March 2013 Newsletter Article

Lutheran Church of the Savior newsletter article for March, 2013

My song is love unknown,

my Savior’s love to me,

love to the loveless shown that

they might lovely be

Oh, who am I that for my sake

my Lord should take frail flesh and die?

-          Samuel Crossman “My Song Is Love Unknown,” ELW 343

In the heart of our Lenten journey toward Jesus’ death and resurrection, I can’t help but pause and recognize what God has done for us. I’m generally pretty pessimistic about human nature. As many, many people have heard, one of my favorite sermon refrains is, “People are people, and people are dumb.” I mean this as a humorous way to point out something much darker, lifted up again for me this week in a blog post by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my very favorite writers.

In discussing the history of racism in America (found in this article, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/a-flawed-america-in-context/273546/, which I highly recommend), Coates notes that “the history of white racism and its attendent victims is horrifying, but it should be seen in scale.” He then quotes at length a history of the 30 Years War written by C.V. Wedgwood, in which Wedgwood describes the thousands of starving people dying in the streets, resorting to eating rats, raw horse, and even human flesh. The 30 Years’ War was Europe’s most deadly until the 20^th century, and it is the war that made Lutheranism possible in its wake. If you claim either Lutheran identity or white western European ancestry, this war is your history. It certainly is my history.

Coates reminds us that 8 million people died in that seventeenth century war, and that others remind him that 10 million Russians died in World War I, 15 million Russians in World War II, and that was only one of how many nations involved in those wars, besides innocent victims?

Coates wraps up his article with this gut-punch of a statement about human nature, one with which I fully agree: “America's particular failings are remarkable because America is remarkable, but they are not particularly deviant or outstanding on the misery index. This is just sort of what we do.” This is what we do, to each other, day by day and year after year. Every misery, every horror perpetrated by one person or group upon another, has precedent in human history. It’s incredibly depressing, and I’m somewhat sorry to be sharing it with you here.

Nevertheless I am sharing it with you here, because I think the church needs to be about telling the truth. We do not gather in the name of Jesus Christ, whose tragic death was both one utterly singular and completely ordinary, to placate each other with platitudes about what good people we are now that we have Jesus. We come together to look at the world Jesus lived in, the world Jesus died in, with open eyes even if tears run down our faces. Because the paradox is that God loves this world, even in all its unspeakable badness.

This leads back to Coates’ final question, after his brutally true “This is just sort of what we do.” He says, “The question hanging over us though is this: Is this what we will always do?”

The answer is obvious to me in the light of my Lutheran expression of Christian faith: yes and no. Yes, humans will always hurt each other, and we will always fall prey to our basest, bleakest, most self-preserving impulses. And also, no: in Jesus Christ, God assures us that life is stronger than death, that love is stronger than hate and fear and selfishness and cruelty and war. God knows us, better than we know ourselves. And yet, instead of condemning us, God forgives us. God loves us, even when we don’t deserve it, perhaps precisely because we don’t deserve it. And when we know God’s forgiveness and love, and hear God’s call to live lives of love and service to God and one another, we will dare to break the bonds of human misery. We will dare to stand up against racism and war and death, to declare that love truly does win, at least today. And when we fall short, we rest secure in the knowledge that God’s forgiveness and love will give us another chance.

Lent is now, but Easter is coming.

Thanks be to God.

Pastor Andrew