A Day in the District

Dear Friend,

We barely got settled before we had to leave Roseland. If I tell you there’s a metaphor there, does it lessen its impact?

But we’re not leaving Roseland for good. It’s just a week away from the cows and pigs and misty green mountains and the leaves that were just wondering if it might be time to change. I’ll be back on Thursday, and am hopeful that the leaves might have waited for me.

Wait for me, please. I’m coming.

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And, anyway, it was lovely to go to DC on Saturday to see the dinosaurs and mummies and a room dripping of gems with two of my granddaughters. (Imagine if you can, and I think you can, their responses to the giant quartz crystal that greeted them when they walked through the doorway. Their reactions to the mastodon and megalodon were everything you see in your heart’s eye right now, and maybe even a little more than that.)

Eventually, we left the museum and navigated through the labyrinth of new barriers and uniformed (young!) patriots and people of all shapes and colors and views and beliefs and backgrounds participating in this remarkable and messy thing we have made. At first, I was a little saddened by what it seems we have lost among all of the barricades and guards. Saddened by the fear that seems literally to be reshaping our time and transforming our landscapes. Re-shaping them physically, socially, spiritually. There are dividers almost everywhere.

But we finally found our way to the Lincoln memorial, and lingered at the top of the steps. I stood there taking it all in, looking across the pools, past the World War II Memorial and and Washington Monument, and past all the people on a partly sunny, October afternoon to the Capitol where I was graced to spend two years working alongside some of the most generous and passionate people I have ever known. I let myself reminisce, and it was delicious.

Photo Credit: https://www.komoot.com/guide/1972785/hiking-around-washington-d-c

I was awakened from my romantic dream by the voice of my older son describing Lincoln to my four-year-old granddaughter. Such insight. Such nuance in his words, and I was eventually buoyed by my son’s noticing the determination of people, these people of all (not just both) persuasions to preserve this thing. People willing to see what lay beyond the dividers that others had erected to protect them.

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Lincoln spoke these words at Gettysburg:

…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

My son’s words reminded me of how this beautiful passage can mean so many things to so many people. It’s like reading a poem, and you can rightfully rest you eyes anywhere. There are those who stop at under God. There are others who focus on government of the people, by the people, for the people. And these words can be slippery, even among those who agree which words are the most important. I mean, would you dare suggest that under God means the same thing to all people?

And yet, many of the people who read this so differently seem to share the determination this nation shall not perish from the earth.

Not all, perhaps. But many. Even most.

I suppose I’m sort of wondering if we do, indeed, have a shared commitment that this nation is worth preserving. And if we do, whether we might find space for both under God and government of the people, by the people, for the people.

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Since it’s just the two of us, dear friend, can I wonder aloud? I guess I just sorta think that under God is a given, because, well, because God, and not because of anything we do or do not. Some seem to suggest that we can somehow wiggle free of our under-God-ness. But I simply cannot see it. We are under God because we are under God. The kingdom is right here. In this very place at this very time. At hand. Whether we recognize it or we do not.

I think some people are suggesting that God is watching and waiting for us to slip up so that he might rain down his vengeance, his wrath upon us. I think that they might mean God’s patience is beginning to wear thin. Maybe that is so, but I wonder how they would know. I don’t know. But I wonder if they say this because their own patience is wearing thin somehow. But I can’t say even that for sure.

But also, maybe under God is the condition of our being and it has very little to do with our the fidelity of our fickle hearts and absolutely nothing to do with who we elect as our next president. To me, it must be so. Because the alternative, a graceless God who is ready to strike if we guess wrong at the ballot box, or guess wrong in life more generally, is simply unbearable. I would be doomed before 8:00 each morning. Even those rare mornings when I am genuinely trying to please God. Intentionally hoping to honor my Lord. I still get it so wrong.

Thank God for grace.

Also, and I’m not sure of this, but it’s really, really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that only now has this nation finally crossed over into God’s danger zone. That somehow for almost 250 years we have kept our noses clean enough, and because of that, we have earned God’s favor.

