Sunday, May 16, 2021 was a day when from dawn to dusk the clouds unleashed torrents of water. You know the kind of day. It seemed that the earth had received all the substance it could hold, but the sky kept weeping anyway. The ground turned into a swiss-cheese landscape of small ponds as the overflow of liquid sat waiting expectantly to soak into the dirt deep below.
I have had those days, too, when I feel I am holding all that I can bear, and the forces of decay just keep giving me pain and grief. I have had those days, too, when from my eyes the tears flow down my face, and keep flowing, and pouring, and puddling on my chest. The Lord promises he will not send more than I can handle. But I wonder, too, if we all believe this because we just keep on surviving until we don’t, and then we have no one left to tell that this was all just a farse.
Somedays I don’t think I can bear any more stories about the church. The separate griefs, weighing on my heart, each a precious reminder of the honor and burden I have to hear the truth aloud. I listen to stories of abuse, of financial scams, of a give-us-all-you-have mentality disguised as religious piety, of cults, of blind faith that leads to blind trust that often leads to scandals, or coverups, or the but yous. But you dressed that way. But you invited him in. But you provoked him. I think deep down we all recognize this toxicity: in our leaders, in our culture, in our communities. We can taste the poison in the kool-aid. But the service goes on.
have you tried the punch?
did you hear about so and so?
what a great worship set.
We sip our cocktails on the beach and wonder why the tide has left. The tsunami is just outside of our gaze: that we will be made accountable for our hate, our xenophobia, our nationalism, our marginalization of women, our transmission of white supremacy, our ablism guised as revival, our exclusion of the LGBTQ community, and our failure to harbor the refugee or build community with the poor.
We might be tempted to say,
“Yes, but not us.”
“Yes, but not my church.”
“We’re not like that.”
I love those WWII movies that don’t just alienate the Germans and Japanese. You know the ones. The hero turns out to be an abusive husband, and the villain turns out to be a good father. I heard a friend say once, “There were some good Nazis, you know.” Of course, I think that must be true. Some folks had families, raised children before and after the war—God, raised children during the war. Some struggled to answer their children’s questions about the country, about the fighting, about the next-door neighbor who turned out to be Jewish, about the next-door neighbor who turned out to be Japanese. Some fathers probably didn’t know how to answer. Maybe some didn’t know what to do. Maybe some knew what was right. Maybe some lacked the courage to stand for it, to risk their lives, or their family’s lives.
Another friend of mine gave a sermon once. He said, “Righteousness is just rightness with God.” It is, just, and only just, rightness with God. In our pews we might say, “pursue righteousness for God is holy,” but really what we’re too self-absorbed to say is just do the right thing. How many people must choose not to do the right thing for a certain kind of people to snuff out another kind of people? And yet, and yet.
We have this uniquely western and historically recent fascination in the church with the individual. We teach that Jesus is the individual’s personal savior, that Jesus came to save him from his individual sins, that righteousness is about the individual’s actions, and that sin is his individual accountability. There is truth in those words. “But not all the truth,” my friend would say. I don’t believe our problem is that we shouldn’t hold the individual accountable; I believe our problem is that this individualism has led us to believe that there is no such thing as systemic evil. And ironically, in focusing our attention on this individual’s need for a savior, we have also made his salvation independently viable before God. That is, the individual does not need community; the individual does not need corporate help; we do not need each other. Children, we need Jesus. We all know that Jesus is the right answer. But not all of us want to hear the question Jesus asks of us.
The evangelical congregation tells me that systemic racism is a myth. There is only an individual. Either the individual is racist, or he is not. He cannot discover himself to be racist. He cannot find himself complicit in an undercover evil. He is accountable to his own actions. The world says that society is responsible for evil. The Bible says that evil is in the heart of man. It’s a lie to blame society for the individual condition of a man’s heart. We, each and every one of us, need a savior. There is truth in those words, too. But not all the truth.
I think many of us recognize a profound evil more insidious in Nazism than only a collection of individual sins. We might say evil with a nod to powers and principalities and such. Perhaps, we might say, there is a movement within a body of people so deeply appalling that it must be uprooted categorically from our way of life, and that to ignore it is to remain complicit in it. But when I say that there is something rotten at the core of the western, notably American, church… well?
Maybe, but not us.
Maybe, but not my church.
We’re not like that.
It begins raining when the atmosphere condensates so much humidity that the clouds themselves weigh too much, and gravity pulls the water droplets back down to earth. This sound is soothing to me. The droplets hit the roof, or splatter against a window, or splash in a puddle on the ground. It pours in the gutter and falls through the downspout. At the base of the downspout we place those hard plastic, often green, slides for the water to disperse across the yard. If you don’t have one, the water bores a hole in the dirt and mud like it is trying to drill through the earth. You can buy one at a local hardware store if you need one. Don’t wait. They say there’s no force as destructive as water.
The sound of rain gives me hope. It overwhelms all the other noises in my life until I realize it’s just me here. I have nothing left to shout, nothing to say, nothing to think. I am just here, water washing over my head, down my face, splattering on my glasses. These are the moments when I best recognize the need to listen, to be present, to be okay with who I am, but also ready for change, ready to grow—lest I smother what the Lord is doing like an overwatered potted plant with no holes at the bottom of the pail, nowhere for the water to go, not ready for the rain.
Regarding Life 