inaction...and a diversion into Jewish history.

I have a lot of cerebral culmination going on....lots to unpack.

I was waiting at the bus stop today after I got off work, and I saw a twenty-something man storming towards his car, clearly furious at someone across the street. I picked up on this undercurrent soon after he yelled 'fucking retard' at the top of his lungs and slammed his car door with guillotine celerity. (I was impressed with his creativity!) He pealed out of his parking spot, sped across the parking lot and out into the street where a very embarrassed girl crawled into the back seat, closing the door just in time for him to drive furiously away.
Thoughts sparked by this event:
- there is such a thing as white trash.
- why do people knock stereotyping? I'm fascinated by how many times people fall so effortlessly into a ready-made mold that is assembly-line generic.
- how can I intervene?

The other day, I was riding my bike down the street and began hearing the catcalls and whistles of an old beer-bellied man. A bit further down the street walked two girls in the opposite direction, assuredly not 20 years old, ignoring the man completely.
Thoughts sparked by this event:
- there is such a thing as white trash.
- this man is perpetuating the cycle that is so pernicious for much of our society (particularly our urban society): he whistles at women he objectifies. Because no one stops him, he is one more experience assured that women are in fact objects. Because no one stops him, those girls are one humiliation closer to adopting the types of coping mechanisms that say either "I am truly an object" or "I can't expect anything better from men" - both lies that vitiate, that spoil, the very fabric of our urban (and, unfortunately, all too frequently African-American or Latino) communities. A woman who cannot admit her worth will not expect a man to (whether in word or in deed), nor will a woman who believes men to be incapable of such recognition. This effectively frees a man from all responsibility: it leaves him free to be the selfish child he's always been, free to read Maxim magazine while his wife gets her hair done, free to publicly shame his girlfriend from across the street because he is upset, free for unrestrained, incontinent sexual activity with other women. And here we finally are at the all-too-familiar single-parent home, where a child is not made accountable for homework because a mother is working to pay for rent, where college is an exception, where a woman keeps afloat a household because she believed the lie that she did not have the right to EXPECT from her man, and now that man is gone. I believe the family home is the sine qua non, the essential condition, for a healthy society and here this base and depraved fraud is, whistling away our humanity.
- how can I intervene?

In psychology last semester, we discussed the term 'diffusion of responsibility'. It's the idea that you're more likely to receive help with a dropped dinner plate if you're dining with only one or two people. The more guests arrive for your dinner, the more likely it is that you'll be picking that plate up yourself. There is an incredible and nearly-phantasmagoric story of a woman who was robbed (or raped - I can't remember) and murdered in the broad daylight of New York City. Dozens of people witnessed the entire sequence of events and NO ONE INTERVENED. Does this seem impossible to you? It most certainly did to me, but I was immediately reminded of how often I see a person spinning out on the February ice, clearly unable to drive, and I stand with other strangers and we watch, we 'diffuse responsibility', like we are the dumbest creatures alive.

Now, follow me on a necessary diversion. Last week at Jacob's Well (my wonderful church in downtown Kansas City), we discussed the Old Testament story of David and Bathsheba. In 2 chapters, we see David desire Bathsheba, take her for his own, try and frame the consequent pregnancy as legitimate but ultimately kill Bathsheba's husband: all this during the very ascendancy of his kingly prestige.
To be honest, this story has honestly confused me for most of my life: I never know what David is doing wrong and what was just normal for people back then (and don't even get me started on how confusing that ostensibly contradictory thought gets for me! I trust God where things don't make sense yet).
However, I read a bit of a guidebook last winter, pointedly called How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth (Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart). In the section regarding the Old Testament narratives, the authors explain that those who penned these stories were writing to a Jewish audience; they expected that the sins of the characters would be glaringly obvious to a reader who was familiar with the Torah. Indeed, viewing these stories through the lens of the Torah brings the messages and morals inherent in them to the surface, much like one needs special glasses to find form and order in certain 3-D images. It decodes and defuses our reading.
Our pastor supplied some of this necessary Judaic information on Sunday, and it brought to light some important themes. Monarchical rule was a new development for Israel at this point in their history: they begged God for an empirical, human king (so they could be like their neighbors, largely), and he hesitantly anointed young King David (because God, having made man, understood the danger of absolute power in the hands of man who, twisted by carnal nature, inherently tends towards dangerous declarations of self-sufficiency and self-deification). At one pivotal point in the story, King David does indeed claim moral authority. The King of Israel (the people God chose through Abraham to be His blessing to the world) has claimed moral authority, and the profundity of this moment cannot be overestimated.

Now, to begin my journey back to my primary point. While listening to this story, I began to realize that the church of Christ, the adopted children of Israel, those who God still calls to be his blessing in the world, is substantially in a very similar predicament in America. Make no mistake - I'm not saying that America is a nation originally blessed by God to be his Christian 'city on a hill': but his church in America is in the same position that the faithful Jews were when King David declared himself moral arbitor. We are followers of Yahweh, we believe that he is trying to reconcile all things unto himself and that our world and the people in it want this as well (although God is often the victim of bad marketing, and the Desire of every nation is rarely acknowledged as such), and that this has repercussions with how we live our lives, how we vote, what we buy, how we treat others, and what we strive for. When we are truly and actually fulfilling our roles as God's chosen people, we are extensions of Christ himself, bringing true justice, true love, true peace, true reconciliation to our brothers and sisters in humanity.
But we are faced with the question I ask myself in the situations above and in many others where justice, love, peace, and reconciliation are obviously missing and desperately needed: how do I get involved? I desire to be Christ-like because it is the cure for what ails us, but I myself am stuck in the same mire that King David, the cat-calling old man, and the angry twenty-something are stuck in. When I see injustice, my reaction is to fight for it, to raise my voice and strike down the offender: but the Unquestionable was questioned and made no reply. My desire is to avenge the wronged: but God claims that vengeance is his and that he will repay, and I can't help noticing that my vengeance roots itself in malice, in eye-for-an-eye logic, in the same self-deification and claims of moral authority that King David made. But his vengeance necessarily flows from love and from a desire that all should be reconciled unto him - how different must this vengeance be??

I am tired of diffusion of responsibility. I'm grieved by the terminal illnesses that plague our civic life, our communities - my community! I'm outraged by the disrespect that we often show to one another and I do not want to continue standing aside while women are degraded and humiliated, while children grow up without role models and without opportunity, while some men continue to shirk responsibility and others strain under the weight of broken cycles that continue to feed themselves with the dawning of every new day.

What does it look like to be Christ in our world? How do we bring creative imagination (note that word 'creative' - consider the depth of a social, political, economic imagination that CREATES, that beats swords and spears into plowshares and pruning hooks, from tools of death into tools for life) to our world in the name of our God Yahweh? I yearn for the problems we have today to come face to face with the sufficiency of Christ, and may I have the honor of helping bring that confrontation about, but I am struck by the immensity of the task and the complexity of being both of a son of God and a son of Adam.

God grant me the wisdom, the love, and the humility to know what You would do!