I’m not denying God’s favor. I am absolutely denying that we’ve somehow earned it.

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I think to suggest otherwise is to conflate empire and kingdom, and I don’t see anything in Christianity or from Christ, himself, that suggests kingdom and empire are, or ought to be synonymous. You might be able to change my mind, but I just can’t see it. Christ himself seemed to be okay with the distinction between kingdom and empire. Not only okay with it, but even seemed determined to ensure that we didn’t confuse the two. Paraphrasing:

Know what is Caesar’s and give it to him.

Know what is God’s, and give it to Him.

Don’t give your heart to the Empire,

Just. Don’t.

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Now, a government that reflect my values is something that I might really, really want, but it’s simply not something I am willing to give my heart to, and definitely not something I am willing to wrap in in Kingdom language to get my way, or even to give God a little boost. I think it’s fair to question what we mean by of, by, and for the people, but to me, the answer to that question in the kingdom was decided a couple of thousand years ago, and the answer is all people.

Today, the question only has relevance in the empire. Are the of-people and the by-people and the for-people the same people? Who is in? Who is out? Again, this only makes sense in the empire. Not in the kingdom. At least not to me.

It’s not lost on me that this question is as old as the republic, itself. We struck some unholy deals to meet in the middle way back in the beginning, institutionalizing louder voices for people who had more. That does not seem to me a kingdom-inspired compromise. That also seems strictly empire to me. While I’m no fan of the compromise, I’m not condemning it. Only acknowledging that even at the beginning of the republic, kingdom and empire were not synonymous. Sorry. They simply were not.

Again, I think “What is of, by, and for the people?” is an honest question and one worthy of debate. I think it is the question of the day, but it is being asked so softly that nobody can hear it above the fear and moral outrage that so many are dishing out to their tribes, and so many tribe members are consuming with such pride and such delight. We seem to be feasting on fear and indignation, and doesn’t it taste good?

It increasingly seems that being morally outraged by someone with whom we disagree is preferable to beholding the dignity he or she inherited from the Creator. Better to hold them in contempt than in delight. You know…like Jesus.

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What if there were another way, though? How much better might it be to resolve that with grace and to the best of my ability, to dismantle the notion that some lives are more important than others. Not by fighting to change the empire or by stomping on those who keep me from my righteous cause, but life-by-dignified-human life . By living fully in the kingdom by the way I treat the person with me right here, right now; even the person who frustrates my progress. Even the dirty, tatted up guy who has undeniably used mountains of drugs and who stares creepily at me when I’m stuck waiting for the light to go from red to green. Even the server at the DC coffee shop who is somewhere between male and female or between female and male, and who looks at me with real or imagined contempt when I unwittingly mess up their pronouns. Even the eighty year-old woman in the MAGA cap who tosses the word “woke” around like a weapon when I go into Kroger. Even the well-dressed executive who could make a meaningful change in a meaningful cause with a simple signature, but with a Scrooge-like resoluteness, refuses. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Each beloved. Each equally important. Each, like us, longing for a person to reteach them their loveliness every single day. What if I could be that person? What if you could?

How much better if we might behold those who are hardest for us to look at? If we were, as Father Greg Brown writes, to stand in awe of what people carry rather than judgment of the way they carry it. What if we let the empire be the empire, and we chose to channel all of our empire changing energy into reflecting the belovedness of our neighbors as we learn to love ourselves as God loves us. Even - and maybe especially - the creepy ones. I feel like we have a pretty good example of what that might look like.

And I think the results continue to speak for themselves.

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Okay, as for the rest of the week: Scan Tuesday, consult Wednesday, and back to Roseland on Thursday. Depending on scan and lab results, maybe, and only maybe the next round of chemo begins later this week. Still contemplating that.

Thanks for your prayers, friend. And I pray for you. That you might know your belovedness is already and always assured.

Oremus,

C