“…The rumble is gonna happen even if we flee from it … only it will not be the rumble we want. The language of the unheard becomes the riot. And what are we still failing to hear? What are we still failing to wrestle with? That the promises of freedom, of justice have not been met…. that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, October 20, 2019.
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And there, someone wrestled with Jacob until the first light of dawn.
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“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Now, when we hear the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., these are not usually the words we hear.
We hear, “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”
We hear, “Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that.”
We hear, “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.… Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”
Those words are profoundly true. And … the Dr. King who said these things is the same man who said:
“The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
Who said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Who said:
“It is not enough for me to… condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society… the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention… A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? … It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom, of justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
As much as America has tried to package King as a man with a simple message of love and peace, the reality of both man and message is as messy as the reality in which we live today. As messy as the deep divides and struggles in our country. As messy as the struggle within each of our hearts and lives.
Two weeks ago, Amber Guyger, the police officer who murdered a young black man named Botham Jean in his own apartment was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Both Botham Jean’s brother, Brandt, and the judge presiding over the trial gave Amber Guyger hugs. Hugs that were quickly lauded as a triumph of good over evil, as the cure to what ails us all, as what Dr. King would have wanted.
The hugs themselves, acts of compassion and forgiveness, were beautiful. And… I cannot put it better than our friend the Rev. Delonte Gholston, when he wrote:
“You cannot watch Botham Jean’s brother without seeing someone who you know in their heart has been deeply transformed by the gospel of Jesus. To this deep transformation I say Praise God.
“Yet there is something about the way that I see many believers, particularly white believers and pastors (and the folk of color largely who serve or lead in white spaces or who study in institutions impacted largely by European theologians) swooning over this individual act of forgiveness that is deeply troubling for me.
“I know that living in deeply divided times, many of us are desperate for a single solitary sign of healing, or unity, or of hope. Yes. This is something for which the human heart desperately longs in times of deep division.
“Yet I hear the voice of Jeremiah ringing out across the ages saying that ‘you treat the wound of my people as though it were not serious. You cry peace, peace, where there is no peace…”
“Somehow, we can see Jesus and praise God when the family of the Charleston 9 forgive Dylan Roof or when Botham Jean’s brother forgives Amber Guyger. But somehow we miss seeing the face of Jesus in black outrage at injustice. Somehow we refuse to see the face of Jesus flipping over the tables in the temple and driving the people out with a whip. Somehow the same folk celebrating black acts of mercy are threatened and intimidated by black acts of righteous rage.
“Forgiveness cost Jesus his very life. And make no mistake – Jesus was killed because he threatened the powers, not because he hugged them. Jesus didn’t give Pontius Pilate a hug or fix his hair. We have to balance the nonviolent character and ministry of Jesus with the fact that his very presence was dangerously disruptive to the powers.”
In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus is telling a story about prayer … but what he is really doing is talking about how we are called to speak disruptively across wide differences in power. The woman in the story is not silently compliant with injustice or giving the judge who ignores her a hug. The woman in the story cries out for justice day and night … and that is who Jesus holds up as an example.
Nowhere in all of scripture does Jesus tell us to be nice and compliant.
Yes, Jesus bids us love our enemies, knowing that love is not easy words but an active and ongoing struggle for relationship where all treat the other with dignity and justice.
Yes, Jesus says, “the meek will inherit the earth,” knowing that meekness is not cowering before overwhelming power, but rather as 7th century mystic John of Sinai wrote, meekness is:
“…a rock looking out over the sea of anger, which breaks the waves which come crashing on it and stays entirely unmoved.”
Niceness is not a value of the revolutionary Jesus. Love is.
And yes, love can look like forgiveness in beautiful ways … and love can also look like screaming lament and crying out for justice day and night.
Yes, love can look like forgiveness in beautiful ways … as long as that forgiveness is freely granted by the wounded as an act of their own self-liberation and not demanded by the wounder as a way of silencing a pain inconvenient to and convicting of themselves.
