You may have seen the social media meme of a woman in Victorian style dress. The caption reads: “These days most of my exercise comes from shaking my head.”
Have any of you been doing this kind of exercise lately?
Without a doubt, we’re in a rough patch as citizens in this republic, clearly moving toward an extreme autocratic or oligarchic federal government. Depending on your definition, you could also say “fascist.”
It reminds me of Jeremiah’s scathing criticism in his age: “Were [the rulers] ashamed when they committed abomination? . . . (No) they did not know how to blush” (Jeremiah 6:15). Or recall the judgment of Amos, who complained that the rich sell the poor for silver, and barter the needy for a pair of shoes (8:6).
We are millennia removed from the ages of these prophets, but their sharp accusations are as relevant as ever. There have always been times when some in power have exercised cruelty and deceit.
But never have the majority in all three branches of our government displayed such cold hearts, cruel minds, calloused hands and feet. Empathy, a vigilant attention to suffering, has been explicitly repudiated. As our now-exiled shadow president Elon Musk said recently, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
Many economists believe the current state of our ruthless economy and politics of fraud are worse than in the Gilded Age, when robber barons amassed their wealth at the expense of workers, when political corruption was rampant—or, as the title of my sermon says it, quoting Paul’s letter to the small Christian community in Philippi, “their god is their belly.”
And I’m not just talking about stomachs or culinary habits. It was (and is) a gluttony of twisted desires and rapacious appetites, where might most certainly and ruthlessly, makes right.
I’m remembering, too, the prophet Micah, who warned of the judgment to come of those “who devise evil deeds on their beds!” They can’t wait until the sun rises to seize the property of others, who covet fields and oppress householders (2:1-2).
They are those who, like our golden-dyed hair-of-a-president, resurrects our nation’s colonial past by his intention to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland, ethnically cleansing Gaza to establish it as a massive tourist resort—even to the point of annexing Canada, all to satisfy his insatiable quest for personal gain and coercive plunder.
We are witnessing as never before the transforming of common wealth into private equity. We are filling his unquenchable belly and those of his parasitic patrons.
Now, put on your seatbelt because I’m going to make a hairpin turn maneuver to ask what in the world does this have to do with a life of faith?
One of the unheralded theologians of the 20th century was Charles Schultz, creator of the serial “Peanuts” comic-strip.
In one day’s panel, Snoopy the dog declares he’s going on a hunger strike. The next day’s sequel has Snoopy banging at Charlie Brown’s back door, food bowl in mouth.
Charlie Brown opens the door and asks, “Your hunger strike didn’t last very long, did it?” To which Snoopy replies, “The brain may be important, but the stomach is still in charge.”
Though we’ve all recognized this fact over and over, we’re still surprised when our consciences are overruled by our exaggerated appetites. Long before Karl Marx’s claim that money is the prime factor in human decisions, Jesus said it much more concisely: “You cannot serve God and mammon.”
The brain may be important, but the stomach’s in charge.
The work of worship—the practice of praise, penitence and absolution, intercession, hearing and responding to the word declared and our response in eucharistic practice—is designed to give devoted time to our own hearts and minds; To examine the work of our hands, the paths of our feet; to inquire into the orientation of our eyes and our ears; to audit our speech, whether we have been true and truthful, whether we have said too much—or too little; to scrutinize our longings and desires to see if any have breached their healthy boundaries, if some need retraining or retracting—or reviving.
Listen carefully. Our liturgical practice is not for our self-absorption or flagellation, which can be yet another form of narcissism, of pride, of conceit. The work is not a spotlight on ourselves, much less a despairing obsession with our own failings.
It is the work of triangulating our attention, in alignment with and yoked to the work of the Spirit, in a world that has forgotten its origin, its promise, its purpose.
Our liturgical work, in regularly-gathered assembly, is to revivify, to recollect, what Latin American liberation theologian Johann Baptista Metz called “the dangerous memory” of Jesus and all who have traveled in his steps.
There is risk involved in declaring our allegiance to such reflection-practice. Such remembrance is not merely reminiscence, much less nostalgia.
It is more than keeping a diary of names, dates, and events. It is, rather, a commitment to walk in ways that reflect such values and directives. It is to travel in the direction of those whom the world considers expendable and to position ourselves in compassionate proximity with the least, the lost, the lowly.
This isn’t to virtue signal, but the very means by which we tune our ears and focus our eyes to what and where and how the Spirit is redemptively moving over the landscape of wreckage and ruin.
Our preparation for and participation in eucharistic observance is simply the recognition, followed by corrective measures, that (in one’s own life) pipes can get clogged. Moving parts need lubrication, bodies in need of medical intervention, cracks exposed and rot replaced.
Remembering you are dust (a Lenten image with open ended application) is not an insult, for such is the very stuff of the universe, ordered and animated in God’s own delight. Do not grovel! Simply allow your compass to be adjusted, as needed.
When we do this, we begin to gravitate toward the most essential question: What does it mean to draw near to the heart of God displayed in midst of denuded souls, devoured bodies, and desecrated mountains and meadows, forests and fields, rivulets and seas?
Now that the prayers have been said, the hymns sung, the texts read and spoken witnesses concluded, the hymn of invitation is repeatedly offered: Declare yourself, from this moment on. Choose whom you will serve. Declare the holiness of the one true God in the practice of iconoclasm aimed at every false god.
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Curator of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action, and author of, most recently, In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions. He was the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.
