When we confess that we are captive to sin, it is not merely individual bad acts or moral lapses that we confess to. Instead, we also call to mind the systems and structures that we participate in that commit sin on our behalf and sometimes with our assent. It can be much harder to discern our involvement in these structures than to understand that we spoke crossly to our neighbor or failed to help a neighbor in need even when it was in our power to do so. Part of the reason that structures are so hard to perceive is the flow of good that comes from them. If we were all involved in a system of oppression that provided no material benefit, no comfort and no sense of human good, it would be assured that we would want to escape from it.
However, when systems of oppression provide easier routes for going on a business trip, traveling around the world on vacation, getting into highly selective schools, being hired, getting a loan, being tenured and the like, those of us who benefit from these advantages have a hard time seeing the downside. Consequently, the insistence of people who have been the victims of prejudicial violence, whether it be exclusion, name-calling, housing discrimination, being unable to bury your own spouse, or outright physical violence including government sponsored genocide, can seem like calling too much attention to themselves, or even asking for special attention and redress that is disproportionate to their complaint. We look for ways to cling to the idea of privilege, which at its heart suggests that while all people may be human in some sense, the fullest humanity resides in men more than women or transgendered people, in whites more than people of color, in the financially successful more than the poor, in heterosexuals more than gay, lesbian or bisexual people. We take solace that even if we do not meet all of the conditions for superiority, we are at least better than one of these "others".
As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Galatians:
27As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. Gal 3:27-29
I wonder how easily we might adopt such a radical baptismal formula in our own liturgy, or in our own welcome strategy. Could we even contextualize these thoughts to our own time to recapture the radical nature of them? Could we declare from the Font that "there is no longer American or Mexican, there us no longer straight or gay, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."?
The Law has destroyed the human instituted distinctions between us, for we have all been revealed as sinners, as unrighteous, as damnable, and as outright enemies of God. Confronted with our own shortcomings, we defiantly wave a banner in God's face, a banner older than any political entity, older than any state or tribe. We have the banner that bears images of the fruit we should not have eaten, and the fig leaves that express our shame at our own bodies. We cry out that we have stolen the power of judgment from God, and that we know what is "right and wrong" and will not hear of God leveling all of the structures we have built to keep things, and even people in their place. Ultimately we are left to despair in the face of what God is doing and to weep for ourselves.
The Gospel gives us hope in this very circumstance, that when we have assumed a world of limited good, and when we have participated in structures that have sought to ration out that limited good on the basis of race or gender, that God's forgiveness has invaded this thicket too. God has waded into the whole mess of human life, both our individual failings and the power dynamics that pervade the whole human race. In setting all of us on the same plane, rebellious and prideful children that we are, God has created the circumstances for forgiveness to be received as an equally undeserved gift and blessing by every human person. The cost for such a gift was nothing less than entering into these same power structures and enduring the deadly brunt of human judgment.
Jesus walked the earth as a poor Jew in an occupied nation under the sway of the most powerful nation of his age. He walked the earth as a laborer who though religious had no right to contend with the religious authorities. He walked the earth, derided as a fool, an evil wizard, a blasphemer, a destroyer of good society, a friend of drunks and whores, and a glutton and drunkard himself. He walked the earth under suspicion of being a bastard child, perhaps the product of fornication or the all too common practice of military rape. When he sought to proclaim a festival of Jubilee, a year of God's favor and a reign of God that was the source of unlimited good, we mocked him. When he told us how deep and wide and unbelievably awesome God's love was, we murdered him. Were this the end, we might conclude that God was foolish to contend with something as intractable as systems of human power. As Christians, we confess that God raised Christ from the dead, a sign of forgiveness for us, a declaration that even death is a feeble tool of domination, and that we have been caught up in the Holy Spirit's work of making the whole creation new. A creation where only one has privilege, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
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