Healing Through Resistance

Sermon

This Lenten season, there are two ways we can talk, think, and pray about restoration. The first is thinking about restoration with the belief that there is a moment, period, or idea of a time in the past that people in the present should restore to—to make Christianity great again. The second is thinking about restoration meaning “becoming whole”—as individuals, but also, as a community of God’s people who gather under her wings.

As we’ve been in this season of healing and restoration, I’ve been more than reminded about the need for collective healing and restoration of the Church in America. This is a Church that has no moment or time in its history when it was “great” nor when it was “whole.” It is a Church that has been more likely to kill and stone, oppress and enslave, silence and ignore the prophets and people sent to heal the Church rather than center their voices to help lead us.

Restoring towards this kind of wholeness—becoming the brood gathered together under the protection, love, and care of her wings; creating and being a part of communities where love and wholeness and care are most important—is how I have always believed Jesus built community. And it’s also how I’ve come to envision and understand the “in-breaking kin-dom”—this phrase that comes up often in almost all of my discussions about faith, this very important piece of the Gospel.

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

When Jesus adamantly declared that he was the kin-dom of heaven, he reshaped ideas about religious reign (and colonialism) by completely turning upside-down ideas of power (God would not wield her power like human kings), about “religious” communities (Jesus’s community gathered for varying reasons, and not always because they believed Jesus was the actual child of God, nor in God), and about the work of God: Because God had not chosen a people to tell her story and lead the world towards wholeness only for political authorities to co-opt their religion and culture to make money, to use the religion as a tool for propaganda, and to spread the name of God through evil, or more accurately, spread evil and chaos in the name of God.

The work of God, why God chose a people, what Jesus was sent to do, what the Spirit calls us to be a part of, is building the kin-dom of heaven on earth: a community that turns power upside its head, absent of human corruption and division, and critically, sees each person in and outside our community as family, kin.

A kin-dom of heaven that the Church in America is far removed from experiencing in its wholeness, and in fact, has often been the very reason we move further away from wholeness.

This Church has been used to justify dominion over human beings; used to justify the forced kidnapping, theft, and pillaging of communities and human beings; has continued to be used by people today to maintain their positions of power and influence; used to make claims about heaven and hell, and sin and forgiveness, telling people they love them but hate the way they live their life. This church will never reach wholeness. In fact, the legacy of the Church in America itself comes from a long history of failed attempts at wholeness, gross abuses against peoples and entire cities in the name of Jesus.

I’ve mentioned these two broad-stroke legacies of Christianity that exist in America. One of these legacies is aligned with the life of Jesus, and another is aligned with whatever was needed to hold on to power and influence at that time.

But seeing, or maybe, naming, the differences between these two legacies of Christianity is much more challenging than it might feel, and more than we might like to admit.

Because aligning with the legacy of Jesus rather than the legacy of whatever Christianity is in America does feel exactly like the kind of community we want to be and try more to be every week. And I recognize that especially now, there is a desire in me, in people in this community, in my classes, to redefine “our kind of Christianity.”

And I think this is something that’s been put on each of our hearts by Jesus because Christianity in America is indeed not the “Jesus” kind of Christianity.

But I also know that we need to think differently about how we redefine who we are. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was a sudden swell of people who had grown disillusioned with the Church of their time, considered themselves restorationists, and emphasized the life of Jesus Christ instead of calling themselves Christians. They desired to separate themselves from the culture of their time, find healing from their non-Christian actions and sin, and restore to the life of the early church.

And I cannot argue that these goals are aligned with the legacy of Jesus.

But this Jesus movement who had grown disillusioned with the Church of their time. Interestingly, the Church of their time was right when the Church in America had just begun centering Black voices, begun racial reconciliation work as a whole society—work that “ended” for America with the death and memorialization of Martin Luther King Jr., and work that had to move mostly outside of the Church and back underground.

These Jesus movements wanted to restore community to the life of the earliest church, when things like race, gender, and sexual orientation did not divide communities like it did in their time. They wanted to be the community that people would come to for healing when they were at their spiritually lowest, emotionally unhealthy, who would become dependent on this community, develop a sense of indebtedness to this community, and so, are coerced into an unconditional faith—not in Jesus, but in their community.

These Jesus movements were ultimately successful in redefining their “kind of Christianity.” And we can see the lasting effects of how they distinguished themselves, because now, when they come together, they remain “counter-cultural,” purposely emphasizing Christian buzzwords like restoration, or revival, or hope, or life, or renewal, or community, where human realities like racism don’t exist in heaven, so institutions don’t concern us now. The early church was (radically, at the time) complementarian, and so today, we should hold those same kinds of roles in the household and in the church.

The remnants of the Jesus Movement are unfortunately alive and well all throughout the Church in America and highly influential in determining the public perception and narrative of Christianity—a narrative of surrender as opposed to resistance. Promoted in mega churches, promoted from the government—surrender, rather than resist.

And these communities will always feel like they’re growing, as does the number of people directly, violently, institutionally harmed in the name of Jesus and the Church, both outside and inside any Christian community.

And as this number grows—people who continue to rightfully associate Jesus and the Church of America as definitively not Jesus, or as a made-up story used for political power—it also means that the distance between the kin-dom of heaven and earth will continues to fracture. We will move farther away from the destination; we’ll lose pieces of the puzzle that we thought we had already placed in the right position. Some people are trying to draw over people’s contributions to the mural.

