Tragedy and Pandemic

Quick Announcement: On Sunday from 1:00-2:00pm, our Parish Counselor Gretchen Carrillo will be offering an online Zoom Resilience Workshop for those who are feeling stressed out by the Corona Virus. Click here in order to request the Zoom information.

I want to share some personal views about our moment, by thinking about tragedy. We often use that term as a description of something very unfortunate or a situation that has gone very badly. However, the classic use of “tragedy” has a particular meaning to it. Reinhold Niebuhr described it with regard to the irony of ancient Greek tragedies, where over and over we see “the hero’s deeper involvement in his own fate through his very efforts to extricate himself from it.”[1] A biblical example would be Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus begins that prayer by asking God to take “the cup” - the impending rejection, betrayal, and crucifixion - away from him. Jesus ultimately relents to say, “Nevertheless, not my will but yours.” Karl Barth describes the tragedy of that prayer as Jesus knowing that in order for God’s will to be done, Jesus’ enemies had to succeed. 

On the whole, we Americans don’t do tragedy well. The plot to almost all of the hero movies, comic books, cartoons, novels, and stories that I consumed as a child was the same: The hero would be minding his (yes, his) own business just trying to be a good person. The villain would ceaselessly bully the hero, or the folks whom the hero defends, with what seemed to be an insurmountable advantage. There would be that poignant moment when the hero would reach the end of his (yes, his) patience and call on his courage/six-shooter/super power/can of spinach and finally “make it right.” It was like getting a Ph.D. in what Walter Wink called “the myth of redemptive violence.”[2] I not only consumed it as entertainment, it became the lens through which I saw the world, history, and even the Scriptures. Of course, I saw Jesus agonizing in the garden, but the church taught me to treat Gethsemane and Calvary as that moment when the hero Jesus is down, leading to the inevitable climax of Jesus coming back on a white horse, full of righteous violence, and taking no prisoners in the end. Instead of seeing the cross as central to the Scripture’s message of “redemptive suffering,” I was taught to see it as a passing moment in a story of redemptive violence. The classic use of “tragedy” has very little room to mean anything when we are conditioned to think that the hero inevitably will join the battle and inevitably emerge victorious. 

By relegating “tragedy” to a passing moment in the inevitable flow toward redemptive violence, we have left ourselves ill-equipped for facing something like a pandemic. Not only did we, early on, start drawing on the analogy of “war” to shape our language and our mentality toward the virus, we are so impatient to get to the victory parade on the other side that we are not able to hold the moment at hand. Here is a simplified look at our tragedy: Prolonging the “shutdown” really does pose an economic disaster for many folks. While we might dismiss the people who insist that they have to “get their hair done,” it is less easy to dismiss the effects of the shutdown on the hairdresser, the table server, the janitorial service, and the production line worker. The shutdown has real serious economic effects that fall disproportionately on the service industry, those who are already living on the edges of the economy. At the same time, our service industries often expose workers to precisely the kinds of conditions that optimize infection. The best means of weakening the effects of a novel virus is not to charge forward and hope for a quick fix that works like magic, but to practice separation, isolation, flattening the curve, and keeping it that way. It is a classic tragedy: Opening the economy prematurely will have devastating, deadly effects on our health; prolonging the shutdown may have devastating effects on the economy and will certainly punish the poorest the most severely.  

I should be clear in what I believe: We have not reached the point to where we can end the shutdown; we must only begin opening businesses when we can do so in a smart, gradual, and safe manner; and I am not willing to accept the inevitability of “collateral damage” as a way of referring to those who suffer the worst effects of the virus. Tragedy does not mean moral equivalency. It means that doing what one must has devastating consequences. 

My training taught me to either scream and holler at rallies or ridicule those who scream and holler at rallies on social media. The gospel is calling me to a better use of my energies: Nod my head with understanding toward those who are anxious about the economy, affirming their anxiety while resisting their solutions; look for ways to attend to the needs of those most affected by the shutdown instead of simply making sure that ‘me and mine’ are protected; err on the side of caution, because the virus I contract may have its worst effects on others and not me; and do everything within the power of my voice and vote to live toward a more just and sustainable society in the future. I feel like tragic faithfulness has this kind of shape, particularly in our current moment. 

Mark of St. Mark

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[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, "Greek Tragedy and Modern Politics," The Nation 146 (January 1938): 740. 

[2] It was also a training in privilege. Many persons of color in the US did not have a sense that heroic action would ‘inevitably’ lead to a righteous victory or a happy ending. 

The Woke God

I lift up my eyes to the hills - from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

God will not let your foot be moved; God who keeps you will not slumber.
God who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; God will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in
   from this time on and for evermore.

These beautiful words, known to us as the 121^st Psalm, have been a haven of hope, peace, and blessed assurance for many people of faith for thousands of years. I hope they provide you with some stability as well, as we continue to face times of uncertainty and peril, as well as conflicting opinions and inconveniences. 

