For proof that ordination does not confer upon the priest a shiny, new ontological status, you need look no further than the clergy group pages on Facebook. Over the past week I’ve had more than a few occasions to do a double-take of the nasty comments and unsubtle racism posted by clergy (as in, vicars of Jesus) about the violence in Ferguson, Missouri.
One Reverend cited recent black-on-black shootings in Chicago and followed with a Rush-worthy, self-pitying lament:
‘I guess people only care about evil when it has a white face.’
What’s called ‘partisanship’ in politics becomes something worse in a Christian forum: tribalism.
Seeing another as Other. Dividing up the perspectives into Us and Them and then quickly looking around for a scapegoat.
What’s all too evident on clergy pages is seen in larger surveys and polls. Generally, white Americans identify with the white police officer who murdered a black boy while black Americans identify with the boy who was shot 6 times by a white police officer from a nearly all-white police precinct for a crime(s) for which white kids rarely even get hassled.
Whenever a story like Michael Brown’s or Trayvon Martin’s hit the news, we choose sides.
Rally behind our tribe.
Keep our feet planted in our shoes’ perspective and see ‘them’ as ‘other.’
In other words, we violate the first commandment.
Yep, you read that right.
Herbert McCabe, the late Dominican philosopher, followed Thomas Aquinas in arguing that it’s not so much that God reveals the 10 Commandments to us but rather the 10 Commandments reveal God to us.
McCabe notes how the commandments chief purpose is to distinguish God from the gods.
The gods of the nations in the Old Testament, McCabe argues: “represents a settling for a partial local identity.”
In giving the first commandment, God identifies himself not as a god but as the God who liberates from the gods: “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of slavery in the house of Egypt. You shall have no other gods but me.” McCabe notes the irony of a God who identifies himself as a Liberator but quickly sets about giving us rules. This is because the 10 Commandments also reveal a bitter truth about ourselves:
“One of the peculiar things about humanity is that when we are left to do exactly what we like, we straight away look around for someone to enslave ourselves to, and if we cannot find a master nearby we will invent one.
The true God reveals himself as the One who summons humanity out of this degradation we cling to, who summons us to the painful business of being free.”
It’s only when read against the backdrop of Ferguson and the comment threads it provokes that it becomes clear what McCabe means by the painful business of being free.
For its our own preferred tribes, races, clans, perspectives, political parties, nations, _____________ from which the true God seeks to deliver us.
The avoidance of such gods is, the Old Testament makes clear, the basic distinguishing demand made of God’s People.
Says McCabe:
“The important thing is not just to be religious, to worship something somehow. The important thing is to find, or be found by, the right God and to reject and struggle against the others. The worship of any other god is a form of slavery.
To pay homage to the forces of nature, to the spirit of a particular place or people, to a nation or race is to submit to slavery and degradation.
The Old Testament begins by saying to such gods ‘I do not believe and I will not serve.’
The other gods make you feel at home in a place or tribe or group or the country you grew up in and love, with them you know where you are.
But the harsh God of freedom calls you out of all this into a desert where all the old familiar landmarks are gone, where you must wander over the wilderness waiting for what God will bring.
This God of freedom will allow you none of the comforts of religion. Not only does he tear you away from the devotions to your native place and people, but he will not even allow you to worship him in the old way. You are to have no image of God because the only image of God is humanity.”
When you realize, as McCabe does, that the gods of the Old Testament represent our normal proclivity to root our identity in our preferred tribes, races, clans, perspectives, political parties, or nations, you realize why it was so hard for Israel to journey out of Egypt and why it was so tempting for them to return there.
Far be it from me to lecture my fellow clergy, but, as McCabe points out, whenever you hear a tribalistic comment like ‘I guess people only care about evil when it has a white face’ you’re hearing the rattling of very old chains.
You’re hearing the echo of Israel’s lament to return to Pharaoh.
It’s the sound of exactly the sort of bondage from which the true God frees us, a point Jesus reiterates when he takes bread and wine and declares himself our Passover.
