Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

A centered, opt-out community

This essay published

Mark 10:13-16
Open Door Mennonite Church

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

When I was in Raleigh, I got called to consult with a downtown church that was concerned because people who were homeless were showing up each week for the service. This church, like a lot of downtown churches, was dying. The families had moved away, and a building designed for 300 had less than 40 for worship each week.

And then these homeless people showed up. They weren’t making demands; they weren’t asking for help. They were just showing up to worship.

I congratulated them on increasing their worship attendance, but I said didn’t understand why they called me, because I thought they wanted more people to come to their church. They started telling me all the reasons they didn’t want people who were homeless to worship there – concerns about how they smelled, concerns about “attracting the wrong element”, and “what will the neighbors think?”.

Basically, their concern was that these new people weren’t like the old people, and that would upset the community norms.

Every community – whether we are talking about a neighborhood, a church, or the Elks club – has community norms. These norms are the rules – often unspoken and unwritten – about things like who the community is, what is acceptable behavior, and how does one become part of the community?

Very quickly in the life of a community, you end up having to answer two questions: “What kind of community are we?”, and “Who can belong to our community?” I guarantee you, if you have been a community any length of time, you have already answered those questions, even if you have never thought of them in those terms. You either did it implicitly or explicitly, and I am convinced that if you do them explicitly, you will get better results.

Often we try to avoid thinking about them by saying things like, “Anybody can belong! All are welcome!”. And that sounds all good, and holy, and inclusive. And it’s fine, as far as it goes. And it usually quits going the moment someone who isn’t exactly like us shows up.

I bet the disciples believed everyone was welcome in their community too. But when the kids started to make a little too much noise, or be a little too bothersome, the disciples started acting like gatekeepers and tried to put up barriers to keep them out.

And that is what we do too. When folks who are not like us, who make us uncomfortable, who don’t quite fit in, show up, sometimes we try to serve as gatekeepers to keep them out. Oh, we don’t say it like that. We use respectable sounding reasons to justify it.

Earlier, I said that every community has to answer the questions “What kind of community are we?”, and “Who can belong to our community?” You see both of these questions being answered implicitly in the passage we read today.

To the question, “What kind of community are we?” – there are two ways to structure a community, and neither of them is inherently wrong. The first way is to build around the boundaries, and the second way is to build around the center.

Building around boundaries is the default way to build a community, so it is the one we are most familiar with. We call them bounded communities. Fondren. First Baptist Church. The Elks Lodge.

The community known as Belhaven has boundaries, and so it is easy to know if you are a member of the Belhaven community, because you live within those boundaries. If you live in Alta Woods, then you don’t belong to the community known as Belhaven.

One reason community life is so contentious sometimes is that once you have determined the boundaries, somebody always feels the need to defend those boundaries.

The other way to form a community is by building around the center. The centered community, instead of asking what are the limits to being in our community, asks itself, “What is at the core of our community?” and then they build out from that.

This means that not everyone in the community finds themselves in the same spot, or on the same page.

Take the community called “Conservatives”. If I say that someone is a Conservative, you know what I mean, even though individual conservatives believe different things. Being a Conservative means that certain principles are important to you, even if different Conservatives exercise those principles in different ways. And if I said I was Conservative, there are no boundaries to say that I am not. That is a centered community, and you belong to it by identifying with it.

So every community decides early in its life if it is a centered community or a bounded community.

If you remember, the other question was, “Who can belong”? There are two ways that works too. You can be a community where people opt-in or a community where people opt-out.

In opt-in communities, you do certain things to join, like move to Belhaven or enlist in the Army. If you don’t sign the enlistment papers, then you aren’t in the Army, and if you didn’t move to Belhaven, then you aren’t a member of Belhaven. Those are communities you opt into.

Opt out communities, on the other hand, are communities where you are automatically included unless you decide to leave. An example of this is your family – you are assumed to be part of your family, and you didn’t have to do anything to join. You are just in unless you decided to leave and change your name.

So in the passage I read, what we see is the Jesus community struggling with the answer to these two questions: What kind of community are we? And Who can belong?

