Dear Diary (1.10.21)

Dear Diary
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
January 20, 2021
Mark 1.4-11
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

I knew a day would come that I’d thought and I’d read and I’d considered and I’d pondered but by 9:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, I still had no written words. Well, today is that day. If I trusted myself enough to be fully extemporaneous, I may not have even tried to sit in a darkened corner of the house with my first cup of coffee and put thoughts to paper. But I need the paper to focus the thoughts and trust the words, so here we are. Something of a “Dear Diary” as  homily today.

I was on back-to-back zoom calls on Wednesday, January 6, when Congress was meeting to certify the electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election. For the more than two decades Nathan and I have been a couple, we have been PBS people. That’s our go-to for any kind of significant news or election coverage. 

But on this day, I just went all in and turned on MSNBC. I wanted the echo chamber. I wanted the 24/7 coverage. I wanted the chyron to follow and the talking heads that would give over-the-top reactions instead of the calm, well-reasoned from Judy and David and Mark. And I wanted something I could follow on mute while I went about my day.

I genuinely did not expect anything big or out of the ordinary, but I wanted to hear the speeches. I wante to hear who was lying. And yes, I’m getting very partisan in this message, but I already warned you it’s more of a Dear Diary than it is a sermon, so let’s just call it that. I’m already sitting in my living room in yoga pants instead of standing in the pulpit in a robe, so I think we’re in safe territory here.

I was on a call with Becky Meriwether and the head of an organization that works with interfaith groups to aid their fundraising. We only had half an hour with this expert, and we needed to make the most of it. And in that half hour, the riot at the Capitol began. “I really care about this conversation we’re having,” I said, “But I’m distracted because this group of people is breaking into the Capitol building.” By the time I got to my 3:00 zoom, I canceled it. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing on my television.

I’m going to split my thoughts in half here, and leave part of them for the Dear Diary that doesn’t get read out loud in church. Because half of my thoughts are just about what has happened to the Republican Party and how it absolutely is not what I knew of it in the earlier decades of my 43 years. So there are those thoughts. And growing up in Alabama and being married to a man who spent half of his childhood years in Georgia or visiting family in South Carolina, we have significant parts of the Deep South covered, and we’re familiar with a lot of the energy that was going on outside the Capitol. Maybe even the energy *inside* the Capitol, though we don’t personally know anyone who made it that far.

I digress. That is all to say…I get the whole “don’t tread on me” energy. And I even get some of the tribalism of GOP vs the Dems.

But in the Venn diagram of who was at the pre-riot rally, who marched to the Capitol, who breached the perimeter of the Capitol, and who actually raided the Capitol, the group I am focused on today for the purpose of THIS stream-of-consciousness chat are those with the Jesus signs. And the Jesus intentions. Those who somehow genuinely believed that their riot, their revolution, their aggression and their violence were protecting not just the America they believe is to be this shining city on a hill but also their God who was fully incarnated in Jesus the Christ.

Now if this were a sermon, I’d be preaching to the choir here. Even in my commitment to caution and never mentioning the name of this president in a sermon, we all know I’ve talked about him. We all know I’ve talked about this supporters and the movement around him. We all know that in 2016 I felt the choice between candidates was not about Republicans vs. Democrats but about truly keeping a dangerous, vile, unqualified man from accessing some of the most tremendous power in the known world.

And each time I spoke about standing up against policies and executive orders that had very real impacts on the these of these our brothers and sisters, it cost me. I knew that. I saw colleagues in other settings ride this thing out under the auspices of having a Purple Church and landing in the “agree to disagree” lukewarm waters, and like the revelation to John on the island of Patmos, I spat that option right out of my mouth.

If I lost my job, if I never got hired by a church again, I would know that I could hold my head up high because I was using the only platform and microphone I had to speak against hate, injustice, and the ways white supremacy manipulates the systems and structures it built to keep people called white in the illusions and delusions of comfort and dominance. 

