Saturday, February 26, 2022

Divine Dialysis: A 7-Minute Sermon

 

To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.—excerpts from Psalm 51

This week, I read Psalm 51 in the wake of dear friends sharing the details of a sexual assault they experienced. My response was rage. I struggled to tap into tears. I was just so angry. At the perpetrator for what he did. At the police for what they did not do. Lindsay asked me if our friends’ story was triggering my own trauma. I wasn’t sure. I needed to go away to reflect—and sit with this Psalm, attributed to David who was called “a man after God’s own heart.” He was also a sexual predator.

This week, when I read Psalm 51 in the wake of my friends’ sexual trauma, in my mobile office parked under two big Bur Oaks on the corner of Butternut and 16th Street in Detroit, David’s words fell flat. Like a fake apology. The prayer lacks accountability. He grovels for a free pass, cherry-picking the mercy and steadfast love of God. He makes promises that he cannot possibly keep. He vows to become a teacher to other transgressors, to become an evangelist to the sinners. His world is a hierarchy—and he's still on top. He begs for his sins to be cleansed and washed. Words that cue the reader to the context. Bathsheba was in the bathtub when all this started.

David is confessional, but he shirks accountability. He is not making amends. He does not say that he sinned against her. He says that he sins against God—and God alone. He sees her through the lens of a voyeur. He sees her skin, not how she suffered, is suffering, will continue to suffer, at his hands. I pressed fast-forward to find Jesus interrogating Simon the wealthy, powerful Pharisee: Do you see this woman? She, not Simon the professional religionist, washed and anointed Jesus. Do you see this woman? She, though her sins were many, became the icon of great love in the Gospels. But Simon, like David, had all the power.

Jesus helped me to down-grade my expectations for the Davids, for the predators and perpetrators. I settled on this: Psalm 51 signifies one small step for those of us who abuse power and privilege. For those of us playing power-games in boardrooms, bedrooms, courtrooms, conferences, service jobs and school districts. We must start somewhere. David utilizes hyperbole to kickstart his healing. He admits that he is swimming in sin. He is guilty from the moment he was conceived. Another allusion to the specifics of his sin. Bathsheba is pregnant—and this is not good news.

As I pondered this, I realized that I, too, have been a victim* of assault and trauma, what a fellow post-evangelical friend’s therapist diagnosed as “spiritual mind rape.” From the time I was ten, my teachers and pastors taught me to take David’s hyperbole literally and universally. They called it “original sin.” Everyone is stamped with sin from the moment we are conceived. It is our human inheritance. Our sin stain distances and disconnects us from a just and righteous God. As a result, our default destination is hell.

People with privilege and power, people who want to sustain the status quo, utilize the concept of original sin to flatten the playing field. It is used to justify the predatory path of white men in power. It is classic gaslighting. He’s only human. Just like you. Predictably, other bible verses are quoted from memory to back up the bullying. “All have sinned,” the apostle writes in Romans, “and fallen short of the glory of God.”

This Psalm was not intended to be universalized. It is a recovery script for power-mongers and predators, like David. This is a Psalm that specifically summons those the prophet Micah bemoaned.

Alas, for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds. When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away, they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.

The personal responsibility must begin with the bullies. Because God so loves the world, God requires something more substantive from those who claim to be shepherding humanity.

You desire truth in the inward being;
            therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

The Hebrew word for inward being (tuchah) is the same as kidneys. Those in power positions must consistently go in for a daily dialysis, to get an infusion of truth and wisdom. Like so many politicians and pastors, David has charisma, vision and a cabinet of planners and plotters and fixers. To polish his image. To build his brand. To perpetuate his legacy projects. The propaganda has nothing whatsoever to do with truth and wisdom, which comes from the deep places in one’s being. The rich and famous trade in truth and wisdom for popularity and the profit motive. They gain the world and lose their souls. Just like Jesus said.

David is basically begging the divine to clean his kidneys. “Create in me a clean heart (leb), O God,” he groans a few verses later, “and put a new and right breath (ruach) within me.” This is the stuff of the soul, something my pastors and teachers confined to the realm of the personal and pious. They detached my soul from my body and the broken-hearted masses. They segregated my soul from the rest of the world. Like my soul is suburbia or a gated community or a carved out gentrified space in a disinvested inner-city.

The scribes who wrote and edited the Psalms were not Western thinkers or American pastors. They were ancient Hebrews who, like most Indigenous peoples, understood the soul as a web that entangles everything else. The secret place within us— whether we call it the heart or the kidneys, the spirit or the breath—is inextricably connected to both the abundant mercy and steadfast love of God and the pain and suffering produced and promoted by patriarchy, the profit motive and other manifest destiny mentalities.

The secret place in us is basically a portal to the divine dimension. It is the root that connects us to what Jesus calls the reign of heaven, the unseen realm where scorned crucified beings, like Bathsheba and the Black diaspora, rise up and redeem our supremacist society. Slowly and secretly, like a mustard seed revolution. The goal of the spiritual life is to tend to these roots in way that will reverse our social respectability. We must surrender to the sorrow. Like the Psalm says, the only sacrifice that fertilizes the divine dimension is a broken and contrite heart. Not burnt-offerings.

