God's Torn Heart: A New Story (5th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 3:12-18; June 19, 2016)

God's Torn Heart: A New Story

5th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 3:12-18
June 19, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Human beings are meaning-makers. We arrange things, put them in order, find patterns. We impose patterns if we need to. We see pictures in the clouds on a summer day. We see constellations in the night sky. We investigate events and look for cause and effect. We invent conspiracies to explain events that seem to have no explanation. We tell stories. More than anything, we tell stories.

We tell stories that explain why things are the way they are. Why is it difficult and painful for women to give birth, especially since animals seem to do it more easily? Why is farming such hard work when animals seem to find their food without toil? The second and third chapters of Genesis tell a story that gives an explanation for the cost of culture.

With our stories we create a map of the world that, if it isn't perfect (and what map is?), will at least help us get where we want to go and recognize it when we get there.

When something horrible happens, whether it's an automobile accident that kills parents and spares their young children or the exile of a nation from its holy ground, until we are able to fit it into a story, we will worry at it like a chipped tooth. When a man shoots his way into an LGBTQ club, fires a thousand rounds of ammunition, kills fifty celebrants, and seriously injures another fifty-three, it makes no sense. It's not just that we are angry and sad and afraid. We are also confused and lost. It's as if our map of the world has been shot apart. We have to navigate a world that is not making sense.

In the face of the unspeakable we begin to speak. We say we are looking for answers, explanations, but that's not quite true. What we're looking for is a story, a story that will hold this event in some meaningful relationship with other events in a pattern that makes sense to us. The easiest way to do this is to reach for a story that we already know.

As soon as the shooter's name was known, some reached for a familiar story, a story that has shaped our national priorities and policies for the last fifteen years. The shootings in Orlando early last Sunday morning fit into the story of "radical Islamic terrorism," as one presidential candidate has it. This was, then, proof of the threat posed to our way of life by outsiders, outsiders with skin several shades darker than mine, outsiders with an unfamiliar religion, outsiders who are wrapped up in images of violence and fanaticism, of decadence and backwardness. Both presumptive presidential candidates called for renewed attacks on ISIS. Get that: the proper response to an attack on a nightclub in Florida is to call for increased bombing in Iraq and Syria. If that sounded reasonable to them, if it sounds reasonable to us, it is because of the story that we invoked as the way to make sense of the Pulse massacre.

There were problems with this story pretty quickly. Although the gunman (whose name I have not and will not utter) pledged allegiance to ISIS during a call to 911 and although ISIS claimed the credit for the shooting, the shooter seems not to have been a radical anything, not really an ISIS franchisee, only a woman-hating, homophobic, wannabe cop with a violent temper.

Although this version of the story might advance a political agenda, secure the profits of the arms industry, and put money in the pockets of the terrorism experts called in by the news agencies to blather on authoritatively and fill the time by extrapolating from guesses, it failed to provide for much of a narrative frame for this event.

For one thing, it erases both the fact that this was an attack on a club that offered itself to the LGBTQ community and that the attack was carried out on Latin Night, when most of the patrons were latinos and latinas, the majority of whom were puertoriqueños. They were, in other words, not only gay but gay persons of color. This is of a piece with the often-repeated assertion that this was the largest mass shooting in American history, when it was only the largest mass shooting in American history carried out by a single shooter. The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864 ended with the slaughter of over 150, most of them women and children.1  Between 250 and 300 died in the Massacre of Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.2  Why is it that when straight, white culture tells the story it gets white-washed and straight-washed, that is, persons of color and LGBTQ persons simply vanish, unless, of course, they are the perpetrators.?

Telling the Orlando massacre as part of the story of global Islamic terrorism is so useful, though, that the inconvenient details can be forgotten. This version of the story has legs, as they say. But that isn't the only way to tell the story.

Other atrocities have become stories about mental illness. This is harder to do in this case because we usually reserve this story for events with a white perpetrator. When the perpetrator is Muslim, African American, or Latino, we have their roles prepared in advance: they are terrorists, thugs, or drug dealers. But we never try to understand an atrocity by assuming that there is something wrong with white culture, something that a white gunman would embody or represent. A white gunman has to be represented as a one-off, a mistake, or an anomaly. So when we account for an atrocity, it becomes a story of a deviant white man, a white man who went off the rails, and so a white man who has nothing to do with other white people. But, as I say, that story line wasn't really available, with a shooter who was even sort-of Muslim.