I digress again, Dear Diary.

In that Venn diagram of who was at the pre-riot rally, the angry march, and the riot itself, it’s the Jesus people that got me. The banners that said just Jesus or Jesus Saves. The woman at the microphone dressed in tremendously fashionable, of-the-moment clothes and somehow chant-singing a prayer about Jesus and the election and the Holy Spirit and some nonsense of overthrowing the results for Trump. I couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying.

But how is it ONCE AGAIN that I find myself 180 degrees from where these Christians are. The clownish ones out front, the flag waving ones on the steps, the costumed and armed ones that made it inside, and the bespoke ones who bear the titles Senator and Congressman. 

Many of us read Robert P. Jone’s White Too Long together. The exchange with him that haunted me came in on of our zoom conversations with him when I dismissed the words and worldview of this whole group of Christians as being “not the message of Christianity.” And he stopped me. He said something, or multiple things (I’m paraphrasing), like, “We have to stop dismissing what they believe as being ‘not the real message of Christianity’ and face the truth that what they believe is what the Christian church in America has taught since before the Civil War.” 

White, American Christianity has been rooted in white supremacy since the time of kidnapping Africans, caring nothing for their bodies as they died crossing the Atlantic, and selling the ones who made it to the highest bidders. White, American Christianity manipulated scripture and dismissed sacred text that had to do with equity and justice as “old covenant” or as only pertaining to the way we treat people within our individual church communities. White, American Christianity formed institutions that were more about citizenship in the United States of America than they were about citizenship in the kingdom of God, and it cultivated a disdain for what the actual kingdom of God might look like. 

I could go on, but why. I’ve beat this drum before. If you’ve stuck with me for the past 7.5 years, you’ve heard me say it all before.

Since this is a Dear Diary and not a proper sermon, let me get even more confessional than I usually do.

I am so over church. I am so done with the white church in America. I am heart-broken and tired of feeling embarrassed by the Paula Whites and the bespoke prayer chanters and the libertarian Jesus flag wavers and the folks who make it into Congress and pretend that we believe in the same God. 

As long as I stay in a structure that looks anything like theirs, as long as I hold a title and embody a space that calls me Pastor in the American Christian tradition, I will push back and speak up from my tiny corner at the edge of the inside from my much smaller microphone that doesn’t echo very far.

Not to yell at you, my beloveds. Goodness, no. Do not hear my passion and my anger and my GRIEF as being targeted *at* you in any way. This is lament. I still believe so strongly in the person of Jesus, I still believe so strongly in the creative imagination of God, I still believe so strongly in the radical stirrings of the Spirit, that I cannot see what I saw on Wednesday and sweep it under the rug as an “agree to disagree” moment. 

I will talk about the revolutionary love of Jesus and how it stands in total opposition to the kind of revolution people wanted on Wednesday. When any of his followers wanted violence, he stopped them. The story goes that Peter pulled out a knife or a sword and cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest who had come looking for Jesus, and Jesus both chastised Peter and healed the man’s ear. 

The revolution was not an uprising against Rome.

The revolution was about ignoring their fake borders and their hateful executive orders.

The revolution happened at wells in Samaria at mid-day and lounging around tables at night with the wrong kinds of people.

The revolution took place when slimy tax collectors climbed up trees just to see what the big deal was about this rabbi and then having their hearts shattered wide open by the love and grace and beauty he extended to them.

The revolution took place when people shared from their meager food reserves and then discovered they had an abundance between them to feed 5000 people and then some.

The revolution was about showing the people around Jesus that they didn’t have to have credentials or clean records or flowery language to be able to fully, 100% embody and live out the love of God.

And when Jesus wouldn’t take up a sword or fight the fight they way people wanted or call on the power of the heavens to smite his enemies, he left ONE COMMAND to the people who would listen—to love so well that everyone would know that the people who were loving and extending grace and delighting in beauty absolutely had to be followers of Jesus the Christ.

