the video from the television series “On the Road,” accessed online at https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/murray

[10]Pauli Murray, Dark Testament and Other Poems(New York: Liveright, 2018), 13.