Niceness is not a value of the revolutionary Jesus. Love is.
The hugs that Amber Guyger received might very well have been healing and transformative to those who were a part of them, but they did nothing to save the life of a young black woman named Atatiana Jefferson, who last weekend was also murdered in her own home by a police officer for the crime of playing a video game with her nephew with the door open.
The systems and powers that murdered Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson are alive and well. Niceness and hugs will not bring those systems down.
But love will.
So what does love look like?
What does love look like when we have wounded and are wounding each other?
What does love look like when we have oppressed and are oppressing each other?
This morning’s other reading, from Genesis, gives us a clue.
It is the story of what happens to Jacob as he is camping at the ford of a river. But, to fully understand this story, we have to look both at what happened before and what happened after.
Years earlier, Jacob had tricked his older brother, Esau, out of both his inheritance and the blessing of their father. Jacob, then, fearing for his life, flees and lives in exile in the house of Laban for more than 20 years.
Then one day, when word of Jacob’s deception had reached Laban’s house, God says to Jacob, “Jacob, it is time. Go back home and face your family. Go back home and face your brother.”
The rest of the story is even more complex and messy.
Because, you see, Jacob is not interested in doing the hard work of reconciliation and healing.
First, Jacob tries to send gifts to smooth the path and buy Esau’s forgiveness.
Then, anticipating Esau’s anger and trying to mitigate his risk, Jacob separates his family into two camps so that if one part is captured or killed the other could escape.
When they finally meet face to face, Jacob makes a show of humbling himself to receive Esau’s forgiveness, but then we see that Jacob’s words and posturing was just that … because soon Jacob is back to his old tricks.
Esau invites them to travel together in one caravan as a sign of their reconciliation. Jacob says, “Nah … not so much.”
Then Jacob says he will follow Esau’s caravan at a distance … and then goes off in an entirely different direction.
Same old Jacob. Despite his words and loving embrace, nothing has changed. He is only interested in saving his skin and preserving the power that he stole.
When they meet again years later to bury their father, their reconciliation has achieved not peace but an uneasy truce that might be an absence of violence but is certainly not the generative presence of love, trust and harmony.
The relationship between Jacob and Esau is complex and messy. They have deep wounds. Deep pain. Deep anger. One has used the other. One has stolen from the other. One has taken power, and the very name of their family from the other.
The relationship is complex and messy. As messy as the family conflicts in our own lives. As messy as the deep chasms of wounding that divide us as a nation.
When Jacob and Esau meet, scripture tells us “…Esau ran to meet Jacob, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept.”
That moment was real … and it might have given onlookers hope and joy when they needed it the most. A beautiful show of forgiveness. And yet the rest of the story tells us their hug didn’t magically heal anything. It didn’t do much of anything at all. Because they hadn’t done the work beforehand. And they weren’t committed to the work that followed.
And yet … in the middle of this epic story, we have the episode we hear this morning. Jacob is alone in the middle of the night, and someone appears. Now, some texts call it a person. Some call it an angel. Some imagine it is Jacob’s own conscience and personal demons come to visit him in the middle of the night as happens to us all.
Whoever it is, it wrestles with him and he wrestles with it throughout the night.
It is a full body struggle. Wrestlers will tell you that the beginning of every match is about learning about your opponent from the feel of their body, the way they grapple for a hold, their tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. How their weight feels against your body. That’s what happens that night. Each learns about the other. And there is further wounding – Jacob’s hip is dislocated. And at the end, what is less important than a winner is that they each are changed. Jacob’s name – the very way he identifies himself – is literally changed from Jacob to Israel. And the other wrestler changes from opponent to blesser … one who literally “speaks well” of his former opponent.
They emerge with new relationship because of new knowledge of each other.
They emerge with new relationship because they have laid their bodies, hearts, wounds, tears and cries down in the dirt with each other and not held anything back.
