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Every time a homeless person asks a person of privilege like me for help of some kind, I am given a choice. I can affirm his human dignity, his identity as a person created in the image of God; I can assume the best of her; I can think that she is being honest, that I can really help her in some way. Or — I can reject our kinship; I can think what exploitative society wants me to think and look down on her; I can assume that she will spend my money on drugs or alcohol; I can decide to believe he’s trying to con me.
I am given a choice: to assume the best or to assume the worst.
American culture tells us to assume the worst: that “they” just want money to feed addictions that are their own fault; that they are trying to trick us into giving them stuff, when really it’s just useless and we should walk brusqely onwards; that they should have just worked harder and I’ll encourage their laziness by trying to “help”.
What kind of broken world do we live in? What kind of evil has seeped into our society when our gut reaction is to assume the worst about the poor and the marginalized? This was not the attitude of Jesus — Jesus was himself poor and marginalized for much of his life. Jesus always looked for the best in the lowly, and he always found it. We should do no less.
I refuse to live in a world that always assumes the worst and stereotypes the humblest and most disadvantaged. I cannot live my life that way. This may mean that I will in fact be conned eventually, that every once in a while my money may indeed be used for drugs or alcohol. But I cannot live in constant fear of the worst outcomes; rather, I must live in constant hope of the work of God in the world around me, most especially in the marginalized.
As Christians, we are called not to live fearful of destruction, but to live hopeful of transformation.
I wanted to ignore Memorial Day on this blog. Just sort of let it slide by, get back to my “Thoughts from Solitude” series, not say anything “dumb” ( =pacifist). But I realized today that to be a Christian in America means to live with Memorial Day, and to be a Christian in general means to respond, not sit quietly.
Other people have already done a fantastic job of analyzing Memorial Day, of revealing it for what it is as a very un-Christian part of the liturgical calender of the State. I want to talk about something else, not about what Memorial Day is or whether Christians should celebrate it, but rather about how we should pray today.
Many American churches will devote (or have already devoted) special prayer to America’s dead soldiers. After all, that’s what we’re supposed to do on Memorial Day as “good patriotic Americans”. Perhaps it is true that the part of the Church that happens to live in America should pray for the soldiers of America. But we cannot stop there.
Today, the American Church must follow the guidance of our Lord in Luke 6.27-28: “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” If we are praying today for America’s dead, we must also pray for the dead of America’s enemies. We must pray for the nineteen who flew planes into America’s buildings in September 2001. We must pray for the thousands who died fighting American soldiers in Vietnam. We must pray for the millions who fell trying to stop America’s military from advancing through Normandy, through Europe, and across the Pacific.
We must also follow the call of Scripture to stand for the lowly and oppressed. If we pray for America’s strong, we must even more so pray for the world’s weak, for the victims of America’s wars. We must pray for the people of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Pakistan. We must pray for the people of Vietnam. We must pray for those who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are not Americans; we are Christians who live in America. But we cannot retreat from where God has placed us. Though the State has a liturgical calender that celebrates death, we have a Lord who gives us life. We serve a God of transformation in the midst of a culture of destruction. We must embody that transformation, letting it extend even to Memorial Day, that God might redeem the State’s unholy holidays for his own holy purposes.
That transformation and redemption must begin with our prayers.
Image credit: psalters.com with hattip to CatholicAnarchy.org
Today, we honor history.
Tomorrow, we make it.
[religion]
Over at unorthodoxology, there was an interesting post about the concept of ’social justice’ in the context of Christianity. It says:
But Jesus isn’t about giving us what we deserve, but about opening us up to each other in radical ways.
I would much rather hear us talking about “social redemption” instead of “social justice.” We as Christians should be working to redeem society, offering a path toward transformation and the ability to realize that the redemption we seek will redeem us as much as the thing we seek to redeem.
I think that’s a great point. After all, in the Christian view, the entire point of the Incarnation is to save us from just condemnation for our sins. The beauty of Christ’s life is that is he was focused on redemption, not on justice proper.
This doesn’t mean that ’social justice’ is a concept without value; after all, the God of the Bible is certainly viewed as just. But in the Incarnation, Law was replaced by Grace – and this means that the focus of the Christian life, in seeking to transform the world, must be on redemption.
