The Ordinary is where we meet up with Jesus

“The ordinary is where we meet up with Jesus, and he is more profoundly nowhere else.” – Romand Coles

ordinary-life1One of the most extraordinary things about Jesus, something that confounded and proved a stumbling block to even his closest disciples, was the sheer ordinariness of his existence. I don’t mean this in the sense of his teachings; clearly, he was extraordinary in the Way of Being of exemplified.

Rather, I mean the ordinary nature of the man Jesus. In him, we have a Palestinian peasant, born in a village we would not of if he had never lived, to an unwed teenage, at the very edge of empire. He was a day laborer, probably spending the majority of his life before ministry traveling to nearby Sepphoris, working long hours on Herod’s magnificent city.

But even after his entry into ministry, Jesus retained his essence of ordinary. Rather than the conquering king, rather than the over-thrower of Rome and second coming of King David, Jesus was an ordinary human, who communed with and loved other ordinary, flawed humans. He ate with sinners, loved unclean women, forgave extravagantly. He preferred the company of lepers to that of magistrates and priests. He was essentially homeless, living off the generosity and goodwill of ordinary Palestinian people. He was poor. He didn’t aspire to power or greatness. He was executed as a criminal, with no friends at his side.

Jesus was “radically ordinary,” to borrow a concept from Hauerwas and Coles. And thus, he calls us to a life of the same. Christians are not called to be purveyors of power and control. We don’t long for a seat at the table with the rich and powerful and beautiful. We don’t become insiders, and place our trust in electoral victories or temporal power. Instead, we are called to serve the “least of these.” We look for the blessings of the hungry and the meek and the forgotten. We are called to be ordinary, and thus, to be radical agents of change.

The one place where Jesus wasn’t ordinary was his extraordinary understanding of the power of relational living to change the world in a lasting and meaningful way. And so, he practiced the ordinary life of a man who meets and knows people. Simply that. And he knew that would be the key to the Kingdom.

This isn’t an ordinary that disengages. As Coles writes a bit later, “…all the arts of the ordinary that read patience as an invitation to escape from the tasks of large struggles against the gargantuan and fast-moving whirls of destruction are likewise highways of delusion.” We don’t embrace our ordinary in order to withdraw from the power of the world. Rather, we engage it as a practice oriented towards change on the macro level. The ordinary, when practiced in a way that is self-giving with no expectation of return, becomes the most powerful tool known to humanity.

So we are called to be relational beings. We make the world become the way we know it can be by changing lives, and we change lives by knowing people, talking to them, hearing them. Institutional power, political power, is important in it’s way. But the real way to change the world is to get to know the people near you, as Jesus got to know the people near him.

We meet Jesus in the ordinary. We bring the Kingdom by being ordinary.

The Fragile Brilliance of Glass: An Ethic of Glory in Trump’s America

Following-up last week’s post about Hauerwas and Coles’ Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary, I want to point out another passage from early in the book. The book, a series of essays and letters, was compiled in 2008, but this particular essay by Hauerwas was originally written in 2006. Despite being a decade old at this point, it feels especially relevant today, as another example of brokenglasswhere our American civil society is in 2016.

Hauerwas is writing about Augustine’s City of God, and his discussion of the glorification of Roman heroes juxtaposed against the glorification of Christian martyrs, and what each of these mean for their communities. 

Hauerwas writes (emphasis mine):

In contrast to the Roman desire for political glory, as the only way to defeat death, Dodaro calls attention to Augustine’s understanding of martyrdom. For the martyr, fear of death was overcome by faith in a reality that, from the Roman perspective, could not help but appear “invisible.” Yet the martyr’s victory challenges the Roman understanding of “politics,” because the martyr does not depend on memory secured by military or political glory. The martyr’s memory is secured, rather, in the communion of saints who dies victorious because they broke forever the fatal victim/victimizer logic¹. The martyr cannot be a hero – whose glory is his own – because the glory of the martyr is a reflected glory – a reflection of the glory of Christ – signaling an alternative political ethic…

…Accordingly, Augustine asks “is it reasonable, is it sensible, to boast of the extent and grandeur of empire, when you cannot show that men lived in happiness, as they passed their lives amid the horrors of war, amid the shedding of men’s blood-whether the blood of enemies or fellow citizens-under the shadow of fear and amid the terror of ruthless ambition?” The only joy such people achieve has the “fragile brilliance of glass” and is outweighed by the fear of loss. So the rich and the powerful are “tortured by fears, worn out with sadness, burnt up with ambition, never knowing the serenity of repose.” In contrast, the person of limited resources is loved by family and friends, enjoys the blessing and peace with his relations and friends; “he is loyal, compassionate, and kind, healthy in body, temperate in habits, of unblemished character, and enjoys the serenity of good conscience.”

The contrast here is between a political ethic that glorifies “winning” with an ethic that achieves lasting victory. And not victory in a political, temporal sense, but victory in a more cosmic, justice-oriented sense.

Think about it this way: we don’t remember the heroes of Rome; but many of us do celebrate the feasts of the martyrs and saints even today.

