Reproach

Then he began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, 

because they did not repent.

-Matthew 11: 20

 I have been following the lectionary as a preaching discipline for many years.  Generally I find it to be a good practice, but I have to admit that they seem to like to leave out some of the Gospel passages where Jesus gets salty with folk.  They tiptoe up to the line of the "woe unto" passages and then dodge away like something might burn them.  The particular lacuna of Matthew 11 is verses 20-24 where Jesus pronounces that the various towns and cities in Israel seem to be a little thick-headed.  He compares them to gentile cities and even Sodom (nobody ever wants to be compared to Sodom). 

As we celebrated the United States Independence Day this past weekend, I had the usual array of mixed feelings that I have on that holiday.  I love my country, but I grieve for our inability to live up to our potential.  This year, in the midst of a pandemic the day seemed particularly bittersweet.  This year in the wake of yet more striving for justice along racial lines, the hope of what we might be seems tantalizingly close.  The mix of emotions is stirred by the sense that we have been here too often before, on the cusp of change, recognizing the depth of the injustice and acknowledging that systemic change is needed, not just individual repentance.  Yet we have not made that turn, even as many people have grown more aware, even as we have acknowledged the presence of injustice more widely, the fact remains that we still can't quite see how things are going to change.

More to the point, many of us are rather invested in seeing it not change, but our unwillingness to admit that is a stumbling block to doing what we know to be right.  We would probably rather just stick with the status quo, because change is hard and uncertainty is stressful.  So the knees remain on the necks and the masks remain off of the faces, and the bars fill up, followed shortly by the hospitals.  I am seeing that the character flaws that have made our response to COVID-19 one of the most inept in the world is really of a similar nature to the one that has made our response to racism and sexism one of the worst in the world as well.  It's not that we don't know. There are a few hardcore ignoramuses out there, but for the most part we are seeing that that simple precautions and basic justice are pretty well accepted by the masses of Americans.  It's just that the awareness only lasts until we have to do something (or not do something) on the basis of that knowledge.

"These truths that we hold to be self evident," were from the beginning carefully constructed so that "all men" was parsed to mean white, land-owning males.  It was not given the chance to be expansive as the ideal it was supposed to express: "All humans are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..."  In fact, as many folks have pointed out in recent weeks, the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned over 600 human beings as property during his life, including Sally Hemmings with whom he started a conjugal relationship (you might say rape) while she was a teenager.

I assume that as the writer of the Declaration of Independence that his words had a high and mighty moral weight.  I will even assume that he believed that moral code.  But when he got back to Monticello, he still "needed" a lot free labor to make all his high intellectual experiments come true and of course who wouldn't like a nice young slave girl to warm the bed, after all didn't King David have Abishag the Shunamite?

Until we wrestle to some extent with these truths, which are also undeniable if not self-evident, we will bear the reproach of not listening to the voices of those who have been oppressed, raped, bought and sold in the marketplace, kept separate and unequal, denied their basic identity as children of God and generally being treated as nothing more than a voice of lament that the masters sometimes hear coming out of the darkness of the shanty.  Woe to us, if we do not realize that the voice is that of Christ calling us to repent.