“Losing Complacency, Finding Passion”
John 2:13-22
An excerpt from Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World
John 2:13-22
An excerpt from Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World
When I was 16 years old, my church youth group participated in a weeklong evangelism event in Dallas.
Half-way through the week the youth ministers informed us of a change in the schedule: Instead of going out to knock on doors and invite people to come to the one true church (I’m not making this up), we would be singing at a funeral.
It turns out that a young man about our age had been killed in a motorcycle accident.
Well, the day of the funeral arrived, and we were seated in the church balcony. From there, I could see everything: the casket, the flowers, the mourners, and the blank-faced, suit-wearing men who worked for the funeral home. I could hear the almost-constant wailing of the young man’s family and friends, and I could see the funeral-home workers carrying on as if they didn’t even care. They expressed no emotion at all, and they seemed to be trying to control other people’s emotions.
This really upset me, and all these years later I realize that what I took away from the experience was not a sense of my own mortality, which is probably what the ministers wanted, but an anger at how some people could close their hearts to the world’s pain.
Now, of course, I understand that funeral-home workers, doctors, nurses, first responders, and, yes, pastors, sometimes have to compartmentalize their feelings. They have to put their own feelings on the shelf, at least temporarily, so they can serve the people who need them, the people who are truly suffering and in deep pain.
I also understand that buried feelings don’t go away and that, if they’re not expressed somehow, will resurface eventually, often at inappropriate times or in destructive ways.
I remembered this experience last week as I read and re-read the story of Jesus “cleansing” the temple. Jesus was angry. He was fed up with all the systems and people who made money from the poor people who wanted nothing more than to worship God and fulfill their religious obligations. In the guise of providing a service, they had both reduced religion to a transaction and figured out how to make a profit on it.
Instead of honoring God and facilitating a loving relationship between God and her people, . . . instead of creating a system that embodied God’s preferential option for the poor and the marginalized, the religious systems and the commercial enterprises that profited from them had made the poor even poorer, while reducing God to an uncaring tyrant.
Seeing it in person, operating full-scale in the outer gates of the Jerusalem Temple, was more than Jesus could bear. It made him angry. Say what you will about Jesus’ behavior, but no one was left wondering who and what Jesus cared about and who he cared for.
Which got me to thinking: Do our children know what we care about? Do our friends know what we care about? Do they see us getting angry about injustice? Do they see us taking action?
Not, to be clear, that I’m advocating violence—even against things or systems. Not that I’m advocating letting our anger get the best of us.
But do we even know what we care most about? Are there situations and people and systems about which we cannot remain silent or inactive?
Or do we consider the world’s’ pain only from a safe, perhaps intellectual, distance, leaving our hearts out of it? Do we even feel anger and outrage any more? Or do we consider ourselves beyond all that? Or is our complacency born of despair and the feeling that nothing we do will make a significant difference?
The story of Jesus cleansing the temple suggests to me that passion, too, is a spiritual practice. Anger, too, can be a holy fire. And that if we are truly, deeply connected to the God who is love, the God who so loves this broken world that Spirit took on human flesh and blood, we will be unable to remain indifferent to human suffering.
And I wonder if our temptations to indifference or complacence don’t come, at least in part, from a definition of “taking action” that is far too narrow, more political than spiritual.
As far as I can tell, the most common and passionate actions Jesus took, the spiritual practices that sustained his passion, were prayer—which, is to say, intentional, open-hearted engagement with the Holy—and encounter—which is to say, intentional, personal, open-hearted engagement with others.
Jesus went away to pray alone; he came back to heal the sick and eat with the outcasts. Jesus away to pray; he came back to teach and feed and connect with the lowly. Jesus went away to pray; he came back to live out his calling. Jesus went away to pray; he came back to live among the poor and the marginalized. Jesus went away to pray; he came back to give of himself.
Jesus went away to pray, and sometimes his anger at injustice and suffering still boiled over. Perhaps because he was so deeply connected to the Source of Life and justice and peace.
Now, I know that prayer is hard for many of us. I know many of us feel we don’t know how to pray, or that the Bible leaves us cold.
And this is one of the reasons we’re reading An Altar in the World: because there are many ways to pray, any number of ways to connect to the Holy, countless ways to be present to God and God’s children, myriad ways to care and to serve, to actively love our neighbors and love and take care of ourselves.
In her chapter on “The Practice of Feeling Pain,” Taylor tells a story first told by the Sufi mystic Rumi, about a man who prayed regularly and passionately until someone asked him if he ever heard a word back from God. And so he stopped praying.
Then a message came to him in a dream, a word meant to awaken him to the passions and patterns of the spiritual life:
The longing you express is the return message [from God], it said.
The grief you cry out from draws you toward union [with the Holy].
Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.
I want to be clear here: Prayer is not complacency. Compassion is its own form of action. Practicing waking up to God, paying attention to God’s presence in the world, honoring creation, practicing solidarity with the oppressed, living with purpose, being present to God—all of these practices are passionate ways of connecting to God and others.
And when we are intentional about connection, we cannot be complacent.
Because little by little, sometimes with great fanfare but most often completely unnoticed, Spirit will be transforming our hearts and minds. Spirit will be changing us from the inside out—moving away from the greedy, warring, individualistic, and self-absorbed ways of our culture, away from the ways we have always been and forever done things, and moving us toward the loving, healing, uplifting, community-building, trouble-making ways of Jesus.
And what that looks like on the outside will likely be different for you than it is for me; it may be different for you and your partner or you and your friends.
And let’s be clear about something else:
It takes energy to commit to a practice. It takes intention and clarity to care and to act. It requires a lot of attention and at least a little time. And let’s be honest: While caring deeply and acting boldly can be be enlivening and exhilarating, it can also be exhausting—especially when our commitment and action seem to make no difference.
I get it.
Some days I feel like I’m still recovering from the non-stop outrage of the Trump years. Some days I feel like I’m still paying for the holy and messy work of providing sanctuary. I know that anger, heartbreak, conflict, and exhaustion are just some of the prices we might pay for paying attention to the needs of this world that God so love.
But in my heart of hearts—the place where God’s Spirit of love is still at work—I also know that the blessings of holy connection are far greater than the costs. I know that it is God’s love working in our hearts and lives and through our spiritual practices of love, connection and attention—and our willingness pay the costs—that will change us and the world.
When we are living for someone or something, when we are loving ourselves as well as our neighbors, when we are staying connected to the Source of Love and Well-being, our holy passion will burn bright. When we clarify and nurture our God-given passions, when we commit ourselves to being instruments of God’s love and passion for the healing of the world, our lives will shine like the sun.
May it be so.
