Our Obligation and Offering
Responding to cruelty with creative solidarity
In the days following the presidential election during which many of us began anticipating the cruelty the president-elect promised to unleash, and in the days following the inauguration during which that cruelty has been deployed via executive orders, policy initiatives, and, most recently, budget legislation, in these days of expected and experienced malice I return to the same question: What are a church’s obligations in response to sustained and purposeful cruelty?
The answer hasn’t been obvious to me. Admittedly, there are plenty of American Christians who’ve aided and abetted the administration’s worst tendencies, who’ve provided shoddy theological justification for blatant wickedness. And while I grieve these imperial accommodations, they are not the reason I’ve struggled to answer this basic question.
In our city I’ve watched as immigrant congregations have taken to the streets in response to ICE raids and intimidation tactics. I’ve also watched as Black churches have joined nationwide efforts to withhold money from corporations who, in response to the president’s intimidation, slashed their economic support for African American communities. But in multicultural churches like ours it’s impossible to choose between these responses because the community is being impacted by multiple expressions of cruelty: attacks on birthright citizenship, revoked federal grants and unpaid expenses for refugee resettlement agencies, civil rights legislation weaponized against so-called reverse racism against white people, eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to reduce instances of environmental racism, etc.
The list could easily go on and each blow quakes throughout racially and ethnically diverse congregations like ours. While others can narrow their responses, I often feel like we’re on the receiving end of random and scattered projectiles of inhumanity. It’s hard to know where to look next, much less what sort of coherent response is possible under such conditions. It’s not only multicultural communities which are struggling to discern a response these varied cases of cruelty, but this has been my experience.
I referenced Archbishop Óscar Romero’s pastoral letters in a newsletter a few months ago. Given the political crises Christians in El Salvador were facing in those years, I’ve found myself revisiting these epistles in search of some wisdom for our time. Given the violence, corruption, and intimidation Romero faced, his understanding of the church’s primary obligation is instructive. “The church,” he wrote, “is well aware that anything it can contribute to the process of liberation in this country will have originality and effectiveness only when the church is truly identified as church – that is to say, only when it is most clearly that which Christ wants it to be at this particular hour of the nation’s history.”
While I’ve been wondering about the actions or strategies which might counter the administration’s attacks, Romero points in a different direction. Before we think about what to do, we must first remember who we are. In an address to the National Council of Churches in 1979, the archbishop reiterated this point. “To be itself is our church’s greatest contribution to the nation. The more clearly it identifies itself with the church that Jesus Christ demands in this historical moment, the more effective and original its message and activities will be.”
To be ourself, to be who Christ wants us to be, is always the church’s primary obligation. This, according to Romero, is especially true during crises when overt cruelty might tempt us to believe we need to be something other than ourselves to meet the moment with the force it seems to require. But if being ourselves seems like too tepid of a response to the horrors to which we daily awake, perhaps we’ve forgotten who we are.
“The Church,” wrote James Cone in 1969, “is that people called into being by the power and love of God to share in his revolutionary activity for the liberation of man.” Grounded in Holy Scripture, sustained by Holy Communion, and animated by the Holy Spirit, the church proclaims our Lord’s gospel, serves one another and our communities, and nurtures the fellowship of believers who are the presence of Christ in each of our particular places. While others will respond to cruelty with their own solutions, the church will remember that all we have to offer is ourselves, Christ’s cruciform people whose very presence is God’s revolutionary and liberating activity in the world.
What are a church’s obligations in response to sustained and purposeful cruelty? The answer I’ve slowly been circling to, occasionally jarred from the clarity I seek by the latest political obscenity, is that we are responsible to offer the only unique gift in our possession, our Christ-constituted, Christ-formed, and Christ-oriented selves.
Such an offering will be marked by certain characteristics. Romero writes that the church which learns to be itself in the midst of oppression will be known for its originality. In other words, we will be creative. There can be nothing original about the racism, violence, or dominating hierarchies being advanced by the president and his supporters. The principalities and powers are endlessly deceptive but they cannot muster even an ounce of creativity; it remains beyond their power to create anything.
But communities centered on the Creator and Re-Creator of the universe and deeply rooted in the particularities and complexities of their places will be endlessly creative. Our responses to the predictability of coercion and dominance will be wonderfully surprising. Held as we are by the Spirit animating our imaginations and the soil rooting our resistance, these women and men will imagine possibilities and futures unforeseen by those impaired by the empire’s tunnel vision.
A church has access to this sort of creativity, in part, because its perspective on reality ignores the twisting narratives spun by the beneficiaries of an unjust status quo. Instead, we direct our attention to the women and men who’ve been made vulnerable by that same status quo. We do so because, as Cone writes, Christ himself is to be found “where men are enslaved and trampled under foot; Christ is found suffering with the suffering; Christ is in the ghetto– there also is his Church.” It is Christ’s loving allegiance to those our power-hungry society renders invisible and dispensable which, according to Romero, “demands of the church a greater presence among the poor.”
While others conjure visions from platforms elevated by privilege and power, the church seeks solidarity among those with whom Christ has made his home. More than acts of charity or feelings of compassion, nourishing a church’s roots in the marginal places is the simple desire for Christ. While others envision futures shaped by brutalizing force, wealth transferred from the poor to the wealthy, and landscapes pillaged for resources, God’s people are given dreams and visions by the presence of the God who is among – and who is himself – the hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned.
There will be times in the trying days ahead when our response to the growing cruelty is obvious. But, whether cloaked in winking doublespeak or blatant deception, evil thrives on chaos and often the horizon of our obligations will be shrouded in uncertainty. To reach for certain strategies is a sort of futile grasping about for static solutions to shifting onslaughts.
But a church that comes to see itself as an insurgent fellowship amidst the forces of evil has something more to offer than expiring strategies and outdated tools. In our creative solidarity with the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed, with those who’ve born the brunt of American society’s greed, violence, and hate, we find that our obligation and our offering is Christ himself.
(Photo credit.)