How then, could we ever become whole as a community?

To be a community of wholeness, a restored and healed community, we each need one another’s piece of the puzzle, each person’s strength and support to push the car the rest of the way, each person’s artistic flair—who they are, how they dress, how they sing, who they love, how they talk, how they draw—especially when we can’t understand it.

And to move toward becoming this community, we need to resist our attachments to the false comforts afforded us by our Christian privilege that are directly tied to the Church of oppression in America.

I think it’s a part of why I, and many people here, are so uncomfortable with what’s going on in America right now—it is as clear as it can be, directly in our face, piercing as sharply as it can into our hearts—we as an American people are moving in the exact opposite direction of wholeness, and much of it, in the name of Christianity.

And as an individual and as a people who have been crafted by God—who is fully whole and wants us to be fully whole—it means we are inherently designed to yearn for wholeness.

How do we even begin collective healing as a church and as individuals who are undoubtedly, even if unwillingly, attached to the Church in America?

This is where resistance can be a tool. A tool that Jesus teaches us how to use here:

• Resisting Herod, “tell that fox that I have no time for him right now” because he’s “clearing out demons,” “healing the sick,” and “wrapping things up.”
• Resisting against ignoring and burying the lament over truths because they might be hard to hear for those who need to hear it, like the city of Jerusalem.
• Resisting against ignoring and burying the lament over certain truths because many of these realities are harder to bear for the people these realities have harmed, like the prophets and people attacked in Jerusalem.

Jesus stands his ground against Herod because he’s more concerned with the people wrestling with demons and illnesses than about the trouble he will inevitably get into with the people who created those demons, pushed those illnesses onto specific people, and then cast them to the margins of society.

Jesus stays, when encouraged to flee by his friends, because reclaiming the truth of the prophets that his life will fulfill ensures that the kin-dom of heaven will be established on earth regardless of how many generations it takes.

And Jesus will eventually leave, not because he’s afraid of Herod, but because Jesus “must” be on their way to Jerusalem, the city, society, place set aside as beloved and holy, a community of influence, where the building of the kin-dom of heaven on earth will begin.

Today, healing through resistance means first that we embrace this vision of healing and restoration as having the goals of collective wholeness akin to this idea of the kin-dom of heaven on earth. That means refocusing our sight towards the people living with the ongoing and lasting effects of structural violence and oppression. It means trusting their needs and paths towards healing. It means recognizing our own needs for the strategies and paths towards wholeness that sit squarely in our blind spots or maybe aren’t even close to how we might strategize and carve out paths.

Within these strategies of resistance and resilience against the structural violence imposed by the Church in America, what we find is that it becomes much easier to resist our own attachments to this Church; it becomes that much more hopeful to reclaim Christianity because the coalition of people concerned with building the kin-dom of heaven on earth grows larger and stronger and begins to look like a community of people we have not seen gather together before—like the crowds who gathered to see Jesus. And it becomes easier to stop worrying about what it might mean to challenge the institutions that created the demons and illnesses that created and perpetuate structural racism, white supremacy, American exceptionalism.

But just because resistance is meant to be healing does not mean it will be easy or won’t be met with its own resistances within your own communities, from the communities we’re trying to ally with, or even from your own self.

Because what we’re doing in this kind of Christian resistance is confronting our own gaps in the ways we understand God, confronting the deficiencies we each have in the ways we understand the church community, and confronting our own attachments to Christian exceptionalism and individualism—not for the sake of experiencing individual shame or guilt but because it is directly part of the work in healing the kin-dom of heaven on earth and healing our own self toward wholeness.

It’s also why Christian resistance must always be done in community—because healing through resistance also means resisting against the harmful thinking that our healing, our thriving, our well-being is a journey taken alone.

When we are able to be in a community that is more concerned with one another’s thriving, with a sense of inclusion and welcome, each others’ specific care needs, each other’s wholeness, and our wholeness as a community, that’s where we will find the courage and confidence to resist.

It’s also how we become more familiar with the legacy of Jesus’ ministry in America instead of that of the Church—a legacy represented by people like Harriet Tubman, Ruby and Lucille Bridges, Nat Turner, the Black Panther Party, and Malcolm X, who each lived out resistance to the evils of their time by centering the healing and restoration of their communities.

This lineage of people has been building the kin-dom of heaven on earth against the forces that have been working to dismantle the kin-dom and kick them out of it. This lineage of people, who extend across ethnic, racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, and global divides, who are motivated by the healing of humanity, is the legacy of Jesus’ ministry that gives us the confidence that we are standing alongside Jesus in our resistance.

Resist with confidence:

• Confidence that your resistance is directed at the institutions, systems, and individuals who are actively opposed to the inclusion necessary to understand the immense kin-dom of God.
• Confidence that greater focus on the communities most harmed by the Church in America will reveal the necessary strategies for all our healing.
• Confidence that there is a greater number of people whose lives and vocations align with Jesus’ ministry and goals of restored wholeness than there are who align with the floating ideologies of American Christianity.
• And confidence that through Jesus Christ, we can indeed move toward the wholeness of the kin-dom of heaven on earth.