Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God in post-Christendom

Thoughts

Status Games, Racism, Trauma, and the Kingdom of God

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As someone who’s always been tuned into issues of fairness and justice, Jesus’s parable of the workers in the vineyard has always fascinated and frustrated me.

A landowner hires workers throughout the day to work in his vineyard. The result is that the workers hired at the end of the day end up making the same amount of money as those who worked the whole day. When they complain about this, the landowner gently rebukes them: “Didn’t you agree to work for this amount of pay? Or are you resentful because I’m generous?”

Jesus’s point is to again say to his disciples, “Those who are last will be first. And those who are first will be last.” What Jesus is getting at here is that the kingdom of God radically disrupts the relentless status games we seem unable to stop playing.

Disrupting our status games

Seeking status over others seems to be hard-wired into humanity. If a sibling’s present under the Christmas tree is bigger than ours, we feel jealous. We can’t rejoice with them because we can only think of what it means for our status.

If everyone gets the same pay at the end of the day, how will we know who actually worked the hardest and longest? If everyone goes to college and it’s free, it ceases to be useful as a status symbol, and people will look for other ways to establish status over others. We are constantly, it seems, on the hunt for ways to send signals to others that we are better than them in some way.

This is why the radical equality of the kingdom is so threatening and radical to us. In reality, it just means that we all stand on the same ground: broken sinners who have received forgiveness and healing out the abundance of God’s love and provision. But what it feels like is that “many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.”

As has been said, when you’re accustomed to privilege and status, equality feels like oppression and persecution. And I suppose the opposite would be true as well: when you’re accustomed to actual oppression, equality feels like a promotion, or at least a breath of fresh air.

As the Virgin Mary proclaimed:

He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty-handed.

Luke 1:52-53

Racism as a status game

This seems to be the dynamic of racism in America. We have had such a strong caste system in place for so long that the status roles are embedded into our culture on a powerful, subconscious level. Racial trauma has been passed down from generation to generation, in both black and white bodies, and thus the status roles of the American caste system are literally baked into our DNA.

This is why white people who don’t think of themselves as racist can react so automatically negatively to basic statements and actions of black equality, like hearing someone say “Black lives matter,” or watching a black football player kneel during the national anthem. On a visceral level, white people are feeling their status being threatened, and their bodies are telling them that their very survival is at stake.

Lose your life to find it

This is why it’s so vital for us (especially as white people) to heed Jesus’s instruction to “lose your life” so you can find (true) life. In other words, when you feel your status being threatened, just notice what’s happening in your body. Don’t trust it, react to it, or try to stop feeling it. Just allow it to be, and then allow it to pass.

You’ll find a new kind of life on the other side: a life in God’s kingdom, where we all occupy the same standing: wounded and broken people who have received forgiveness and healing out the abundance of God’s love and generosity.

Then we’ll able to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, because we’ll know that nothing at all of value is being threatened when all that’s at stake is status. We’ll be able to drop our relentless status games and rest in love of God together.

A Life That Cannot Be Destroyed

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Jesus Christ, our High Priest, arises to this rank not because of his physical ancestry, but “thought the power of a life that cannot be destroyed” (Heb 7:16).

I’ve been reading Fr. John Behr’s book The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death, and one of his assertions is that the death and resurrection of Jesus were not “self-interpreting” events.

So the early Christians didn’t actually understand that Jesus had a “life that cannot be destroyed” until after they reflected on his death and resurrection through reading the (Old Testament) Scriptures in a new way… that is, as the Scriptures that, as Jesus said, “spoke of him.”

There are lots of implications of this that I’m actively thinking about right now, including the radical difference between this allegorical reading of the Scriptures the early church did with the predominant historical-critical reading we do today.

It feels obvious that the way to interpret Scripture is to try and figure out “what was really happening” in the author’s mind who wrote it, and I think there is some value in this, but the early Christians didn’t seem to be bothered by this question at all.

Instead, they assumed that the foundational reality to read the Scriptures from is now the death and resurrection of Jesus, so now they take on new meaning that the original author could never have dreamt of.

This kind of allegorical approach, though, is perhaps more familiar to us than we realize. Every time we preach a text of Scripture as Scripture, we are assuming that God has something to say to us today that the original author of the text we are preaching from could never have imagined, yes?

It will, of course, have coherence with what God said then, but God will be saying something new today, through these Scriptures that speak of Christ, who is indeed alive and working now.

Imitate What You Receive

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“Normal” church life has been disrupted by the pandemic, which has given many people an unexpected opportunity to rethink what worship is, and what it’s for.

This week I’ve been thinking about this quote from Gregory the Great (Bishop of Rome, died 604 AD), who is talking about how worship works, and how to worship in spirit and truth: “If the sacrament of the Lord’s passion is to work its effect in us, we must imitate what we receive and proclaim to humanity what we revere.”

We must “imitate what we receive.” Isn’t that interesting? To imitate the body and blood of Jesus is to “take on the form and pattern of Jesus’ death,” as Paul said it to the Philippians. We offer ourselves as a living sacrifice just as Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for sin.

And then we “proclaim to humanity what we revere.” We speak. We allow what has been embodied in us to be proclaimed intelligibly to all who would hear it, calling them into the life we ourselves have received. The shape of “effective” worship, then, can be outlined like this:

  1. We hear the Word (Jesus in Scripture),
  2. We respond to the Word (in prayer and surrender),
  3. We receive the Word (in Bread and Wine at the Table of Jesus), an
  4. We are sent to imitate and proclaim the Word (in service and witness).

This is nothing new, of course, but it was an interesting angle on it that Gregory’s quote got me thinking about… maybe it’s helpful for you, too, as you think about what it means to worship and be the church these days.

Our Humble Complaint

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These words from Dame Julian of Norwich really landed for me the other day (she talks often of Jesus as our “Mother,” FYI):

We make our humble complaint to our beloved Mother, and he sprinkles us with his precious blood, and makes our soul pliable and tender, and restores us to our full beauty in course of time… And then the true meaning of those lovely words will be made known to us, ‘It is all going to be all right. You will see for yourself that everything is going to be all right.’

In the midst of our new awareness of the chaos of the world right now, these words are comforting.

I also keep bringing my “humble complaint” to Jesus, my “beloved Mother,” praying that the future all-rightness of the world will continue to manifest itself in the present, in my relationships and in our world.