"Believe"
January 24, 2021
[Note: I preached this sermon today with the Leipzig/Halle/World Affirming Faith Community, a queer affirming, online, English-speaking worshipping community based in eastern Germany. Click here to watch a recording of the sermon]
I want to thank Ray for his gracious invitation to come and share a message with y’all. Over the past week, Ray and I have been writing back and forth to one another over email—or rather, Ray would send me an email and then I would get back to him a few days later and then he’d promptly get back to me and then a few days would pass and I’d be lying in bed and think “oh crap! I need to get back to Ray!”
It’s been a bit of a week here in the U.S.
But in our communications, Ray told me all about this community; how you formed, who y’all are serving. And, to borrow from the apostle Paul, I give thanks to God for all of you. Your faith is strong and bears witness to the truth that there is nothing—no physical separation, no pandemic, no death, no tyrants, no oppression or power, no things that are or things to come—nothing that can ever separate any of us from the love of God in Jesus Christ that binds us together.
The work of liberation is long and grueling, but by the grace of God, we don’t have to do it alone. And in the end, the truth of this gospel, of this good news, will always win out over the false and empty promises of the forces that seek to oppress us and keep us bound to death and the grave.
And that’s what I want to spend a little bit of time talking about with you this evening—well, evening for you, afternoon for me. This truth that our Gospel lesson says that kicks off Jesus’ entire ministry. Before he performs any miracles does any teaching or even calls a single disciple, he proclaims this truth:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Mark reports these as being Jesus’ first words, and I got to say, as far as opening statements go, this one packs a punch. But it’s worth mentioning that the text adds a bit of context right before the proclamation: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God…
After John was arrested. John, the first character we’re actually introduced to in Mark’s gospel. John, who the Gospel of Luke reports as being Jesus’ cousin. John, the person who baptized Jesus just five verses earlier, was arrested.
To be honest, we cannot know for sure one way or the other how this arrest would have affected Jesus on a personal or emotional level; the text doesn’t really give us any clues. We don’t even find out why John was arrested for five more chapters—he was antagonizing Herod Antipas for his incestual marriage to Herodias, his niece and brother’s wife. There’s a whole thing there pertaining to Jewish law and Antipas’ over-inflated concern for his reputation and its connection to his ability to hold onto power.
Again, the text doesn’t tell us whether or not Jesus knew all of this backstory. But he, and more importantly, Mark’s audience, likely did know this:
When power is threatened, power rears its ugly head.
It’s a truth that prophets throughout the ages knew all too well. So, whether Jesus knew the particulars of John’s arrest or not, his upbringing in a time and place fraught with the oppression of his people and living under the thumb of an imperial military-occupied police state would have taught him that much.
And yet, knowing this, he proclaimed his truth anyway. A truth that would wrench the mighty from their thrones and places of power and privilege and lift up the lives of those who were marginalized and minoritized. A truth that would liberate all from the bonds of oppression and death.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Unfortunately, for too long, this truth that was supposed to be liberative has been co-opted by the very systems and structures it sought to dismantle. A truth that was supposed to lead to life has been perverted into a bludgeon wielded by the powerful and mighty, used as a tool to extend their empires to subjugate all within their reach into conformity. If you stray too far from the accepted norm, we’ll forcibly and violently put you back in line.
One needn’t look too far to see it in action.
We see it in the ways European colonial conquerors perpetuated a genocide against indigenous communities.
We see it in the creation of the institution of chattel slavery and white supremacy.
We see it in rampant homophobia and transphobia, resulting in demonstrably higher rates of joblessness, poverty, homelessness, and death by suicide for LGBTQI+ persons.
We see it in the advancement of policies and legislation that control and restrict the bodies of people who can get pregnant.
And in my country, we saw it a few weeks ago, used to fuel an insurrection in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election.
Christian nationalism. White Christian supremacy. Whatever we want to call it, we cannot deny that it lies at the center of nearly every injustice we live under in our current day and place. It is woven into the fabric of our societies and has permeated through all of our institutions. It fights hard to maintain the status quo.
Consider, if you will, our Hebrew Bible passage from Jonah. Jonah itself is a challenging book, proclaiming the scandalous abundance of God’s mercy—that God loves the people we hate. But our reading today, prescribed by the Revised Common Lectionary, has a key omission.
In our reading, God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and prophesy; Jonah answers the call and prophesies that Nineveh will be overthrown in forty days; the people of Nineveh hear and respond to the message by believing God, fasting, and putting on sackcloth, an ancient garment of mourning, submission to God, self-humiliation, and social protest; and God sees this and changes God’s mind, showing mercy to the city and its inhabitants.
But if we are following along in the Bible itself, we’ll find that the lectionary leaves something important out of the story in its selection for today. The lectionary skips over verses 6 through 9:
When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
This is, what I would argue anyways, the most important part of this story, and the lectionary skips right over it. This is the part of the story where real, systemic change occurs. News of Jonah reaches the king. And, rather than doing to Jonah what so many kings have done to so many prophets challenging their rule, the king’s heart is softened. He joins his subjects in their fast and sackcloth. And then, and this is the key part, he enacts a new policy through proclamation. This is what repentance has to look like. Repentance is not something we can merely perform on an individual basis, it must go to the core of our systems and structures, resulting in meaningful change.
