Where do we go from here?
It’s confusing to know where to start in a world rocked by a pandemic (globally) and racial unrest (in North America). Do we post on Facebook, Instagram, or Tweet out information? Do we lock ourselves in a room to wade through all of the messages and articles coming our way like a stampede of buffalo? Does what we say (or post) even make a difference? We feel anger (people on all sides of the issue feel this) and we don’t know what to do with it. Rage seems to bubble to the top looking for a way to be expressed, but will that do any good? Will it expose the problem or merely exacerbate it?
As weird as it may seem, Christians root themselves in the Bible. Sure, it’s a book that has been used, misused, and abused over the centuries, but as believers we claim by faith that God reveals Himself to us in the poems, prayers, stories, and history found therein. Two particular texts are helping me stabilize myself in the turmoil that is daily stirred up by my FB feed, CNN and Fox News. The first is a teaching of Jesus that is fairly well known, a small section from the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 7:3-5:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
The place to start in dealing with the world I find myself in isn’t out there, it’s in here. Before I can be of any help or support to the world full of “speck in their eyes” people, I need to take the plank out of my own. This sounds good, but it is a painful place to start.
Walter Brueggemann, on Old Testament scholar whose writings have had a deep impact on me, talks about a cycle that he finds in the Psalms of Lament that helps to describe this process of self-administered plank removal. He says that we often live our lives in a state of “orientation”. We have our understanding of reality, our unspoken assumptions about the world, our “take” on the way things are. But then a crisis such as pain, loss, or confusion hits and pushes us toward a state of “disorientation”, a place where what we thought was true is called into question. For the first time we see that we have a plank in our eye. It’s a surprising event and one of the last things we would have expected. We prefer orientation to disorientation, so we draw back from this situation and seek to put the pieces of life back together the way we have assumed that it should be. It’s in this moment that the opportunity lies before us. We can deny the plank and run back to our own sense of how the world is, or we can take a moment to honestly look at the parts of our world we had so successfully avoided up to this point. The wise thing is to embrace the disorientation. To realize that the stability we have in life is not our understanding of it, but the presence of God with us who will never leave us or forsake us, even when it seems all we had thought to be true is called into question. Those who can ride out the disorientation move into “reorientation”, a new and more informed understanding of the reality that we live in. This process repeats itself over and over and the Spirit of God works to expose things in us (planks) that hinder us from actually living faithfully in the world as it is, not as we think it to be. This isn’t a one time thing. Our new orientation will be challenged at some point as well, because no one can fully grasp reality as it is all at once.
So the key is to be willing to move into the disorientation instead of hiding from it or running away. Which brings me to a second story of Jesus. It comes in Matthew 9:9-17. Jesus is pushing people around him toward their own disorientation as he called Matthew the hated tax collector to be a disciple. To add injury to insult he goes to have supper at Matthew’s house with all of Matthew’s friends, people the religious elite were sure were the problem with the world of their day. These unholy people had no place with a Jewish rabbi. One key point to take away from this encounter is found in the words of Tim Keller, from a sermon on this passage called “Mercy, Not Surrender.” Keller writes,
“Jesus eating with these sinners is something that will just knock you flat if you understand it. It means no matter what you’ve done, no matter who you are, the distinction that Jesus recognizes is not between the good and the bad. The only distinction that divides humanity now is between the proud and the humble. That’s the only one that counts. It’s the only one that matters.”
Talk about reorienting the whole world. So much of the race discussions today are centred around issues of good and bad. “I am not a racist, I would never do those horrible things.” “Don’t people realize that violence isn’t the answer.” Inherent in these phrases are our own understanding of good and bad as categories which leave little room for the human dimension of suffering, pain, and trauma. We boil people down to either good or bad, lump them into groupings and seek to align ourselves with the ones we see as good. But back to our first story, this is focused outward on them. The shift to proud and humble forces us to open up our own heart and take a look around. Am I willing to let the Spirit show me what’s there, even if it upsets my current “orientation” or will I cling to what I want to be true, and run away from anything that challenges or unsettles me.
One of the key characteristics of plank-eyed people is that they either don’t realize they have a plank in their eye or even worse, they see it but spend their lives hiding or denying it. That’s why the humility to walk boldly into the disorientation is one of the keys to deepening our relationship with Jesus. His plan is to de-plank us, which if you think about it, sets us free. We want to see clearly. We want to love fully. We want to orient ourselves to life and reality as they are, not as we think they might be. Walking around with a plank sticking out of our eye is not what we would hope for our lives. The question is will we be humble enough to do some self-examination in the midst of the current world crisis.
I’m writing this on June 17th, it’s my daughter Kaitlyn’s 22nd birthday. (HBD Kaitlyn! We love you!) It’s also the day that my dad would have turned 89 if he were still alive. My dad wasn’t flashy or flamboyant, but he was solid. He lived life humbly and modelled what it means to enter the disorientation willing to learn and grow from whatever life had handed him. He had his share of hard times, but they didn’t harden him. He accepted what God gave and sought to be surrendered to the shaping of his own understanding by what came his way. He wasn’t perfect, he had his flaws, but he didn’t hesitate to admit that. I am thankful for what I saw in his life which continues to shape me today.
My dad had his share of planks, like we all do. The difference that I respected so much in his life was that when he realized a plank was there he faced it head on, allowing God to remove it. Want to address the issues of racism in our world today? Take a long and courageous look into your own eyes. Once you’ve worked through that you just may see a bit more clearly about how to live in a way that moves toward transforming this world instead of just perpetuating it.