We are now experiencing great outer energy directed against injustice. It’s needed. It’s right. And we must not let up until this Great Turning is realized. Yet, outer and societal change requires inner and personal change if we are to achieve what we need to achieve societally. This sermon on Matthew 5.9, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” confronts naive cries for “peace” without justice, and urges us to add to our outer action for justice the needed inner work on the traumas we bear. It takes communities of intention to create the safe spaces where this can happen.
The Beatitudes of Jesus are eight wisdom sayings that stand at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. They are not moral teachings as much as they are soulful riddles that invite the hearer into a new way of being human. They are an invitation to see, from the inside of our lives—from our souls—what it could mean to be truly human. At this time of such a massive reassessment of human life on this planet, the Beatitudes, what I call, "Novel Attitudes," could point the way to a better way of life for our communities and our world.
UPDATE (Monday, June 15, 2020): I just listened to a remarkable podcast that suggests some next steps. Lama Rod Owens takes us on a deep dive into trauma, race, contemplative practice, and the way to engage each other for transformation in the midst of such massive discomfort. Many of us come to meditation, for example, for comfort. But, especially for white people, right now is a time to embrace our discomfort. In this podcast, Dan Harris, says, “Lama Rod Owens encourages me to step way out of my comfort zone in this conversation, and I am grateful to him for it. Owens is the author of the soon-to-be-released book, Love and Rage. As it says in the bio on his website, his story sits at the ‘cross sections’ of so many aspects of American life ‘as a Black, queer male, born and raised in the South.’ He was officially recognized by the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism after he completed a three-year silent retreat, during which time he says he dealt with years of past pain and trauma. As you will hear him say in this interview, he "worked his butt off to feel ok." After retreat, he completed a Master of Divinity at Harvard. I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I did.”
Where to find Lama Rod Owens online: Website: https://www.lamarod.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lamarod1 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lamarod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lamarodowens/?hl=en
This dialog invites us into the nexts steps toward which I’m pointing in this sermon
1.
Jeremiah’s poem is a difficult poem; it’s a twenty-six hundred year old prophetic rant against both the political and religious leaders of Judah, and its capital city, Jerusalem. With feisty rhetoric and an oratory that tilts toward mockery, the prophet, speaking the word of God, confronts the greed and corruption, the injustice and callousness of those who hold social power. Jeremiah paints a picture of a wounded nation where the powerful have enacted policies that benefit the rich, cut programs that benefited the poor, and who have modeled the worst kind of behavior, which, tragically, says Jeremiah, the population has largely imitated. “From the least to the greatest,” rants Jeremiah, “everyone is greedy for unjust gain.”
And to make matters worse, the preachers have colluded with the politicians, saying everything’s good. “Peace, peace,” they say. “Go back to work.” “Go back to church.” “Go back to life as normal.”
But God, speaking through Jeremiah says, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying ‘Peace,’ ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace. They have acted shamefully, they have committed abomination; yet they are not ashamed, they do even not know how to blush.”
It’s a difficult poem. A difficult poem for difficult times.
But in the middle of the poem, God, speaking through Jeremiah, offers a way out for those who will listen: “Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”
Six hundred years later, Jesus echoed Jeremiah’s words: “Come to me all who are weary and who are carrying heavy burdens . . . . and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11.28-30).
Twenty six hundred years ago, those in power rejected Jeremiah’s invitation. Two thousand years ago, the powerful rejected the way of Jesus. Today, the same is true. Many of those in power have likely never really opened the Bibles they hold in their hands, certainly not with the intention to obey the way of Jesus; the Bible is too often only a prop used to appease and pacify the pious.
God, speaking through Jeremiah, said, “they ought to have walked in the good way, the way I have shown them,” “but they said, ‘We will not walk in it.” The way to peace was open to them, but they rejected it and chose their own way. “Therefore,” says God, “disaster will come upon them. There will be no peace for those who refused to walk in the way of justice.”
This is a universal and timeless truth: there will be no rest for our souls, no true peace, without justice.
2.
This week an old friend, a member of a congregation I pastored for sixteen years, posted a message on his Facebook page: “How about all lives matter? Not black lives. Not white lives. Get over yourself. No one’s life is more important than the next. Put your race card away and grow up.”
There’s a lot that’s right with this message. All lives matter, no life matters less than any other. It's a well-meaning effort to rise above the tensions that divide us and challenge us to recognize that we are one, human race; it’s an effort to make peace . . . peace.
But well-meaning and true as it may be, it obscures a deeper truth about the vulnerability of some who are part of that one human race; it minimizes the need for us to stop the violence, prejudice, and injustices that endanger the lives of people of color. It aims at peace without justice. And we now know that there will never be peace without justice. There will be no “rest for our souls” unless we make justice our goal.