The lectionary’s selection would have you believe that God desires changes in the behavior of individuals. The text in its full context tells us that God desires systemic change. It’s why, to quote Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, a Black historian of racism in the United States, “Antiracist activism is not about changing hearts and minds; antiracist activism is about changing racist policy”.
Put another way, systemic problems must have systemic and collective solutions, not individualistic ones. And placing the burden of solving systemic problems on individual actions is a tried-and-true tool in the toolbox of the wealthy and powerful who seek to hold onto their wealth and power.
It’s why multibillion-dollar beverage companies distribute their products in cheap single-use aluminum and plastic containers and spend millions on advertising campaigns telling us, the consumers, to take care of disposing the containers properly rather than the more costly, but more environmentally friendly, method of distributing their product in glass bottles that can be collected, sanitized, re-filled, and re-distributed.
It’s why social media robber barons tell us to sort through the fog of misinformation and disinformation that drives profitable engagement ourselves rather than make meaningful changes to the algorithm that would disincentivize the proliferation of content that fuels radicalization and extremism.
And it’s why multimillion-member global denominations adopt a go-along-to-get-along posture when it comes to issues of liberation for Queer, Trans, and Persons of Color, forcing neglected, under-resourced, and ill-equipped local congregations to have these conversations on their own rather than fully living into the truth that Queer persons, Trans persons, and Persons of Color are fearfully and wonderfully made in the divine image, exactly as they are, full stop.
Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t liter. Media literacy is a skill we all should learn. And there’s nothing wrong with engaging in honest-to-God holy conversations about faith and sexuality at the congregational level. But these individualistic fixes will never the be all and end all solutions to the systemic problems that plague our life together.
Last fall, I attended a virtual panel conversation hosted by the Museum of Food and Drink on food, justice, policy, and the cuisine of Mexico. One of the panelists, Dr. Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Associate Professor of Latinx Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University, offered a framework to the principles of colonization and decolonization that has shaped my approach to biblical studies over the past few months. Colonization, she said, can be equated with constant extraction from a context, and decolonization can be equated with constantly adding context back into the narrative.
This week, the Revised Common Lectionary extracts this story from its context, leaving behind the parts that threaten the status quo of whiteness and Christian nationalism. Today, countless Christian communities gathered and heard the sanitized and safe version of this story. It’s yet another act of violence and harm perpetuated by the forces of white Christian supremacy in an attempt to hold onto its own power.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
I want to put some context back into this gospel proclamation, today. The call to repentance should not be a sledgehammer used to beat people into submission. Instead, we should understand it as the fertile soil through which life-giving relationships can foster. Repentance isn’t about changing who you are to fit some pre-conceived mold that will keep comfortable people comfortable. No, repentance, real, biblical repentance, is about turning away from that false god. That is what the Hebrew word we translate as “repent”, teshuva, actually means after all. It means to turn away from that which separates us from God and to turn around to move towards God. It means becoming more holy—or qadosh in the Hebrew Bible, a concept that means set apart and different and weird—because God is holy.
Set apart.
Different.
Weird.
So, hear this.
You have heard it said that you are only worthy of love if you look a certain way, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, exactly as you are.
You have heard it said that you are only worthy of love if you love the right kind of people in the right way, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, and delights in your loving and sexual relationships based in mutual respect and affection.
You have heard it said that you are only worthy of love if you live under a cloud of shame, hiding who you are, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, exactly as you are and celebrates the truth of who you are.
You have heard it said that you are only worthy of love if you force yourself into a mold in which you were never made to fit, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, exactly as you are and is grieved by those who cannot see the beauty of the divine image you bear.
You have heard it said that you are only worthy of love if you forsake your Queerness, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, exactly as you are and is Queer with you.
You have heard it said that you will never be worthy of love because you will never be enough, but I tell you that God loves you right here and right now, exactly as you are and knows that you are enough.
This is the good news that Jesus is proclaiming, and this is the good news that Jesus is calling us to hear. It’s a good news that proclaims the truth of sufficiency as opposed to the idol of scarcity. It’s a good news that tears down oppressive systems of hierarchy rather than propping them up. It’s a good news that celebrates and delights in difference rather than forcing conformity. This is the good news that Jesus calls us to turn towards, and Jesus is calling us to turn away from anything that would obscure that good news from us.
Fully realizing the kingdom of God will take a lot of work. There are deep and systemic problems that will need deep and systemic solutions. Jesus knew that. There will be forces that seek to break us apart and drive us into isolation. But the good news that Jesus embodied and proclaimed is that no matter what tries to stand in our way of work, we are not alone. God is with us and we have been given each other. The task before us is long and grueling, but it begins by taking that good news proclamation to heart.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Amen.
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