They emerge with new relationship because they have truly struggled.
Brené Brown talks about a three-step process of rising strong from our falls, mistakes and wounds in a way that, in the words of All Saints’ mission, “heals and transforms ourselves, our community and the world.”
The first step is “the reckoning” – it is recognizing the feeling of disconnect, pain and more and interrogating it for where it comes from and what it is connected to.
The second step is “the rumble” – this is the wrestling match. It is the deep encounter and challenging of self and other. It is where “boundaries, shame, blame, resentment, heartbreak, generosity and forgiveness” are deeply wrestled with, often at great cost. The rumble is where “wholeheartedness is cultivated and change begins.”
The final step is “the revolution” – this is where healing and transformation happen. Brown writes:
“Unlike evolutionary change, which is incremental, revolutionary change fundamentally changes our thoughts and beliefs. Rumbling with our story and owning our truth in order to write a new, more courageous ending, transforms who we are and how we engage with the world.”
Brown’s reckoning, rumble and revolution is nothing new. It is the essence of our sacramental process of reconciliation – a process that begins with self-examination and confession, moves on to wrestling with repentance and reparation and ends with amendment of life, absolution and the transforming of relationship.
And the heart of it is the rumble.
What does love look like when we have wounded and are wounding each other?
What does love look like when we have oppressed and are oppressing each other?
It looks like the rumble, the wrestling match, the struggle, la lucha. Facing ourselves, those we have wounded and are wounding and those who have wounded us. Screaming our laments and crying the incessant cries for justice of the woman before the unjust judge. Encountering the opponent in front of us and the opponent deep within us in a struggle that will almost surely involve further wounding as we struggle to reach new ground together.
Not using our power and privilege to retreat but holding on to each other as if our lives depended on it because they do.
Jacob and Esau embraced, kissed and wept … and the change that occurred between them was superficial and short-lived.
Jacob and the angel wrestled through the night … and the change that occurred between them changed them and the course of history for an entire nation.
Demands for civility and shows of forgiveness from we who are in power will never achieve the justice that leads to the peace we seek and for which God longs.
Demands for civility that only serve to silence those who have been silenced far too long do not stop the violence, they only guarantee that the violence that truly will not solve anything will happen again and again and again and again.
Because the rumble is gonna happen even if we flee from it … only it will not be the rumble we want. The language of the unheard becomes the riot. And what are we still failing to hear? What are we still failing to wrestle with? That the promises of freedom, of justice have not been met…. that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Gary Hall stood in this pulpit a few weeks ago and said of this work “We just gotta do it.” And we do.
For if we do not do this work, Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson will continue to be followed by an endless Trail of Tears of hash-tagged names, traumatized communities and righteously enraged survivors.
If we do not do this work, we can have as many impeachment hearings as we want, and we will merely continue to swap out new leaders who will reflect our own woundedness, fear and desire for domination instead of transformation.
I don’t care whether or not Ellen is nice to George W. Bush. I do care that when the cameras are off whether they are wrestling with the effects of their actions in the past and how they are going to push each other to use their power and privilege to hear and respond to the people who like the woman in Jesus’ story are out there crying day and night.
And that is what I care about for us, too.
Because, niceness is not a value of the revolutionary Jesus. Love is.
And love is messy and complex and exhausting. It is the reckoning, the rumble and the revolution.
Love is crying out day and night and love is deep listening and responding to those cries.
Love is wrestling with one another through the night until the dawn breaks and we are too tired to wrestle anymore and breathlessly clinging to one another in our exhaustion. Changing the other and being changed ourselves.
Love is not crying “peace, peace” … until we actually have peace.
Love is no more riots not because the voices have been silenced but because the wounds that lead to violence have been healed …
Love is no more riots not because we have avoided the conflict, but because we have embraced it
… because we have achieved Dr. King’s dream of a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
Love is no more riots because there are no more words that we have failed to hear. AMEN