Another frame story, and one that never appears in major news media, is the story of the violence inherent in patriarchy. How many of the mass murders committed in the last twenty years or so have been committed by women? None. A massacre is something that men do. This story could be told as part of the story of toxic masculinity, of maleness gone amok. The signs in this case are there: a first marriage that ended because of domestic violence, the shooter's fascination with power, and his co-workers' reports of tirades. I think this story is neglected for the obvious reason that most of the reporters are men, their bosses are men, and their bosses' bosses are men. Toxic masculinity? Masculinity as a public health hazard? That might make a really useful story, but it's not going to sell AR-15s.

Speaking of which, one story that is being told to make meaning out of this event is the story of America's on-going love/hate relationship with guns. The Pulse massacre was not America's largest mass shooting, but we should remember that the Sand Creek Massacre of over 150 was conducted by 700 Colorado militia men over the space of a couple of hours. In Orlando a single gunman with one rifle killed 50 people in a few minutes. Clearly the weapons available today are of a different order entirely from the Civil War firearms of Colonel Chivington's troops. So this event has been taken up into the story of our attempts to find a way of living with these deadly objects, a way that doesn't end with so much death. We have an opportunity to protect the rights of the users of firearms for sport and self-protection that doesn't involve easy civilian access to military-grade weapons that were designed to allow one person to kill many people quickly. Recent history tells us that we don't have much time if it's going to be done. The NRA already has its campaign ready to roll out. However this story turns out, it is not a story that can answer the question, "Why?" only a story that move toward answering, "How?"

One other story arc has gained some ground on the others. This wasn't just an attack on a random gathering of Americans. It was an attack on the LGBTQ community and, in particular, the Latinx LGBTQ community. Let me explain my use of the term "Latinx." As you may know, the terms Latino and Latina are more common, but they divide the world into grammatical masculine and feminine. As members of the LGBTQ community remind us or teach us, the world is not that neat. There those who are both and those who are neither and so it is easier for some to invent a term than to use what the straight world has given them. And that is the point of Pulse. The club, like many LGBTQ clubs, functions as a safe haven, a place where people who everywhere else are forced to define themselves or hide themselves in the often hostile gaze of straight culture. Pulse is to the Latinx LGBTQ community of Orlando as Mother Emmanuel AME Church is to African American Christians in Charleston: a place where people can be who they are, accepted for who they are, without fear for their safety or lives. This is what makes an attack on an African American church or an LGBTQ club so devastating, quite apart from the immediate injuries and deaths. The unscathed survive only to find themselves without that place of safety, that refuge, that sanctuary. Through no fault of their own they find themselves homeless in their own community, exiles in effect.

Both as an attack on people of color and an attack on LGBTQ persons, the Pulse massacre is one more of a long line of acts of violence against those outside of the racial and orientation/gender mainstreams. Violence against non-white, non-straight people has been a feature of our history from the very beginning.

We are learning, not without a struggle, not without resistance, not without discomfort, to own our history. If the Battle of Concord Bridge is a part of our history and we are rightly proud of our long-ago struggles for freedom, then Sandy Creek and Pulse and other atrocities are, unfortunately, part of our history, too. We have to live them down. The best way to do that is to bring them to an end.

During the last week I have been sad, outraged, angry, cynical, depressed, confused. Friends and colleagues of mine are suffering and I do not know what to do. I have been in touch with several of them to say, what? That I know? I don't. That I'm sorry? That seems pretty cheap. That I will stand with them? But how can I when their credentials are in jeopardy and mine are perfectly safe for as long as I want them to be?

One of the things that we must do, I'm convinced, is to recognize that our rhetoric has real consequences. The debate in our denomination--and in our nation--that presents itself as being about "homosexuality" is in fact about whether people who do not fit into the two gender boxes straight culture demands that everyone fit into and people who love differently than straight people love are to be considered fully human, as bearing the image of God. By declaring that the being and the loving of LGBTQ persons is "incompatible with Christian teachings," we have helped in some little and not-so-little ways to pave the path that led a shooter who had seen two men exchanging a gesture of love to conclude that he had a right or even an obligation to respond to his discomfort by killing fifty human beings and seriously wounding as many as that again.

