Transforming Despair Into Hope
... What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?
You yourself must change it.
... Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
- -Adrienne Rich
Poet/prophet Adrienne Rich's question frames a window through which we might look at what it could mean to live believing that we are no longer strangers and aliens, that the dividing walls have been abolished and hostility put to death. What would it mean to live in a country whose people were changing each other?s despair into hope? What would it mean for the church to stand on the first page of the end of despair? It will undoubtedly be a journey crossward, upstream, against the grain of a culture that is hungry for scapegoats.
From Mainstream to Margin
The gospel story of the meal in Bethany (Mark 14:3-9) is a story of people turning one another's despair into hope. It offers us a narrative and an image of what we might expect if we ourselves dare to change life, dare to stand on the first page, dare to live from the conviction that no one is a stranger or an alien. Let's revisit Simon's table and listen for clues.
The first thing we notice is those who are present. Simon, the host, is a man considered unclean (a leper) by tradition and scriptural law. At least one woman is there, one who performs a prophetic and pastoral act of anointing. Presumably those who traveled with Jesus from town to town are also there. I have long wished that we could ritually remember the meal at Bethany on Tuesday evenings during holy week, as we remember the last supper on Maundy Thursday. The table in Bethany, more adequately than the all-male supper in the upper room, represents the inclusive table fellowship at the heart of Jesus' ministry.
Eating in certain places and with certain people can be a dangerous, even revolutionary, act. Just talk to anyone who had hot coffee poured on their heads in the 1960s while seeking to integrate the lunch counters at Wool-worth's. Talk to people who attend Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco where the hungry and the well-fed meet one another in the soup lines after the Sunday service.
Eating with lepers, women, tax collectors, and sinners was just one of the many ways Jesus broke down dividing walls and proclaimed peace to those who were far off and those who were near. This table fellowship was one of the many inviting, maddening, playful, healing, and subversive ways he disrupted conventional wisdom about who was near and who was far off.
Those meals were visible enactments of the commonwealth he preached. He scandalized people by saying that if you want to understand the reign of God, then you need to learn from those whom the dominant culture labels sinners, strangers, aliens, and outcasts. He said that the faith they exhibit in their social location at the margins of the community reveals God's spirit and God?s realm. Jesus didn?t call people to move from the margins into the mainstream as a pre-condition to forgiveness and participation in the commonwealth of God. In fact, he did the opposite?he called people to move from the mainstream to the margins, from the temple to the streets, from the safe confines of the sanctuary to the ditches where victims lie bleeding.
That is where we find him again and again: with those considered far off. He was there listening to them as well as preaching to them, learning from them as well as giving to them, being served by them as well as serving them. Simon, a leper, was his host. A woman anointed his body, which Jesus spoke of as something to be remembered in the whole world wherever the good news is proclaimed.
What happens at the table in Bethany goes farther and deeper than Jesus using such occasions as so-called teaching moments. It goes farther and deeper than Jesus welcoming every one, even women and lepers. These are people turning each other?s despair into hope. Jesus is ?the Christ? because the God he incarnates touches the lives of others through him and because he is open to being touched by people like Simon and the woman, who incarnate God for him.
As Rita Nakashima Brock has pointed out, "When Jesus is oppressed by the principalities and powers of the world, he reveals the incarnate power of God as he does through much of his life and at his death. But when Jesus has structural power over another, [for example, as a man in relation to women], divine power confronts Jesus from those at the margins...[they are] the incarnation of God to Jesus."2
From Despair to Hope
Jesus, in his flesh, broke down the dividing walls and created one new humanity through his openness to the transformative power of the Spirit embodied in those abused by domination and injustice. With Jesus, we can both embody this Spirit and be transformed by it. Many of us have experienced something of both positions?sometimes oppressed by power that privileged ones wield against us; sometimes inheritors of power granted us by privileges associated with our skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or citizenship in this country. To quote Brock again,
It is up to us to be alert to our own uses of power so that we are able to resist abuse and to resist abusing; to resist oppression and to refuse oppressing others... When we take responsibility, we can use our power to love, to nurture, to enable freedom and willfulness of others, incarnating the love of God.3
To be a people changing each other?s despair into hope occurs when we can endure the grace and self-scrutiny that reveal how, in the web of complex relationships in which we live, none of us is only near or only far off. That is hard to acknowledge. We tend to assume that we are the ones who are most near, most in touch with God?s realm. We assume we are near by virtue of our inherited power and privilege, by virtue of our faith that we believe grasps the heart of the matter, or by virtue of our experience of oppression. We tend to assume that they from whom we are estranged?are the far off who must be brought near.
But what if being "in Christ" depends on our movement and our transformation as well as the movement and transformation of our enemies? What if being ?in Christ? means risking the arduous, new, unmapped journey of staying awake not only to when we are near but also to when we are far off? What if it means staying awake to when we have a word of truth to speak and to those times when the truth shakes us to the core? What if it means staying awake to when we can and should reveal the incarnate power of God from our place at the margins and to those times when divine power is confronting us, calling us to confess our misuse of structural power?
As a lesbian, I experience a kind of double jeopardy in the church and the world due to sexism and heterosexism. This experience of oppression, however, does not make me immune to oppressing others. My white skin affords me privilege and power that people of color are denied. I have had educational and economic opportunities that have been denied to many. If I really take to heart the good and radical news that we are no longer strangers or aliens, my deepest commitment is not to creating communities "safe" for people like me. My deepest commitment must be to the work of transformation so that every one is safe and no one a stranger. Transformation involves not only changes in heart, attitudes, and behaviors, but also changes that bring about fundamental redistribution of power.
It is more imperative than ever?in the midst of these frightening times?that we nurture communities of faith where we can sit down and weep, where we can engage in the difficult and exhilarating work of learning from our differences, where those of us who have been silenced are encouraged to speak in our own voice, where those of us who hold power and privilege are called to account and allowed to change, where we can actively and tenderly care for ourselves and each other, and where we can celebrate even the smallest breakthroughs with exuberance.
With Christ as the cornerstone, we can be a dwelling place for God a people changing each other's despair into hope?asking always: For whom is the world, the church, not yet safe? Who is the stranger, the alien, in our midst?
Source
This article is adapted from a sermon preached at the closing worship of the 20th General Synod, United Church of Christ, July 4, 1995, Oakland, California. Used with permission. The full text can be obtained by writing Melanie Morrison, PO Box 23233, Lansing, MI 48909.
Notes
1. Excerpts from Adrienne Rich, ?Dreams Before Waking,? Your Native Land, Your Life (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 46.
2. Rita Nakashima Brock, ?Reflections on Mirrors, Motheroot, and Memory,? delivered on November 6, 1993 at the Re-Imagining Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
3. Ibid.
Melanie Morrison, Ph.D. candidate, is an ordained United Church of Christ minister and co-director of Leaven in Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of a new book, The Grace of Coming Home: Spirituality, Sexuality, and the Struggle for Justice (Pilgrim, Fall 1995).