August is a month for losing your place: in all the books you’ve been meaning to read all summer, in your inbox or your Twitter feed, in the TV series you’ve been binging. (Don’t sleep on Derry Girls!) But God goes looking for us, and in her great love discerns, from moment to moment, if we need to stay hidden or if we need to come out.
Come out about what’s important to you, come out from your hiding place. Find yourself. Find the place from which it is safe to come out, find the place into which it is safe to enter. Donna spoke of the ways in which church can be this place, even and maybe especially for the unbelievers and the maybe-believers: without an explicit or even implicit mission to persuade or convert, we nevertheless stand for what church can be and what the love of God is when we create a place for people in which to take sanctuary and from which to emerge. The cleft in the Rock of Ages is both a hiding place and a point of egress.
It probably says more about me than about the relative memorability of Sunday’s service that I wanted to run right home and watch Season 3, Episode 23 of The West Wing, “Posse Comitatus.” I’d forgotten how great, and momentous, this particular episode is. Exit Mark Harmon as Secret Service Agent Simon Donovan, the only man worthy of C.J. Cregg (sorry, C.J./Danny shippers); enter Lily Tomlin as eventual Secretary to the President Deborah Fiderer. There are about six plots going on—a night at the theatre, an assassination, the search for a new Secretary, the tension between C.J. and Simon, a major domestic bill in consideration and wreaking havoc with Josh’s love life, a pissing match between President Bartlet and his Republican rival Governor Ritchie involving a Yankees game and a traffic jam on the Major Deegan (reminiscent, now, of the traffic problems in Fort Lee)—and a recurring motif of the white and red roses of the houses of Lancaster and York, respectively. Throw in some Gilbert and Sullivan and it would really have been Peak Sorkin.
I digress. The episode was alluded to in our Modern Testimony, an excerpt from Megan Garber’s Atlantic essay, “How Trump Obscures Mass Shootings with Doublespeak.” The essay alluded to Governor Ritchie’s flaccid response to Agent Donovan’s death in an armed robbery: “Crime…boy, I don’t know.” It’s not so different from the responses of too many of our elected officials to mass shootings, not so distant from thoughts and prayers.
The first Sunday of the month so often finds me wearing disposable food safety gloves and parceling out a box of fifty Munchkins across the eight or ten tables around which we gather for our monthly Agape communion meal. Nothing changes this ritual, not even the uniquely and appallingly American ritual of mass gun violence, in which we remember the humanity of Jesus as much as his divinity: his friends and his religious practice; his eating and drinking; his fragility and fear. These were shared by the thirty-two (as of this writing) people in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, who had so much in common with Jesus, so much in common with all of us gathered around those tables and wondering which Munchkins had a jelly center. In the wake of all this death, we remembered Jesus’s, and we looked for the way forward.
Or did we? If there is a way, I’m no authority on it. During the meal, I wrapped a tangy-sweet chunk of applewood smoked Cheddar around the crusty bread meant to represent the body of Christ and thought of the thirty-two people who will never enjoy bread and cheese again. Then, too, after church, we rode the train uptown and took in a Broadway musical. Then, too, it just happened to be the revival of Oklahoma!,which interrogates, and none too gently, the American lust for both violence and happy endings.
Valerie preached on the parable of the rich fool: “You fool!” God says to a rich man who, like many of us here in New York, has a little storage problem, “this very night your life is demanded of you. And the things you have prepared—whose will they be?” It was the lectionary text, and a painful coincidence for the dead of El Paso, stocking up at a back-to-school sale. There is no way forward for those who abandoned the markers and notebooks, socks and hair ties in the aisles of the Walmart. And there is no way forward for those enjoying one last drink with their friends, just as Jesus did, in Ned Pepper’s bar in Dayton.
For the living, it has to consist, Valerie offered, in gratitude, in not losing sight of the other. The rich fool eats, drinks, and makes merry alone; God reminds her that her plenty won’t count for much when her life is demanded of her when she is alone. God gave Jesus friends with whom to share a last meal, erstwhile though they may have been.
God gave the world Jesus, and God gave the world Glendon Oakley, who saved several children during the shooting.
The rich fool is rich in examples of how to do better. The rich fool washes her hands and passes out the Munchkins.
The king caved in, and ordered Daniel brought and thrown into the lions’ den. But he said to Daniel, “Your God, to whom you are so loyal, is going to get you out of this.”
—Daniel 6:16
Daniel’s true crime might be described as what Community Minister André Daughtry described in his sermon today as “particularity.” Daniel worships the God of Israel, quietly but openly flouting a decree that Darius be worshipped as a God (a decree that Daniel’s enemies connive Darius into signing). Darius is reluctant to sentence Daniel to the lions’ den, urging Daniel to call on his God to save him.
The artist—like the exile, like the spiritual leader—is someone who answers the call to particularity. André shared his photographs of Rev. Jeff Mansfield, a former community minister at Judson, which included an action shot of Jeff leading a Moral Mondays protest in Albany. (“Leading,” it should be noted, is not the word Jeff himself would use. Reflecting on the picture, Jeff instead described a sense of feeling steered by the protesters, of being in front “not because [he] knew the way, but because [he] knew they needed to get there.”) Protesting systemic racism and poverty is, in these darkening days, still particular.
On the 42nd anniversary of the 1977 blackout, New York City experienced another (albeit much smaller and briefer) blackout last night. It was a strange epoch in an already-unsettling weekend that began, for me, with standing vigil at Foley Square as part of Lights for Liberty, holding up my phone along with nearly three thousand other phones, candles, and flashlights in the shadow of 26 Federal Plaza. Saturday morning found me chasing our friends’ toddler around the Elevated Acre and watched the helicopters and ferries bouncing along the East River with him and his parents; I went home and followed stories of the ICE raids, starting earlier than the projected date of today, on Twitter. That flowed into news of the blackout, and in an apophenic moment, I wondered if one had anything to do with the other.