The politics of Empire – the politics of death – inevitably are driven by self-glorification and competition. American democracy is no different, and this competitive, self-centered  way of being is only grotesquely enhanced by capitalism’s ethos of winning at all costs and personal enrichment. There is no reflected glory of the Divine in our political ethic of Empire. Instead, it is a dull glory, quickly forgotten and with no lasting impact. And, in 2016, we have have wrapped our arms around it completely.

Martyrs, however, serve here as exemplars of a people who have rejected structures and strictures of being in the world in the way it says you must. In doing so, they have proven the futility of the world’s need to make scapegoats, a la Rene Girard. As Hauerwas points out so beautifully, they have overcome the logic of the victimizer. They cannot be seen as someone punished with death, because they have embraced death with open arms, showing it to be, not a punishment, but a glorification, a vindication.

This break is especially relevant in a modern political climate that has taken victimization to a level not seen since Nazi Germany. Political leaders – especially our president-elect – have played the victim card, which white Christian American has eaten up, and consequently, the supposed perpetrators of this victimization – immigrants, Muslims, refugees, gays, black nationalists, lefts – have been targeted.

Donald Trump, I believe, is the apotheosis of Hauerwas’ examples of everything wrong with liberal democracy, as shown here. We have a president-elect desirous of glory, willing to play to the masses by promising their safety through the death of others; a man so obviously eaten up with envy and ambition and insecurity, covered in fragile bluster and fear and anger. He is a reflection of the pathology of white Christian American. And the only way for him and them to cope with these insecurities is to project them outwards, on to others, to make themselves the victims and their enemies – the Others – as their oppressors.

Those of us who fall in these labels, or who know, love, and respect those who do, don’t have to play this game. Hauerwas continues:

In short, a community shaped by the memory of the martyrs makes possible a people capable of the slow, hard work of politics of place, because they are not driven by the politics of fear. Yoder’s “wild patience” assumes that such a people must exist if the work of nonviolence is to be a radical challenge to the way the world is. What the church contributes to radical democracy is therefore a people who seek not glory but justice. Such a people have been made possible because they have been formed through liturgical action to be for the world what the world can become.

There is a way out of the cruel logic of the scapegoat. It is the way of love, of radical acceptance and hospitality, of refusing the blame or live in fear and suspicion of those perceived as the Other. As we saw in my previous post, it is a way that sees what those different than us have to bring to the table, and respecting that.

The politics of glory and death is not the call of the followers of the Crucified One. We don’t “win.” We don’t get first place.

Instead, we reflect the glory of the Divine. We take a back seat. We are willing to lose so others may win. We embrace the possibility of death and loss, because of the promise of resurrection. And in so doing, we show the possibility of a different world, achievable right here on earth, if we only have the courage to see it.

***

¹From the (much-longer) book footnote: “Rome could kill Christians but they could not victimize them.”

Christian America’s Politics of Fear

Commenting on political theorist Romand Coles’ reading of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas writes in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary:

 Yoder argues that the church precedes the world epistemologically, but Coles rightly argues that does not mean that Yoder thinks the church has nothing to learn from the world. Rather it means that there can be no “politics of Jesus” that could be coercive, selfish, nondialogical, or invulnerable. Therefore, Christians, from Yoder’s perspective, should welcome the diversity of peoples that Babel represents because only by engagements with different communities does the church learn what it means to be a community of truth and love.

No one can accuse Hauerwas of any partisanship, or even a affinity for American democracy (this book, after all, is a series of essays by him and Coles imagining a new sort of politics the church can pioneer over and above liberal democracy.) But I think this passage here could be applied quite aptly to the political scene in America right now, and really for the duration of this last election.

trumprallyAmerican politics has become quite dependent on what Hauerwas and Coles term the “politics of fear.” Yet, one of the central ideas of Christianity is a “love that drives out all fear,” and consequently, a way of engaging in the world that reject the structures that are dependent on fear for their own continuance. Liberal democracy, in Hauerwas’ view, is such a structure.

That fear has been especially evident this election season, as we saw Donald Trump sweep to power on a platform that largely was driven by fear of almost every “Other” one can imagine. Fear of the Other has become the primary driving factor for white Christians in America in 2016, in direct contradiction to the dictates of the Gospel message, as was made evident by the 81% of white evangelical Christians who provided the key support that delivered Trump the white house.

Indeed, Hauerwas notes here that a Christian politics is one that happily engages with the Other, because only then does the church live fully into it’s inheritance. Rather than being driven fear, Christians are called to be driven by love and self-giving. The politics of Jesus looks like the life of Jesus: compassionate, humble, just, and concerned with the “least of these” first and foremost.

American Christianity is at a point of reckoning. In a monomaniacal focus on culture war issues, most notorious of which has been abortion, the church has ceased to be a reflection of the life and example of Jesus in the world. It has cloistered itself, becoming inward-focused and obsessed with preserving a white nationalist, hyper-moralistic, us-vs-them vision of politics, rather than the life-giving, love-filled Politics of Jesus. In order to “be for the world what the world can become,” as Hauerwas writes, it must reject it’s fealty to white American exceptionalism and regain it’s vision for a future predicated on love for the Other that is all around them.