The lectionary has taken us out to the river in the wilderness a whole bunch of times in the past 6 or 7 weeks. I’ve told you everything I know about John the Baptizer and the movement he was part of—a movement challenging what was going on in the religious centers. A movement that took him out to the far edge to talk about the essence of his faith and not all the trappings that had grown up around it.

So it’s stunning to me that yet again, on THIS Sunday after an attempted insurrection in which people used the world “revolution” and also waved Jesus flags…here we are. Heading far out of town. Far from the seats of power. Way out to the guy in camel’s hair who eats locusts and wild honey.

And once again, we go out to the riverside in our imaginations and see Jesus standing in line with every other person who made their way out to John to receive a blessing from him and join his movement that was about heart and returning to the most basic understanding of who God is and who God has shaped humankind to be, and we watch as Jesus steps into those very same waters to be baptized into that movement.

When I baptize at St. Charles, I ask:

Do you commit yourself to the Way of Jesus?

Do you welcome the fruit of the Spirit into your days? Peace, love, joy, kindness, goodness, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control?

Do you commit yourself to honoring the image of God marked within you and within all those whom you meet? 

I don’t know if they’re the right questions or the best questions. They’re questions challenging each of us and all of us to consider in their hearing what it is that we are about as a people on the way of Jesus the Christ.

Are we committed to this Way? The way of self-emptying love? The way of love that transforms lives and reaches out to heal the wounds of enemies? The way of love that fully sees those who have been pushed to the margins of society and addresses their needs with compassion?

Are we giving ourselves to being transformed by the power and work of the Spirit?

Are we willing to honor the image of God even in the men marked in anti-semitic tattoos and brandishing guns and tasers and zipties? Oof.  Can I honor the image of God in Donald J. Trump? And Don, Jr? And Mitch McConnell? And Josh Hawley? Can I honor the image of God in the old classmates and distant relatives who I perceive to be more on the way of QAnon than on the way of Jesus? That’s some revolutionary love right there, and it changes me a whole lot more than it changes them.

Down the Avenue at Rayne and across the globe in United Methodist churches, when people are being baptized who can speak for themselves (I.e. not babies), they ask:

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness,
reject the evil powers of this world,
and repent of your sin?

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you
to resist evil, injustice, and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves?

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior,
put your whole trust in his grace,
and promise to serve him as your Lord,
in union with the Church which Christ has opened
to people of all ages, nations, and races?

It is a ritual that pre-dates Jesus’ death and resurrection because Jesus himself walked into the river to be baptized by John. It is a ritual of submission to be washed clean, yes, but to be washed into a way of living. To join that line at the riverside and be washed into a movement together.

And in the story of Jesus, before he performed any miracles or called any disciples or preached any sermons or did anything noteworthy at all with his one wild and precious life, he simply was.

And as he was, right there in those waters, God sees him and calls him beloved.

That is what I believe. 

I believe in a love so powerful that it shapes your whole life and ripples out to shape the lives of others. I believe in a love that I will give myself to over and over again throughout my entire life because never once will I actually have gotten it quite right. And often, I forget what that way of love looks like. And these stories, and you, my people, call me back to the loving way over and over again.

I don’t know how the white church in America has gotten so far away from that message. Even growing up in it and around it, I’m still shocked. I don’t get it. And it breaks my heart. And I’m grieved over and over again by the ones who have conflated greed and power and oppression with the love of God.

I don’t know what I can do with my own limited life and limited reach and limited voice. But I will continue to speak out and say “You’re wrong.” And with my life, Holy Spirit willing, I will point to the Love of God, fully revealed in Jesus the Christ, and show a love that compels us to love bigger and better and wider. Anything else is not love. And it’s not of God. And it’s not the Way of the Christ.

For today, love is all I know. And love is the Way to which I commit myself over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And for today, I believe, that is enough.