Confronted: A Meditation on Luke's Beatitudes, Kendrick Lamar, and Laura Jane Grace

This week has been all about being confronted. Being challenged. Confrontation came in the form of Kendrick’s halftime show (featuring “They Not Like Us”, among other songs), which drew the ire of so many white folks because it didn’t include them, didn’t ask their permission to critique their version of reality or what it means to be an American. It continued with the release of Laura Jane Grace’s new single, “Your God (God’s Dick)” which speaks to the queer experience of being completely graphically violated by the partriarchal version of Christianity that has been allowed to fester and grow into whatever it is we are living through right now.

We progressive Christians really want to be on the right side of history and stand with the oppressed. And so, we can tend toward trying to distance ourselves from the “wrong” kind of Christians, the ones who are perpetuating all of the oppression. We don’t even think about how we might be culpable as well.

We read things like the words of the prophets, or Jesus’ woes in the Gospel, and think those criticisms are being leveled at someone else. We get smug and say, “yeah, that’s right. They not like us.”

But what if Jesus and the prophets actually are talking to us? What if Kendrick and Laura are calling us out? Yes, even we inclusive, progressive ally types who work really hard to be and say all the right things?

What if a big part of all of these problems is that we tried to play nice, because we wanted the people who kept our institutions funded to keep coming in and not get offended and take their tithes and pledges with them?

Because here’s the thing – creating accessible space for the “out group(s)” will always make people from the “in group” uncomfortable. And we’ve tried to steer clear of discomfort, of confrontation. We haven’t been willing to let BIPOC and queer and disabled people really tell us how they feel, how the institutions that we’ve helped to prop up have caused them harm. Because, it’s only those other guys who’ve done that, right?

Those who call ourselves allies who identify as Christian have some soul searching to do right now. I recently had a conversation with a leader in our diocese where I was asked: “what does solidarity look like in your context?” And I struggled to come up with an answer at the time, but as I look at this week’s gospel reading (Luke 6:17-26) it becomes clearer.

“Blessed are you who are poor, blessed are you who are hungry, blessed are you who weep, blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, defame you…”

Solidarity means stepping up and taking all that the oppressed we claim allyship with have been bearing all along. Poverty, hunger, grief, hatred, exclusion. Confront, and be prepared to be confronted. We have to tell a different story, and the only way to do that is to be loud and be willing to lose what we have, including our reputation, our safety, our certainty.

Laura Jane Grace has another song, called “The Swimming Pool Song,” that speaks to this need to let go of oppressive structures to make space for something new, even if it pushes us far outside of our place of comfort:

I am a burning church
I am artifice and years collapsing
I have not yet become all that I'll be
And when my body has been spent, my soul here will remain
Graffiti on a wall for all eyes to see

This only feels like the death of evеrything

Those with nothing left to lose – those in the crosshairs of fascism – are speaking to us the story that we need to hear and repeat. We need not let our fragile egos push us away from the healing that will come from being confronted, repenting, and changing our path.

Instead of scapegoating the “wrong” kind of Christians for mucking everything up, why don’t we try being better at living the way Jesus has called us to live? And accept the critique and scrutiny that is coming from the very wise people outside the church, who are telling us exactly where and what we need to fix?

As Second Isaiah tells us: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

If we can manage to do some of that, maybe then our story will be worth listening to.

-Rev Brian Petersen