The disciples were acting as gatekeepers to keep people away from Jesus. And you can’t have gatekeepers if you don’t have gates, and gates only exist where there are boundaries. So the disciples had believed that this was a bounded community.

But when the disciples tried to keep people away, the Gospel says that Jesus was “indignant”. Jesus was upset that they were erecting boundaries. No, everything we know about Jesus is that Jesus was building a community centered on the idea that The Kingdom of God was at hand, and we need to get ready to live in it.

In opt-out communities, all you have to do to belong is want to. And here, the children want in, and they show up, so Jesus considers them in. The disciples, however, see the children as an intrusion into the life of the community, so they want them out.

The Kingdom of God is a centered, opt-out community. We are centered on the idea that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and we need to prepare ourselves to live in it, and everyone is a part of this vision unless they specifically want out of it. After all, the Kingdom of God will be filled with humans, not just Christians.

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”, Jesus says.

So, if we are to be part of this centered, opt-out community, we should listen to Jesus.  Let the people in. Don’t try to keep them away. The Kingdom belongs to them, after all.

Power

This essay published

Open Door Mennonite Church
July 29, 2018
2 Samuel 11:1-17 (NRSV)

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

So David sent word to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the people fared, and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house, and wash your feet.” Uriah went out of the king’s house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. When they told David, “Uriah did not go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “You have just come from a journey. Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing.” Then David said to Uriah, “Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.” As Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant warriors. The men of the city came out and fought with Joab; and some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite was killed as well.

 

Over the last month I have been here in Jackson, I have been in a lot of meetings. I have had meetings with City officials, with school board members, with local activists, with bankers, with normal folks who just want Jackson to be better for them and their children.

But the biggest thing I have been trying to figure out since I have gotten here is how does Power work here. In community organizing circles, they call it power mapping, or power analysis. It’s important as a first step, because sometimes the people who look like they are in power really aren’t, and the ones who look like they don’t have any actually have a lot.

You have seen this first hand in your relationships. Like, when granddad bullies and blusters, but grandma is the one who really decides things. Granddad thinks he has the power, but really, he doesn’t.

Power mapping isn’t just useful in community organizing. It is helpful in personal relationships. It is helpful at work. And most importantly for our purposes today, it is a powerful spiritual practice.

Take, for example, today’s story.

History, they say, is written by the victors.

It has also largely been written by men.

Here in the US, we often talk about the Founding Fathers – men like George Washington, John Addams, Benjamin Franklin. Where were the women in these stories? Other than Betsy Ross, who was only notable because the Founding Fathers asked her to do something, I would be hard pressed to tell you any of their stories. Where were the women?

They were there, but their stories were not told. Mostly, I suspect, because it was men doing the telling.

And why did the men get to tell the stories? Because men had power, and in those societies, women did not.

You see this constantly in the Bible stories, too. You could, if you grew up in the church, perhaps tell me the story of Noah and the ark. If you were a hard-core Sunday School attendee, you could perhaps even tell me the name of his three children. But I bet you could not tell me the name of Mrs. Noah. Or the names of his son’s wives.

You couldn’t do it because their names were not considered important enough for us to learn. Because they were women, and it was men telling the story when it was first written down.

It’s about power. Men had the power, and they got to tell the story. And whoever tells the story gets to shape the story.

Like in this story. There are multiple ways of telling the story, depending largely on who does the telling.

The way I learned it was that David, God’s favorite, saw a beautiful woman, and they slept together. Then she got pregnant, and to cover it up, he had Uriah killed. That is the way I learned the story, and largely the way the story has been taught for generations.

That is how the story gets told – but that isn’t what happened.

What happened is that David, who was King and thus had power, saw something he wanted and he took it. Nowhere is the story is it even implied that Bathsheba was a willing participant. In fact, when one party has all the power and the other doesn’t, it is hard for there to be any consent. When the person who literally has the power of life and death over your spouse tells you to do something, you don’t really feel like you have a choice.

What we call the story of David’s adultery was actually the story of the sexual assault of Bathsheba.