When our hearts break, we are empowered to break rank with the bullies, the predatory, those primed by their stock portfolios, with everything that tears apart the divine web. The soul, however, grows in us not by watering what we are against, but by shining the light on who we are for. Our diseased kidneys are cured by conspiring, from Latin words that mean “breathing with.” Divine dialysis comes from something David does not do in the Psalm: breathing with those Jesus called blessed: the meek and mourning, the poor and pure in heart, those who are persecuted for the sake of justice. 

*          *          *

The 51st Psalm has a strange ending. It seems totally disconnected from the previous posture, the radical prophetic proclamation that God is not down with ritual sacrifice and offerings, but by a radical revolution in posture, by a spirit restored by sorrow. The Psalm concludes with this conundrum:  

Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
then you will delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt-offerings and whole burnt-offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar.

It was likely added by scribes surviving imperial exile. They petition for a rebuilt Jerusalem, brimming with burnt-offerings, where they can make temple sacrifice great again. It is a yearning for things to get back to “normal.” Again, these are two verses, in my mind, that clearly contradict the earlier statement that the only acceptable sacrifice is a broken and contrite heart, that God, in fact, is not pleased, is never satisfied, with sacrificial offerings at a worship service.

How do we make this make sense? I believe that the only reasonable and responsible explanation is that the Psalm does, in fact, contradict itself. The Psalm includes the written convictions of competing factions within the exiled Jewish community. My narration here hums on a biblical reading strategy that rejects what my old teachers and pastors called a “high view of Scripture,” a perspective that puts the bible on a pedestal of perfection. The high view, or what is called biblical inerrancy, was literally invented  by white evangelicals in 19th century America to support slavery. Baptists adopted an official confession of faith that insisted that the scriptures were “truth, without any mixture of error.” The inerrant bible allowed white preachers to proof-text passages like Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3 that demanded slaves obey their masters.

Since then, the high view has consistently supported supremacy stories that scaffold a segregated society of segregated souls. Christianity is the one right religion. America is the greatest country on the planet. White folks are more deserving than everyone else. Women are supposed to submit to men—and non-binary folk aren’t even acknowledged. In fact, for the first twenty years of my journey with Jesus, the high view of scripture held me hostage to homophobia and other hierarchies like racism and sexism.

Eventually, I scrapped the high view hierarchy and started reading the text through a lens crafted from below. I learned the low view of scripture from Jesus himself and other freedom fighters like Frederick Douglass and Fannie Lou Hamer who brought the bible down low, close to the earth, close to the suffering and oppressed, close to those who are condemned and questioned around every corner—and close to God, who sides with those the world deems foolish, weak, low and despised. Jesus’ low view of scripture flipped the hierarchy upside-down—and people wanted to kill him for it.

The good news is that there is a conspiracy persistently plotting within the bible itself. The task is to seek out the Sabbath strand that second-guesses the stronghold of Solomon trending in the text. Sabbath release is the minority report, the prophetic thread, that takes God (and us) off Solomon’s throne. Studying the contested nature of the bible patterns readers to see the contest in our own world. This spiritual practice gives us the strength to subvert Solomon and stand on the side of Sabbath release in real time.

The bible bulges with this debate. It is basically two different religions, vying for space on the sacred page. One perspective is professional. The institution monopolizes the right rituals, sacrifices and offerings to make amends with God. The other biblical route runs through a mystical, prophetic posture. It is galvanized by grief, by a broken-heartedness that bears witness to the evil in society and inside of ourselves. There is no need for a sacrificial lamb or scapegoat.

*          *          *

Original sin. The segregated soul. The high view of scripture. The three pillars of predatory Christianity. Each of these is outed in Psalm 51, a chapter read out of context by pious people, privileged people, powerful people, for centuries. The solution is not to shelve the sacred text. It is to differentiate the love-and-liberation words of the Creator God from the law-and-order words of those who claim to be children of the Creator God, who sign on to an ideology that perpetuates predatory institutions.

The three pillars of predatory Christianity must be dismantled.

We are not inherently sinners. 
We’ve been sinned against. 
We must be protected against the assaults. 
We must learn to metabolize the trauma. 
 
Our souls are not separate but equal. 
We dwell in a web of Being, both beautiful and brutal. 
Our hearts break when we intentionally breathe with the blessed ones. 
This is how the soul grows. 
This is how we change the world. 

Lastly, the sacred text is not pure or perfect. 
It is a playing field for competing images of God. 
There’s a supremacy story scripting law and order: 
a god of blood sacrifice. 
There’s a minority report too, 
a ministry of mutuality moving on love and liberation: 
a God groaning over every drop of shed blood. 
 
When we work to decipher these contrasting images in the sacred text, 
we train the eyes of our heart, our kidneys, our entire consciousness, 
 to see them competing for the soul of the world.

In the benedictory spirit of this Psalm, may the breaking of these pillars lead to the breaking of our hearts. The only acceptable sacrifice to God. Amen.

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*Let me be clear: I am not insinuating that being a victim of spiritual trauma is the same thing or on the same level as the sexual trauma that my friends experienced. I am just saying that sitting under the guidance and well-defined authority of mostly white male evangelical teachers and pastors for two decades did some serious damage and that this trauma also needs to be tended. 

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