I wrote all this to my friend; I told him how, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15). While the whole flock of a hundred sheep mattered ultimately, there was one sheep that became particularly vulnerable and endangered. That one needed special advocacy and protection; that sheep needed someone who would focus every effort to secure its safety. Jesus says the shepherd left the ninety-nine and went to care for the one.
3.
My friend was right, “all lives matter.” But right now, the egregious violence and systemic injustice against black and brown people makes advocacy on their behalf and advancement of their human rights non-negotiable—especially for us, people of the way, “children of God” who seek peace.
Of course, violence is perpetrated against people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. But the disproportionate injustices suffered by people of color require us to do all we can to walk “the good way,” the way of justice, the way that turns us away from all that endangers them and us, as well as the disaster that comes to every civilization that refuses to walk in the way of God (Jeremiah 6.16-17). If we walk the “ancient way,” the “good way,” Jesus’ way that makes peace through justice, we could help save us all, save our civilization, and save the planet.
This is why we're rising up, I told my friend. We’re rising up because the Lord of Life requires it. We won’t say, as Jerusalem’s failed leadership said long ago, “We will not walk in it; we will not give heed.” They tried to cover up corruption by promoting a false peace. They tried to keep themselves in power by ignoring God’s path. Let’s not do the same thing.
4.
There is a deep “wound” in the American soul. None of us is untroubled by this wound. It’s a racial wound; we know it’s big; we know it hurts. But most of us, from the “greatest to the least,” have “treated it carelessly.”
This racial wound affects everything about us as a people. We’re all lurching about for a way forward. But so much of what we’re doing, is stuff we’ve done in the past. Maybe it’s more intense today, maybe more people are engaged, more people are enraged. But still we’re largely working against racism in the same way we’ve worked against it in the past—four big strategies: “demonstrate, educate, advocate, legislate,” and a fifth, “repeat as needed.” None of which are bad. We must do all of them. But, if history teaches us anything, they will not carry us where we ultimately need to go. Much of what we’re doing is directed at the symptoms of the wound, not the wound itself.
A wound treated carelessly does not heal well. It festers, it scars, it becomes chronic.
The trouble is, we know and feel the effects of this wound, but we don’t really know the wound itself. It’s not a surface wound. It’s not skin deep. It hides and hurts deep down in our bones, in our blood, in our cells.
If we’re going to heal America’s soul, we’ve got to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before. The work will be hard, slow, deliberate healing work. It may be misunderstood as passive. But it’s anything but passive. To get where we’ve never gone before, we’ve got to do what we’ve never done before. To grow a just world, we’ve got to grow ourselves. To heal what’s outside us, we’ve got to heal what’s inside us.
5.
Dr. Joy DeGruy is a mental health professional and scholar of the black experience in America. In her book, The Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, she describes this wound and its effects in excruciating detail. Resmaa Menakem is a mental health professional and educator. In his latest book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, he describes the way his grandmother’s hands, the scarred hands of a woman who picked cotton as a child until they bled, taught Resmaa Menakem to perceive the ways our bodies hold our traumas—the trauma of one generation after another. Healers like DeGruy and Menakem, tell us that trauma isn’t healed by thinking better thoughts; we won’t eradicate trauma through strategies and policies; we heal trauma at the cellular level, by going deep into our bones and blood and cells, making space to pay attention to the pain that enslaves us all.
DeGruy and Menakem have a lot to say about the wound that afflicts us as a nation. They have a lot to tell us about ways we can treat that wound carefully—even if, maybe especially if, our leaders continue to treat the wound carelessly. They have a lot to tell us about the traumas black, brown, and white bodies all bear in their bones. They have a lot to tell us about the ways our current methods, well-intended as they are, tend to keep wounding us, re-traumatizing our bodies. As clinicians, they tell us that unless we’re more careful this time, if we do the same old things in the same old ways—just more loud, more angry, or more penitent this time—we will not treat the wound as it needs to be treated, and we’ll just get more of what we’ve always got.
We won’t get to where we need to go just by telling white people they’ve got to do better. We won’t get to where we need to go by “white-splaining” to black people how things work or how “woke” we are. We won’t get to where we’ve got to go by shutting wounded people in a room to have a dialog about racism. The walls go up. Our traumas get triggered. We shut down. When we’re unsafe, we don’t evolve, we don’t grow.
And so, we’ve got to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before. We’re going to have to feel things we’ve never felt before—for trauma is an injury to our capacity to feel. There will continue to be dangerous spaces and places as we move forward. We must continue the outer work of societal transformation based on liberty and justice for all. We will demonstrate, educate, advocate, legislate, and “repeat as needed.” But as People of the Way, as people who know we are all God’s children, we will focus special energy on creating safe spaces and places where the inner traumas that drive our outer trouble can be witnessed, tended, and healed through authentic community.
To know peace we must know justice, and to know justice we must know and heal what wounds us.