But even that way of telling the story centers David. It centers the man, the person in power.

Another way of telling the story would be to center the story on Bathsheba.

Her husband Uriah was sent to war because, the Bible tells us, it was springtime, and that was the time to go to war. But David didn’t go – he stayed home, where it was safe, but men like Uriah got sent off instead.

So one night, after she got finished with her bath, she got summoned to the King’s palace, where she was sexually assaulted by the King. And then she discovered she was pregnant, and the King had her husband killed and made her move into the palace.

Bathsheba was a woman in a system that allowed no power to women, and on top of that, she was pregnant. And your only option is to fend for yourself or be protected by the man who sexually assaulted you and killed your husband.

Some choice.

Let’s look at this story from the framework of power.

In the story, we have four main characters: David, Bathsheba, Joab, and Uriah. Let’s rank them in order, according to who has power and who doesn’t.

David is king, appointed by God. David has ultimate power.

Joab is a military commander, in charge of men. He has the next amount of power.

Uriah is a man and a soldier. He has the next amount of power.

And Bathsheba is a woman, in a society run by men. She has the least amount of power.

Having mapped out the power, let’s look back at the story. The way it is written, who is the story about? Who is the main character? David, the person with the most power.

To who is no blame attached, but was complicit in the crimes? Joab, the person with the second most amount of power.

Who are we made to feel sorry for? Uriah, another person with power.

And who is the only person in the story who is only passive, who only has things happen to her, but doesn’t have any agency of her own? Bathsheba, the person with the least amount of power.

So that is a different way of telling the story. A story that centers the voice of the victim, the story of the person with the least amount of power.

I have spent, at this point, nearly 1000 words telling you about power analysis because I think it is perhaps one of the most important things we in the church can do. I think the Jesus story is ultimately about power, who has it and who doesn’t, how you use it if you do, and for whom.

Jesus was incredibly concerned with power. Most of the healing stories in the New Testament are about people who have little power being restored to a position of equality. Think about the man born blind, whose sight is restored. Or the woman who was constantly bleeding and thus considered impure being made whole, so she could return to society. The man possessed by demons, the man who could not get healed because he couldn’t get to the pool to get in because, you guessed it, people with more power than he had got there first.

In the story of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus told the Pharisees that the one without sin should cast the first stone, whose side did Jesus take? The side of the one with the least amount of power.

In the parables Jesus told, they were always stories about power as well. The story of the rich man and Lazarus is all about power. I mean, the rich man is in hell and still thinks he has the power to tell Lazarus what to do. The wealthy landowner that won’t forgive debts, the rich young ruler who stored up his riches, the inequity of pay in the story of the talents.

Over and over again, the Jesus story is all about power. And I believe that is because God is concerned about power. The Exodus story is about people with Power using it against people who don’t, and God taking the side of the ones who don’t. The stories of the exile – Daniel and the lion’s den, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fiery furnace and all the rest – are stories of God taking the side of the people with the least amount of power. The prophets constantly warned those in power that they were not aligned with God’s will.

Power is not bad – it just is. What is bad, however, is when those of us with power use it to harm others. Instead, Jesus believed that those of us with power had an obligation to use it on the behalf of those who do not.

The apostle Paul gave an example of Jesus doing this in Philipians when he quoted an old hymn as saying that Jesus

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Jesus had power, but didn’t use it for his own benefit, but for the benefit of others.

This story today is the story of power, and who has it and who doesn’t. And the clear witness of scripture is that God is always on the side of the one with the least amount of power.

So where does this leave us? I think it means that as followers of Jesus, we have to look for the power dynamics around us, and ask who has the power and who doesn’t. And then if we want to be like Jesus, we have to be on the side of the people with the least amount of power.

And if we are with them, then God is with us.

Amen.

 

Empathy

This essay published

Being new in town, I am still discovering the good coffee shops.

I have learned over the years that not everyone values the same things I do in a coffee shop, and so you can’t just take anyone’s word for it – you have to investigate for yourself.

So when I walked into the shop, I was wary, on alert – like a gazelle on the African savannah.

There were signs this was going to be good right away.