Our Methodist tradition's way of organizing its life has been life-giving for many of us and world-transforming in places that we can point to with justifiable pride. Before we began the Imagine No Malaria campaign, a child died from malaria in Africa every two minutes. Now that rate is every eight minutes. That's life in the real world for so many children and life without the grief of losing children for their parents.

But our denomination stands at one end of a spectrum the other end of which is occupied by the Orlando shooter, by the California preacher who celebrated the deaths and prayed for more, and by the Westboro Baptist Church. Of course The United Methodist Church does not advocate the death of LGBTQ folks. In fact, as the Social Principles say,

We affirm that all persons are individuals of sacred worth, created in the image of God. All persons need the ministry of the Church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship that enables reconciling relationships with God, with others, and with self. 

and,

We implore families and churches not to reject or condemn lesbian and gay members and friends.  

But at the same time,

The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.

We refuse to marry same-sex couples and we refuse to ordain "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals."

We say this as if heterosexuality and homosexuality were practices that we could either do or not do rather than aspects of our identity and therefore something we are all the time. We say that it is the behavior we are concerned with, but our message nonetheless is that LGBTQ persons are flawed in their being as well as in their loving. But none of that is supposed to add up to a rejection or condemnation of LGBTQ folks.

We want LGBTQ people in the pews. We want them on this side [baptizand's side] of the baptismal font. We want them on this side [congregation's side] of the table. But we don't want them on this side [officiant's] of the font, nor this side [officiant's] of the table, and, if it's a wedding, we want them there [in pews] but not here [in front of Table]. Friends, that just won't wash. We can't have it both ways. We can't pretend that our denomination is not part of the problem. We can't keep adding heat to a pan of water and expect it not to boil. The United Methodist Church helped in its own little, unintentional and well-meaning way to create the Orlando massacre.

Perhaps there are other stories that could be told and are being told as you and I struggle to understand, to repair our maps of the world, to make meaning out of an event that jars us and leaves us in sorrow and anger.But there is one more story that must be told and that is the story of God's dream of who we might and could become. At our baptism, you and I became a part of that story. We came to the font. A few of us walked, most of us were carried, but none of us came on our own. We came in the company of others. And we were drawn by the grace of God, the love of God that refuses no one and welcomes all. Water was poured and prayed over. Questions were asked and answered. Among them was the question that has guided me and kept me keeping on when nothing and no one else could do it:

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?

It is a part of the life of Jesus' followers to find ourselves in a world where evil, injustice, and oppression are real and, moreover, they are not always easy to spot. They present themselves in "forms." Sometimes they come to us as the stories we tell as when we tell our story in such a way as to cover up a crime and excuse ourselves. Our stories then become part of the crime. Our stories themselves become oppressive, unjust, even evil.

When we tell the story of the Pulse massacre for our own benefit, to advance the agenda of increasing our own power, it becomes an oppressive story. When we tell it to erase the evidence of the racism and Islamophobia that led to this crime, it becomes an unjust story. When we tell it to incite violence against Muslims or the LGBTQ community, it becomes an evil story.

But we don't have to do any of that. We have the freedom and the power to see that there are ways of telling the story that are a form of evil, injustice, and oppression. We have the freedom and power to resist those ways of telling the story. We can use those stories to help us discern the precise shape of the evil that we are confronting in the Orlando massacre.

And then we have the freedom and power to tell a different story. We are baptized into just such a story, a story of solidarity, justice and liberation. We (and I mean we white people) can see in our own stories and in the stories of the people of color even here in Decorah those points of commonality that can become the beginning of conversation. We (and I mean we straight folks) can see in our own stories and in the stories of the LGBTQ people even here in Decorah those points of commonality that can become the beginning of conversations. Those conversations, if we are careful to listen for the voice of God speaking through each other, if we are careful to let down our guard and honor each other, could lead even as far as reconciliation.

The path toward reconciliation isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is recognition of the nature of evil, injustice, and oppression, and of our own implication in those things. That isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is repentance, the inner conversion that doesn't just recognize but resists evil, injustice and oppression. That isn't easy. On the way to reconciliation is restitution that engages us deeply in the work of repairing the damage that has been done. That isn't easy. Those could be the next chapters of God's story for us.

In the prophetic tradition the Orlando massacre gives us a glimpse of the hell that we create for each other in our shared life. The prophetic tradition goes on to announce that there is a space for change. The door of our self-built prison has been left ajar and we can escape if we choose. We can escape and run into God's dream. That is our story, the story that's waiting for us.


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