Given at the Saturday Zoom prayer service for my beloved parish, St. Mary’s in Seattle. On Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20.
We gather here today in praise and fellowship for the first time since the Inauguration. I streamed the ceremony with Finn as we started our morning last Wednesday; I shared a few internet pictures of Bernie Sanders looking adorably grouchy in his parka and mittens; I hoped that I’d wake the next day with a feeling of relief, or even joy. But the reality is, I mostly just feel weariness; and a wave, rising to fill the space now open in my heart, of grief.
Does anyone else here feel it, too—a grief they’ve long put off just now catching up? A grief for all that’s been lost, violated, and despoiled in the last year since the first reported COVID cases in the US? In the four years of the last administration? In the last four hundred years in this country, my country, our beautiful and unjust country?
The numbers of those harmed by our government’s ineptitude and dishonesty and our society’s cruel inequalities are huge, but my mind shuts down before huge numbers. I’m grieving today instead for individuals. I’m grieving for Sonny Quitlong, whose voice was one of the first I ever heard at St. Mary’s when my mom invited me to mass in 2005, almost a decade before I joined the church. I’m grieving for the more than a dozen federal prisoners who our outgoing administration—led by a Catholic Attorney General—rushed to execute. I’m grieving for Ashli Babbitt, who soaked up years of racist, paranoid conspiracy theories, who stormed the Capitol and who died for a lie.
Our new administration can rush to repair some of the damage done, but it cannot restore any of these earthly lives. As I read the news, my own hope for our nation feels weak: not snuffed out, but flickering. So where do these readings call me to go, and how to do they tell me to make my way?
Some Sundays, the readings are a balm, a relief. But my first reaction to these readings was irritation, uneasiness, sorrow, and fear. An ancient city whose citizens are fasting in sackcloth; Jesus proclaiming repentance; St. Paul warning us that the world in its present form is passing away. Agh! I want to push these readings away, but I do so because of a disquiet I know begins from a recognition of their truth. The fragility of our sense of “normal” is clear to us even as we try to clutch it. Who in the two weeks since the storming of the Capitol, in the last year since COVID, in the last four years since Trump’s victory, could deny that our certainties are weak and that our old comforts are passing away?
So, it was with a gloomy heart that I read of the start of Jesus’s public ministry. “Repent,” he says, “and believe in the gospel.” This was a message those around him were hungry for. “Widen your mind,” this admonition might also be translated, “and trust and commit yourself to the good news.” Good news, good news: in our country’s provincial Galilees and in our imperial Ninevehs, the news doesn’t seem very good. But it is into these very places, into this very history, that Jesus enters.
Perhaps it’s this entry—the One Who Was before the foundation of the world coming as one of us, flesh and blood, into our history—that teaches us how to hear the other readings.
St. Paul’s message, otherwise, is hard to stomach. I want—don’t we all?—to treasure my dearest relationships, to give myself fully to my weeping and rejoicing, to fully enjoy all my impulse online purchases that have gotten me through this pandemic. Although this is a terribly fraught moment for our nation, I don’t wish to believe that time is running out and passing away. “No great reckoning in my child’s lifetime,” I pray; as, perhaps Finn will pray if they become a parent. But St. Paul is merely reminding us of something obvious: we can’t make idols of anything temporary in our lives: our home, our loved ones, our families, our society. Who knows what the future holds? How many of those who stormed the Capitol did so because they’d attached their entire sense of well-being, their entire hope, to a deep investment in our fanatical, paranoid former president? All that endures is God. Helplessly, tenderly, committedly, all I can do is acknowledge that things pass away and try to make God more real in the world.
So OK, how do we do it? How do we go about making God more real? In our Old Testament reading, we hear Jonah, humbled and zealous after three days in the fish’s belly, offering God’s frightening call of repentance to the Ninevites. If you’re like me, the place names in much of the Bible exude a musty but lovely remoteness that means they’re hard to place specifically: they all seem to exist next door to each other in a place called Distant, in a time called Long Ago. So, I was surprised to learn in my research that Nineveh was not in Israel or Judea: Nineveh, instead, was the capital of the neighboring Assyrian Empire, which had recently devastated Israel and sacked Jerusalem. So this means that Jonah, urged along by God, travels to the capital of his people’s enemies to attempt to awaken their hearts to their sin: to their complicity in terrible wrongdoing. He is sent here because the Ninevites, as impossible as it is for Jonah to believe, are precious to God; and Jonah awakens in them a grief that can be the first seed of real transformation.
Who are those who have hurt us? How can we be ready to acknowledge them as they make small changes—as they mourn their own pasts? I think of Ashley Babbitt’s family. What would true healing look like for them? And how, turning the scenario around, can we listen for the Jonahs in our own lives, in our own culture—the youth in the streets calling us to account for our own toleration of racist state violence, the undocumented organizers demanding we actually practice the welcome we always preach? Who is reminding us that we, too, live in Nineveh right now? How can our tears be the first seeds toward a true repentance, a metanoia that widens our hearts and our human solidarity?
The last question of these readings is, where should this repentance carry us? One answer comes in the place to which Jesus returns after his forty days in the wilderness: his old hometown. I was surprised to learn that Galilee, a place whose name I’d sung in so many hymns and savored saying aloud, was looked down on by most Judeans. One of my favorite Bible study guides, Father Gustavo Gutierrez’s book The God of Life, notes that Galilee was remote and provincial, suspiciously close to pagan communities who affected its culture as well as its dialect. (Remember the servant in front of high priest’s house at the end of Matthew’s gospel, who recognizes in a moment that Peter must be one of Jesus’s followers: “even your speech,” she says, “gives you away.”) Yet Jesus begins his ministry precisely by returning to his home district, among the despised and marginal, to proclaim his message—to call us to widen our hearts and to trust and commit ourselves to his good news—and gather his first followers.
But grief comes with hearing this call. Grief at what we’ve lost. Grief at the terrible injustices we’ve accepted, one way or another, as normal. Grief for the future. As Jesus calls us to repentance—metanoia, a widening of mind—our tears are a part of letting Jesus closer to us, letting his wounded but unbreakable love for each human soul pierce us. As in Galilee, as in Nineveh, so in Seattle: tears clear our eyes. In taking our lament to God, we are refusing to forget the suffering we’ve felt, we’ve witnessed, we’ve been complicit in. In our lament, as Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson writes, we refuse to rationalize injustice. We even “express the shadow of a hope for the future.” On the other side of our lament, we can discern more clearly that Jesus is speaking to us, right now, from the fringes of our own society: from the COVID beds, prison cells, neighborhoods surveilled by ICE. “Even today, as Christ sits at [God’s] right hand,” Gutierrez tells us, “some of Galilee’s dust must still be on his feet.”
May I remember that my tears are part of my hope for a more just future; that tears let God into my heart; that tears can guide my feet toward walking alongside those whose dignity, whose beauty, whose humanity are most defiled by this old “normal” that is passing away. May I weep! And at the end of my life, may I be able to show Christ that my feet, too, are dirtied by Galilee’s dust.
Jay Aquinas Thompson 