Lots of natural light, but no direct sunlight to blare in your eyes. A traffic flow pattern that made intuitive sense. Instead of one huge room, a series of nooks and crannies where you could have a private conversation, or sit quietly with a book. More than one type of coffee being offered, but only two, so you could break it down pretty simply into dark or lighter roast.

But it wasn’t until I asked for a mug of coffee that I knew this was going to be good. Because the barista took the mug, which had been placed upside down on the shelf so no random dust could fly into it, and then she ran it under the steam wand on the espresso machine to heat it up.

Two simple things – the upside-down mug, the pre-heated mug – told me everything I needed to know. This was a place where the people who work there had empathy for the people who would drink coffee there.

I think empathy is perhaps the most import thing needed to live in society and the thing I see most missing in today’s interpersonal interactions.

The ability to place yourself in the shoes of another – to ask yourself what their life must be like, to seek to understand their point of view, to do what Atticus Finch was recommending in the third chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird:

“…if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” – Atticus Finch

All of that seems not only lost but no longer even aspired to. Instead, our own desires, feelings, and goals assume primacy. They are the most important thing, we tell ourselves. Our convenience, our desires, our point of view.

I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. – Karin Armstrong

Maybe that is a lot to put on a barista in a coffee shop, but the person who asks herself what people want in their experience of drinking a mug of coffee (a clean mug, a warm mug, so the coffee doesn’t get cold before you have a chance to drink it all) is on the path to making the world better, even though both acts were minor inconveniences to her. Maybe because both acts were minor inconveniences to her.

I think, more than anything else, the reason I am captivated with the Jesus Movement was its focus on the Other. It wasn’t about how to achieve enlightenment for oneself, but rather about how to save the world, how to bring about Liberation for all people. At it’s best, it is a training school for compassion, for empathy.

I don’t think empathy, if we are to survive as a species, is going to be optional. Instead, I think it is what will save us.

A letter to my white progressive friends

This essay published

Dear friends,

Being born into, and raised in and by, a White Supremacist culture, while spending my adulthood working for racial equity and committing my life to Dr. King’s idea of Beloved Community, where we are judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character has been… interesting.

I grew up in and now live in Mississippi, arguably the most visible state, historically, for White Supremacy. I came back because I hope to have an impact here. hope to work alongside and under my siblings of color to make a more just and equitable society.

If I stop there, I only get accolades from my white comrades on the left.

But 11 years of working in cross-class and cross-race relationships has taught me that the only way people change is if they have reasons to change. It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are – we learn from others.

I want to be very clear here: It is NEVER the responsibility of the oppressed to educate the oppressor. But those of us who are of the oppressor class – we who can be heard by, listened to, and given an audience and platform by those who oppress people – we have a moral obligation to do the work, to put in the effort, to meet with people distasteful to us, to argue forcefully for those without our layers of privilege.

My fellow white people: Black folk have been telling us to come and get our cousin. You can’t do that if you refuse to talk to your cousin. Your cousin ain’t suddenly gonna pick up Ta-Nehisi Coates in the library and get woke. Your writing off your cousin and his ilk is a right you have, but a right born of privilege and a right that, if exercised, prevents change from happening.

This is white people’s work to do. I understand if you, personally, don’t want to pick it up, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t our work, all the same.

I am a minister of the Gospel, from the radical Christian tradition. Like the Jesus I have aspired to follow, I will eat with those whose ideas are abhorrent to me. Not because I agree with them, but precisely the opposite: Because if I am not at least as concerned with the soul of, the liberation of, the redemption of, the salvation of, the oppressor as I am the circumstances of the oppressed, I don’t think you can call me a Christian.

As a hero of mine once said, “Mr. Jesus died for bigots, too.” I eat with bigots not because I want to empathize with them, it is because I want to convert them, and I have not found ignoring them, calling them names, or mocking them with memes to be an effective evangelism technique.

Because the better world we all dream is possible is only possible if we can all achieve liberation – some of us from oppression, and others from privilege, from white supremacy, from our own egos.

Yours in liberation for all people,

HH