Do the Bullies Win?

Sermon

This was the existential question that haunted my middle-school days. Every morning, as I stepped onto the bus, I braced myself: Who was going to punch me in the arm for no reason? What will I do if a group of boys circle me and grab my backpack and start tossing it around so I can’t reach? How do I avoid saying something slightly awkward so that if I slip, the group wouldn’t jump on it and make fun of me for a week?

This is my eighth-grade yearbook. Here are some samples of what people wrote in it. “Chris, maybe you’ll grow. Maybe not. Just stop wearing your little brother’s clothes. Haha, he’s taller.” “Chris, you are not going to be missed.” “It was fun paying all those pennies to your mom this year, I hope she buys you something nice.” And here’s how they greeted me when they wrote in: “Pee Wee.” “Pee Wee.” “Hey Pee Wee.” “Hey, much more demeaning name I am not going to say in church.” “Hey Little Dude.” I actually didn’t hate Little Dude, but please don’t call me that.

What’s sad is that these are the kids I wanted to sign my yearbook. I wouldn’t even call these folks my “bullies,” it was more a spirit of bullying in the air, that everyone needed to survive the hierarchy of picking on and being picked on, and if you had a preexisting vulnerability, say a short brown kid in white suburban New Jersey, then you just found yourself near the bottom. And when you’re a middle schooler in it, all you can think of is, Will this ever end? Do the bullies win?

***

New Year’s Eve, 2016. Valarie Kaur is a Sikh activist who chronicled stories of brown folks targeted with hate crimes after 9/11. And Kaur, like many others, was still processing the 2016 presidential election, a man who called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, a man who has not answered to sexual misconduct allegations from at least 19 women. It felt like the bullies winning.

And here’s what Kaur said to a crowd at the Reverend William Barber’s church. “The future is dark. But what if—what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ear ‘you are brave’? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?”

As the church erupted in shouts of Hallelujah, Kaur cries over the roar, “What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe! And then push.”

***

How does Mary have the audacity to sing what she sings? “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Mary, a random young pregnant woman from some conquered colony of the Roman Empire, who could only offer the poor person’s sacrifice at the temple. Sure, the gospel writers will eventually trace

Joseph’s lineage to Abraham and even Adam in an epic game of Ancestry.com, but in the grand scheme of world events, the Judean people of ancient Israel were just a weakened diaspora ruled by four different empires over the centuries. Every time her people went through a checkpoint forking their money to a grunt for the empire, every time a Roman soldier forced their son to carry a backpack for them just because, it seemed like the bullies most definitely won.

And yet, how can Mary sing, “God has brought the powerful from their thrones and lifted the lowly?” Well, for one, Mary has not forgotten the stories passed down from her ancestors. Her song directly parallels Hannah’s song when she becomes pregnant with Samuel. The lyrics of both songs echo the larger Biblical thread of God seeking liberation for the oppressed—from Moses leading God’s people out of slavery in Egypt to the prophets crying for justice to roll down like waters. As the Reverend Otis Moss says, every piece of Scripture at the time it was put on a scroll was written to a colonized people coping with empire. King David’s triumphs were memories of times past after the Babylonians conquered them. The book of Genesis declared that God created all things, not the idols and gods of their conquerers.

Mary’s song is rooted in the promises of the Biblical God, who didn’t seem to talk much about whether you go to heaven or hell when you die, or whether you adhere to certain dogmas, but rather, that God is with you, the poor the lowly, the meek—and the bullies won’t have the final say. And if an angel says God’s going to do something amazing with this baby, well of course this is what this is all about. As writer Erna Kim Hackett says, this is theology not from the religious halls of elite men, but from the lived experience of two women under empire in their homes.

And so, how does Mary have the audacity to sing what she sings? I dunno, how does anyone have the audacity to move forward despite all the oppression and hardship of this world? How did, like Kaur says, “those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault” keep going on?

It feels something like faith. Not a faith in some abstract concept of God or spiritual escape. Not even necessarily a faith that everything’s just going to work out in the end.

Rather, a faith that a world where the bullies don’t win is the world that God wants. A faith that through connection with the Divine tries to nurture that world in our everyday actions and in the larger collective, even when we feel like what we do doesn’t make a difference, even while things are often more complicated than individuals just being the bully or the bullied, even when we struggle with the guilt of feeling like the bully ourselves. It is a faith that, despite everything, the choice to breathe and then push is worth it.

***

If I want to end with any words of assurance, it’s frankly to my eighth-grade self and to the young people I work with.

When I look at this yearbook, I remember feeling like the world was a cruel, lonely place, and I couldn’t believe in myself because I was just defined by the name-calling and how I was being treated. And look, sometimes there’s no moment of triumph or standing up to the bully ’cuz that might make it worse; sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get through the day.

But this isn’t all that there is. It can get better. I think of then compared to where I am now. I’ve been able to have so much more confidence in who I am, I am married to an amazing woman and have two beautiful children, I am a pastor at a church where I can speak out of my experience to have a positive impact, and when you think about me in the context of my parents from a country bullied by both Spanish and American colonizers, where I am now is beyond their wildest dreams.

And I now have friends, REAL friends, old and new who have supported me and shown me love all through these years. That quote from a kid who said stop wearing your little brother’s clothes? I just texted him yesterday. I’ve been friends with him for decades now.

I’m not saying that all your bullies will become your friends or that everything will always come out rosy in the end.

But I’m saying that maybe amid all of the nonsense, maybe God is still up to something, birthing something new, moving to turn the “way things are” upside down. And maybe you have a part in helping that happen.

Do the bullies win? Sometimes. But they don’t get the last word.