The psalmist’s declaration that God does not sleep might be a reference to an Ancient Near East barb. Elijah used it that way when challenging the prophets of Baal to call down fire and see whose God would answer. When, despite every shenanigan they could muster, not a single flame appeared, we read, “At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” (I Kings 18:27). The jibe that Elijah offers is the same assurance that the psalmist offers – God is not the god who slumbers, who sleeps, who is unaware of our steps, our pain, prayers, or our sufferings. To use a phrase that might open up new meaning for us, God is woke. 

While the psalm makes an assuring claim, it is not about magic. The psalmist knew times of trouble, calamity, grief and loss. To say that God does not sleep is not a blithe declaration that we are somehow immune to tests of our faith or pain in our hearts. It means that we are not alone in our pain. For those of us in the Christian faith, the woke God is demonstrated profoundly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God did not, in fact, intervene with an army of angels or ten plagues or by calming the angry sea of the crowd with the words, “Peace, be still!” Jesus felt the full pain of human suffering in every respect – physically, psychologically, and even spiritually. Consider the garden where Jesus prayed for the cup to pass before relenting to God’s will and not his own. Consider the cross when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ cry show that he was staring at the yawning maw of meaninglessness, helplessness, hopelessness. There’s only a semantic difference between a forsaking god and a sleeping god. 

If you have been overwhelmed by the nature of this pandemic, by the toil of facing exposure in order to serve the affected, by the loss of someone you love, or the foibles of human reactions to it, the Holy Week that we recently remembered speaks powerfully to our moments of asking, “God, are you asleep?” There are times that it is an unavoidable question. 

My prayer is that you will find as much power and poignancy in the story of Easter that you find in the crucifixion. When we intone, “Christ is risen,” and respond, “Christ is risen, indeed,” we are not merely citing an ancient cheer. We are declaring, with a faith that seems inexplicable at times, that the emptiness of death does not get the last word. God is ever woke. And with God’s non-slumbering presence, we have hope. Thanks be to God. 

Mark of St. Mark

What Wondrous Love

Last night we doused the candles that we had originally lit on Ash Wednesday.

We snuffed them out one by one as we re-read each of the six biblical stories from our EPIC Lent series, the Experience, Practice, and Identity Circle that shapes our sense of who God is before us and who we are before God. We doused the candles because we know that one Maundy Thursday the disciples failed. Every single one of them. Judas betrayed, Peter denied, the other ten fled, the women stayed at a distance, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus only stepped up after the fact, and the crowd – which had been so joyously supportive of Jesus on Sunday – sided with the religious and political powers to insist that an innocent man was condemned to die.

The storytellers in the gospels are more ‘matter of fact’ than ‘condemning’ as they describe the utter failure of every single disciple. Judas gets a mixed review – some say “The Devil made him do it,” some say he was a bad apple from the start, and some say that he was immediately filled with regret, returning the blood money and hanging himself. Peter’s fall was mostly exacerbated because he had perched himself on too high of a pedestal to begin with. One of the stories gives him three chances to declare his loyalty to the risen Christ – which many read as opportunities to redeem each denial. The women probably had little choice in staying away – they weren’t allowed in many of the spaces where the action was taking place and Roman soldiers always posed a danger to women, especially when they were already feeling the bloodlust of displaying cruelty. The point of the stories seems not to be that this person or that person was especially unfit (except some of the descriptions of Judas). The overall point is that none of us is fit to stand by, to follow, to accompany the one who is betrayed, abandoned, and crucified.

So, how should a person of faith spend Good Friday? And, for us, how shall we spend Good Friday when our normal patterns of life today are disrupted? Some of you are spending this day doing marvelous works of service – in hospitals, in caretaking roles, in “essential services,” or in simply keeping it together for yourself and others. Bless you in that work. Some of you are grieving a loss, compounded by the inability to gather and offer one another solace. Bless you in that loss. If service or grief is your work today, you are immersed in the meaning of Good Friday already. Bless you.

For those of us who have the time and freedom to consider the meaning of Good Friday, let’s not spend this time feeling “guilty.” If my instructors in facing White Privilege have taught me anything, it is that when we respond to hard truth with “guilt,” we change the emphasis from the one who has suffered to our own fragile feelings. Let’s not do guilt this Good Friday. Instead, let’s embrace the gospels’ candor: When the call to discipleship means following Christ through his rejection and suffering, every single disciple fails. Including us. How great it is, then, that God still loves us, that Easter still awaits us, that it is precisely on the rickety staves of folks like us that God has built the church. Knowing that we are numbered among those who fail enables us to look with greater love and appreciation to the one who did not fail. Today is about that one who, even in the depths of human suffering, did not abandon God’s purpose and did not abandon us. Truly the folk tune says – as a declaration and not as a question – What Wondrous Love Is This.

Mark of St. Mark