17 April 2017

Two Thieves, Four Nuns, Seven Monks, and Us:

Good Friday in This Place and Time

The Rev. Dr. Kelly Murphy Mason

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There’s some speculation that Pepsi had the apology written in advance. This is the apology for the ad a few days ago in which the images of today’s resistance movement are used to sell Pepsi – millennial multicultural people marching together with peace signs, artists, musicians, a Muslim woman in a headscarf – these images used to sell Pepsi. It’s the apology for the ad in which a white model heroically breaks the tension between protestors and a line of police by approaching alone and handing an officer a can of Pepsi – making a mockery of the now famous image of a black protester Ieshia (eye-EE-sha) Evans approaching a line of riot police at a Black Lives Matter protest and extending her arms to be handcuffed. Pepsi blandly apologized for “missing the mark.”

 

But they didn’t miss the mark. The ad has been viewed over a million times. They posted the ad, pulled the ad, and issued their apology within one day. This was a strategy designed to enhance Pepsi’s brand by appropriating something full of meaning, something meaningful – something that stands in opposition to corporate power, something gritty and real, something human and spiritual and important. And they not only appropriated it, they subverted it. They forced it into the service of values precisely the opposite of its own. This is a classic, time-honored capitalist tradition – resistance gets absorbed, repackaged, and sold back to people. Instantly whenever new meaning is made, it gets monetized. And that, in turn, kills the meaning. This has been going on since the time of Jesus.

 

Jesus kicks off his big day arriving in Jerusalem with an act of economic terrorism in protest of exactly this kind of subversion of meaning. The very first thing he does there on the day that we’re celebrating as Palm Sunday is go straight to the temple – the heart of Jewish ritual and prayer life. And the text says, “Then Jesus … drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple” (so he actually forcibly kicked people out – the customers too), “and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

 

The money-changers were guys who would sit at a little booth in the courtyard of the temple and exchange people’s lowly foreign currency for the Hebrew shekel, which was the currency of the wealthy in Jerusalem. They would charge a steep fee for the exchange and they would also collect a tax for the maintenance of the opulence of the temple. Poor peasants would come from far away as a kind of a pilgrimage to make a ritual sacrifice and pray there. And they basically had no choice if they were going to do the ritual they had come to do. It was pay to play. Pay to pray. They had to buy an animal – like a dove – to sacrifice, and they could only pay for it with the Hebrew shekel and so they had to go to this guy – like a loan shark – and pay up to get the appropriate currency.

 

The glittery gold of the temple and the fine robes of the priests and the incense and pageantry was all thriving while the peasants were essentially being robbed because they were poor and because they were foreign, hence Jesus railing that the temple had become a “den of thieves.” What was the temple supposed to be instead? Jesus says, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer.’” Where is this written? What is this? It’s written in the book of Isaiah, a Hebrew prophet who lived about 700 years before Jesus. It’s part of a teaching that is downright universalist – Isaiah is saying that even those who are not of the Hebrew people, even foreigners, if they love God and do good, they’ll receive all the same blessings as the sons and daughters of Israel. The end of the passage is: “Their burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be welcome on my altar. For my house shall be a house of prayer for all people.

Dale’s beautiful, raw story of his own anger and despair is a story I’m hearing from many of you in different versions these days. And I’m feeling it myself. As many of you know, this past Tuesday someone carved swastikas and white nationalist slogans into the wooden front doors of our sister church, 4th Universalist in Manhattan. They had recently declared themselves a sanctuary for immigrants and refugees. The hatred is hitting so close to home. In my case, it’s literally close to home. I live four blocks from that church on the upper west side. I also work out in the gym at our local JCC and my kids take a swim class there. There have been two bomb threats this year. A friend of mine is from Surinam. She has lived in the U.S. for 17 years, raised four kids here, paid taxes, but overstayed her visa and so she is illegal. She and her kids are terrified of being deported – probably even more terrified than they need to be because of the climate of panic. And of course, we here at First U had our Black Lives Matter banners stolen repeatedly and vandalized this fall.

 

As your minister, as a mother, as a friend, and as a person, it all makes me feel angry and scared and I’m guessing you feel something similar. We see all these things and the circles of horror only expand outward: we feel the onslaught of bad to worse news; the surreal daily cocktails of truth, truthiness, and lies; the daily eruption of new controversies, new outrages, new unfairness. Some of us feel these things so deeply that it makes our blood boil. We live with this churning anger and negativity that sometimes feels like it could swallow us whole. It feels overwhelming. It ruins our date nights. We don’t know what to tell our kids. It feels like the whole world has gone mad.

 

What’s a spiritual response to all this? What are we to do? In addition to continuing to protest and call congress people and organize and stand up for the values of our faith... In addition to all that, I would say, in a word, compassion. First we need the awareness that for some of us, especially minorities, especially people of color, none of this is all that new. They’ve been subjected to hatred and violence for hundreds of years. There is something to the Derrick Bell quote that Dale mentioned about the “permanence” of racism. Racism is not new and it’s not going away any time soon. And that could be said of all forms of injustice. Discrimination against transgender youth certainly didn’t start last week. We, and our ancestors, have found ourselves on all sides of these issues. Some of us own 401Ks that are invested in promoting the causes that we then take to the streets to protest against. It’s more complicated than we’re right and they’re wrong. Nobody’s hands have ever been clean. For some of us in this room the world has never felt safe. We need compassion for those of us who have been fighting this fight because we had no choice for decades.

 

And then we need compassion for those whom we “other.” Bear in mind that with most of these recent expressions – the swastikas, the bomb threats, the banner vandalism – it’s not even the government doing these things – this is the people. Probably not wealthy people. Probably not privileged people. Probably desperate, angry, but ordinary people. These are people who feel like their world is being taken away from them. And they’ve been falsely led to believe that they can get it back. And we’ve played a role in humiliating and alienating them. You can imagine the rage of someone who feels like we nice, educated liberals care deeply enough about a Muslim from Syria to hide them in our church but don’t give a flying you-know-what about his dad who lost his coal job in Pennsylvania after working hard his whole life and now has nothing. We need compassion for those who feel that the world is leaving them in the dust and who, in some cases, are right.

 

And we need compassion for ourselves.