Every sentient Being

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I understand that God shows no partiality but in every nation, anyone who fears (is in awe of) God and does what is right is acceptable to God.

              Peter

 

… central to Christian life and mission is what we could call subversive or transgressive friendship – friendship that crosses boundaries of otherness and dares to offer and receive hospitality.

              Brian McLaren

 

When I knew only my own religion, I thought my savior was the only child of God. When I learned from other religions, I realized every sentient being is to be loved like a one and only child of our common source.

              Jim Rigby

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She stands there,

The water of some river, any river

Dripping from her clothes

Clutching her child, afraid yet hopeful

 

He stands there

Head awash with voices and sounds

The demons in his head confusing,

Immobilizing

 

She lies in the darkness

the victim of incest

knowing that at 14 she carries her father’s child

 

She walks fearfully down the street.

Her color, her features,

Her hijab

Her accent

Making her a target of hate

 

They are out there,

They

 

Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim

Christian

They

 

But they are people

More than that, they are Sacred, Sacred children

Precious souls

Precious in God’s sight

 

When we fail to see them at all

fail to see them as children of God

We make a grave spiritual error

 

When we see them as less

We compound that error

When we cause others to see them as less

We multiply that error

 

I believe nothing hurts the heart of God more

Then hearing someone demonize others

That nothing is more abhorrent to the Sacred than hearing

Someone lie about people

Minimize and marginalize people

Out of hate or fear

Ego or ambition

 

And nothing makes God sadder

Then watching some of God’s children

Cheer

As someone tears apart and endangers

Other of God’s children

 

It is not an accident

That Jesus was only intolerant of one kind of person

The intolerant

The judger

The demonizer

The excluder

 

It is the paradox of tolerance that the one thing most difficult to tolerate is intolerance

 

So what do we do?

As a political candidate tears apart people for his benefit?

As he [yes he] makes some people hate and fear other people

And some children of God wish other children of God harm

 

 

What do we do If we would follow the “friend of sinners”

Who welcomed all who would come

All who would come and sit down at table in peace and friendship?

 

We know what to do with those who have always been

Other

The immigrant, the gay man, the transgender woman

The person who is poor, or mentally ill

Or damaged by the world

We love, accept, welcome, care!

 

But what do we do with the privileged?

The powerful

The rich

Who live and preach intolerance?

 

I know we don’t vote them into power!

But what do we do with them in our minds and hearts?

 

How do we pray for them?

We cannot pray against them. 

We cannot join that parade (even though I sometimes do)

 

But we can pray FOR all those whom they endanger

Pray for safety, welcome and compassion to come their way

Pray that the forces that seek to destroy them

Be rendered harmless

 

And we can speak out for them for the voiceless ones.

We can point out the lies, and condemn the hate (not so much the hater)

We can refuse to be drawn into the vortex of hate

Into the abyss of racism and prejudice

 

And seek as best we can to love

To see the spark of the divine in each person out there

And seek to help others see that spark too.

 

The paradox of tolerance will always remain

And hate will never destroy hate

So all we can do is work, however imperfectly, using the power of acceptance and love

So that hate loses

And love wins

 

 

the hostile identity

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Once upon a time

In a country not that far away

A prophet came

Perhaps more than a prophet

Perhaps a God carrier

Perhaps Emmanuel, God with us

 

He came to a people

Who saw themselves as “God’s people”

Separate from others

From those unclean

 

It’s God and us against the world

And he promoted a new way

Yes, a way of change

 

A way in which one is washed clean

In the waters of repentance

 

He asked people to rethink everything

Including their hostility to the other

Their sense of separateness

 

He asked them to shift the way they treated those

Who were “not them” but were “other”

Not with hostility or resistance

But with kindness, generosity, empathy, and love (Luke 3)

 

This One helped people become new creations

And created a new way

A way of welcome, inclusion, and healing

 

And a tattered lot of misfits followed Him

And then

Those following him became “the church”

 

Which sadly,

instead of transforming the world, conformed with the world

and reclaimed the old formula

 

We are God’s people

God is hostile toward all who are not “us”

It is God and us against the world

 

And so our faith became marked by hostility

By confrontation

And exclusion

 

And hostility became hate

Hate led to many forms of violence

Spiritual

Emotional

Spiritual

 

This is not new

This is not the way of Jesus

 

This is exactly what Jesus has asked us to leave behind

The old way of separateness

And privilege

The old way of “us” and “them

 

Jesus calls us to solidarity

And reconciliation

To welcome and kindness

To generosity

 

We cannot baptize hate and bias

We cannot embrace control and coercion

Retribution and punishment

 

We must move instead from an oppositional identity (Brian McLaren)

To a benevolent, compassionate identity

 

Where we see ourselves not as different but as the same

Not as above but as equal

Not as separate, but as with

Not as against, but as “for”

 

This is not weakness

This is not compromise

This is difficult

So difficult that so very few have done it!

 

I want to have a compassionate identity

I don’t want to be the kind of follower

who is hostile

who sees others as enemies

who feels a need to dominate and control

 

I don’t want to embrace hate and violence

The way of lies and manipulation

And pretend it is the way of Jesus

 

I don’t want, in insecurity and fear

to hide behind hate

and pretend it is righteousness

 

I just want to follow

the way of fierce love

I want to follow Jesus

Today I go Down

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John [the Baptist] defines the essential meaning [of Baptism] himself: he proclaims not a baptism of conformity, but a baptism of repentance, which means the radical, far-reaching rethinking of everything.

              Brian McLaren

_______________________________________________

 

It lies in front of me.

Not sparkling nor clean, but muddied

By the chaos of dirty human bodies

Wading into its murky depths,

By the filth of dirty feet and soiled souls

 

He stands

This prophet, crying “Prepare”

Prepare the way for the Lord

 

And he calls me into the water.

 

Down I go

Down into that brown gloomy river

Down until I am completely buried

Like a body in a tomb

 

Down, breathless, and sightless

Until I burst forth

Into the bright hot sun

 

I have been called to leave everything behind

My old identity

My old ideologies

My old comforts and my old distresses

My successes and my failures

My privilege, pride, and ego

 

It is like a new birth.

The end of so much, the beginning of so much more

 

It is not easy to leave behind

Those things we have fused to, those identities we have crafted

Who makes us who we are?

 

It is painful to leave privilege behind

And safety

And power

 

But all those must remain, there in that watery grave

Or we cannot rise

 

For this new birth is radical

It is a reversal of everything.

 

What was good becomes bad,

What was sketchy and unacceptable becomes good

 

It is good to be poor

Good to be meek

Good to be humble, and kind

Good to serve others

Good to suffer, perchance to die

 

It is not that I am called to embrace a new identity

As much as to lay down all the old identities that have always defined me

White

Professional

Democrat, Liberal, American

Winner (and loser too)

 

The good the bad the ugly

It all must be washed off as I immerse myself in Christ

Living now inside Christ

Looking with his eyes,

Feeling with his heart

 

For it is as I die to my old identities

That I am freed (now being “in” Christ)

To rise with Christ

 

A ferocious death giving birth

To fierce love

And the possibility of restoration, reconciliation

And a new life