Hope & Solidarity

John Stoehr has often said that he writes editorials because he can't help himself. For me it's the same, but with preaching. So even though like many I'm trying to take a breath and lick my wounds, let's talk about finding a sense of hope after Trump's victory last Tuesday night.¹

Let's be clear about what we're looking for first. It's not optimism, the sunny-side-up confidence that things will be all right if we just keep a positive attitude. It's certainly not the philosophical proposition that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We are looking for hope, the animating and empowering sense that the world can be meaningfully different.

Nor are we looking to fall back on a restatement of our values, as natural as that might seem. It won't surprise anyone who's listened to me over the years that I'm not impressed by the usual religious left calls: Matthew 25! Shalom! Be the peace you want to be in the world! There's nothing wrong with any of these slogans, but they do have drawbacks.

For one, it's too easy to conflate our faith with our politics. No, for Christ's sake, Jesus wasn't a Democrat, not even a liberal. Nor should we pretend that saying "My faith requires me to take these sixteen positions that just so happen to be identical to those of my secular liberal friends" is anything powerful. That makes Christians functionally the same as anyone else, just with different motivation. Finding and living in hope requires something deeper, something larger: learning to see the world differently. That in turn requires us to talk about more than what we want to do, or to see happen.

These slogans also subtly depend on people already having hope, already being on board with the agenda. What about the people sacred or secular who, like now, look around and see nothing but devastation and death? We need to unlock a new source of energy, because the truth is that progressive religious values simply aren't shared by many people, at least not in the way they're typically expressed.²

Resurrection

So if we're going to find hope, I think we have to step away from the social agenda for a moment and to look to the resurrection, properly understood.

Because resurrection is not, as scoffers would have it, "pie in the sky by and by." It is not a claim that eventually we'll be in heaven with God and Baby Jesus and everything will be just right. It is rather a very this-worldly claim that God is always with us, no matter what. What's that text I've preached at dozens of funerals?

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The content of resurrection is the same promise God makes throughout Hebrew scripture: I won't give you up to Egyptians, or Babylonians, or Iranians, or Romans, or whoever else has a mind to oppress you this week. I won't even give you up to yourselves, even when you're being complete jackasses. God, the prophets testify, is with humanity in the midst of sin, suffering and chaos. It is not accidental that Paul situates the passage above in a larger discussion of life, freedom and God's decision to withhold judgment. Nor is the paraphrase of Psalm 44 an accident: hope arises in a realistic assessment of threats and death.

But in Christ's death and resurrection, God does something truly new. There's nothing magical or supernatural about it. The "something new" is to maintain solidarity up to, through, and beyond the point of death, even shameful death on a cross.

Death's great power over the living is to separate us from those who have died, but in accepting this power, and in sharing the human experience of loss, God brings out an inverse truth. Death can separate, but it can also draw together. And in that drawing together, there is power greater even than that of death.

I believe that bone deep. If I didn't, I'd be a pretty lousy hospice chaplain. I also believe that none of this gets rid of the reality of death. If we're lucky, it can take the edge off. People die, sometimes painfully, sometimes horribly. That is a fact of life. And if we're doing realism, let us remember that the deformities of Trump's person have already at a minimum contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and they will claim more.

But what I try to reinforce and model myself is that no one need die alone if they don't want to. I will walk with them as far as I am able, and God will take it from there.

There's the hook for secular folk, I think. We know God's steadfast love through human witness to and emulation of it. I believe there is a god who sponsors human solidarity. There is certainly something beyond myself that makes it possible to do what I and others do, some mysterious Other that will not let us go. That's what I believe, anyway. You don't have to share those beliefs to tap into the same power. All you have to do is stand with one another.

Our job

I recently spoke with a gentleman whose wife has metastatic cancer, and is probably looking at the end of her life.³ "I guess my job is to keep her happy," he said. That is absolutely not your job, I told him, because that is not an outcome you can guarantee. Your job is to be there with her through thick and thin.

Likewise, I would say to anyone reading this that it is absolutely not your job to save America from Trump and the MAGA cult. Very few of us have that kind of power, for one thing. No, your job is to do what you can, and to stick with one another through thick and thin. It's hard for me to say what that kind of radical solidarity looks like in practice. I need to think some more about it, and I suspect that it will look different for everyone.

But I will say this: don't think about the grand gesture, of being super-cutting-edge in your radical commitments. Think less Bonhoeffer, more like the spouse who sits quietly at bedside holding their dying partner's hand. Live your lives and look for the opportunity to do some good. Saints are most often formed from those who started off doing something small and took it to its logical conclusion.

And whatever else you do, don't allow yourself to fall into the trap of Donald Trump's divide-and-conquer politics. You don't have to be scared of one another, you don't have to let yourself be cut off from one another. That's a choice.

I have in mind mostly choosing to remain in solidarity with our friends or with vulnerable persons. But yes, we can choose to remain connected to our enemies, or at least the citizens who voted differently from us.

To that proposition, someone might properly object, But remaining committed to my MAGA family or neighbors might cost my life! To which Jesus would say, Exactly. The closer we hew to radical solidarity, the more likely it results in us laying down our lives for one another. We all have to decide how far we want to walk down that path. Not everyone can be a martyr, nor should they be. Point is: the further you take it, the greater the witness you offer, and the greater alternative you provide.

Think about the guy who ministered to Klan members, ultimately leading 200 of them out of the group. That's certainly more than I could do. But it shows what can be done, if you're brave or hard-headed enough, and it began with simply befriending them as individuals. So decide what you can do, whatever that might be, and do it. Then try to do a little more. And a little more.

As you do, know that God is with you, even to the end of the world. Even beyond.

I'm trying. And I think you will find that even trying just a little bit will make you feel better. Taking action on your values is a great way to make your hopes a reality. It also turns out to work pretty well for anxiety.

Endnotes

¹Like all of my sermons, this one comes from a Christian perspective, but I work at keeping them open, so anyone can get something out of it, or so I hope.

²In fact, Christianity is increasingly understood as a social structure for conservatives, and most white Christians voted for Trump in all three of his campaigns.

³To be clear, neither the husband nor his wife are my patient. I just get into these conversations somehow.