Grace in the Gray

I have mentioned this before in the last several weeks of my appreciation for a podcast I’ve discovered. I’ve spent a fair amount of windshield time the last several weeks, and Simon Sinek’s podcast “A Bit of Optimism” has been my immediate go-to! I listened recently to his conversation with Deeyah Khan and her documentary White Right. She intentionally went to spend time with White Supremacists, and the complication for her engagement is that she’s Muslim. One afternoon she found herself in the middle of a parking lot in Charlottsville, NC, with a huge group of people carrying a terrifying amount of weapons. And she’s the only non-white person in the mob and she’s carrying a camera. As they gather, they begin chanting “Blood and Soil, Blood and Soil…” I’ll come back to this in a minute

We return to Mark’s gospel after a lectionary-prompted detour for the last six Sundays through the Holy and Divine Bakery noting that Jesus is the bread of life in John’s gospel.

This gospel passage is nestled between the feeding of the 5,000 of the Jewish community in Mark 6 and the feeding of the Gentile community of 4,000 in Mark 8. David Frenchak says “eating, for those who are not starving, is a universal symbol of gathered community, and ritual and ceremony are natural components around food.  Those who follow accepted ritual are blessed to eat, and those who do not are challenged.  When these rituals carry religious meaning, what often emerges is social hypocrisy.”  And this hypocrisy is precisely what Jesus challenges.

We are moving through a time of heightened emotions and more significantly affirming our beliefs through these months before the presidential election. We’ve been in this space of heightened tension and fear and aggression. We can recall this time a few years ago during the pandemic: those firm in their conviction of being vaxxed while those firm in their conviction of being Anti-vaxxers. We want to be around those who share our political platforms, who align with our political views, and encountering someone who disagrees with our platforms and views, we want to challenge and confront and defy them.

Deeyah Khan said of her experience with the White Supremacists that allowing the emotions to feed the violence is easy. Seeing a White Supremacist and flipping that switch to being enraged at their actions is easy. Sitting in the space of engagement and conversation is hard. We might hear things and feel things that we don’t want to see or feel. If we’re truly honest, we will likely see things about ourselves that we don’t want to see, and speak words to the other that might fall on our own beliefs and behaviors with a resounding thud.

So, you might be sitting there saying “What in the world does a Muslim woman engaging with Neo Nazis have to do with the gospel?!  What does the gospel have to do with the presidential elections in a few months?!”  Quite a bit actually.  

Jesus is talking about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. We “say” we are Christian, but do our behaviors show that we love Jesus? We “say” that we are Christian, but do our responses to someone who is on the different political spectrum from us reveal that we love Jesus?

Simon Sinek continues the podcast by saying that evil is a word used by the other side. The White Supremacist doesn’t call himself evil. Hitler never called himself evil. The Democrat or Republican doesn’t call herself evil. The Supreme Court justices who voted to repeal Roe v Wade did not call themselves evil. The teacher who teaches To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn do not call themselves evil. The gay and lesbian do not look at themselves in the mirror saying to the reflection, “you are an abomination.” And, if they do, it’s because they are parroting the belief systems of another. To call someone “evil” is a judgment from the other side.

Jesus calls out the behaviors that reveal a heart of stone. Jesus calls out those who consider themselves righteous and religious and pious and yet who engage in behaviors that reject the love and grace that should be the foundation of the religion.

Make no mistake, friends, this gospel passage is hard! Not because we recognize that we can be the recipient, the victim, of hatred…NO! This gospel is hard because we refuse to see and recognize our own judgment and hatred of the other.

Shelly and I are buying a house…I love the vicarage and am grateful that it when I was hired 5 years ago I didn’t have to engage the stress of finding a place to live while also leaving one job and entering a new one in a new town. But now we want to have our own place, build our own equity, continue to deepen our roots. As excited as I am, I have to admit that I am nervous. Not for the process of buying a house and all that entails. I am nervous because I don’t know who our neighbors be. Will they detest the fact that a couple of lesbians have bought the house and will now live next door? Will they believe that we are the abomination and act in ways that seek to reject us? Will we be harassed or have damage to our vehicles and our new house? Will our cats, kept safe and inside in their catio, be poisoned because we are gay? Yes, buying a house is exciting. And yes, buying a house in a small town in the south is scary when you’re also queer. These are the things that are keeping me up at night right now.

Deeyah Khan says there is grace in the gray. There is grace and honor and respect in the process of community. Jesus says we must see one another not through the lens of our own self identification but through the eyes of the One who created the “other.”

And THIS is the hard part of being a Christian: when we see that (spoken like a curse) Democrat or that Republican or that queer or that Mexican or that refugee or that millionaire or that horrible boss or employee, we MUST recognize that we too are the “other” in another person’s narrative.

Jesus tells us to see ourselves, see who we truly are. Yes, we are beloved by the Creator, but that also doesn’t give us a pass to be a jerk. Jesus says to love one another, and the only way to do that is to SEE the other and to draw close to the other. Drawing close with curiosity and not judgment, we might see ourselves a little more clearly and discover that we, too, need the grace in the gray.