King of the Mountain

March 5, 2019

3:03 PM

King of the Mountain WB

Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. – Isaiah 58:4-8

We failed. All of us.

Though we were made in Your image, yet did our struggle with our own limits and mortality find us falling short of Your glory.

In the name of Your love, yet did we hate. In our righteous quest to Do No Harm, we discovered that it is an impossible rule to keep.

In our desire to extend grace, yet did we exclude and create hostility. The conservative’s “love” inherently excludes LGBTQ, and the liberal’s “love” inherently excludes those who aren’t as “woke.” We say that they’re excluding themselves because they won’t change. They. They. They.

In our quest to love our God and our neighbor, yet did we fail to see how You could possibly be at work in our fellow Christian.

In our desire to be “all in” for the Gospel, to suffer as You have suffered, to live holy and pleasing lives in Your sight, we found ourselves the older and resentful brother…unsure how to possibly embrace our brothers and sisters that we deemed to have wasted Your gracious gifts.

We failed our LGBTQ siblings by making them scapegoats for our fundamental failure to understand them.

We failed our global siblings through conservative manipulation on the right, and elitist and racist assumptions from the left that we were more advanced than them sociologically.

We failed to trust in You, and every power play and political manipulation, every complacent look the other way, every attempt to preserve “connection” that was never really much more than a broken bureaucracy… all of it has revealed our universal and ubiquitous incompatibility with Christian teaching. None of us should be Your ambassadors. Look at this rotten mess we’ve made of your once-awakened church.

I want to say that THEY are worse sinners than me. After all. THEIR politics reflect Machiavelli more than Messiah. THEY are the ones who painted with broad strokes, who deviously worked the system to cleanse the temple and purify the church of us… They are the ones who don’t get it… They. They. They.

But isn’t this Your fault? Aren’t You the one who came not to bring peace, but the sword? Aren’t You the One who loved Jacob and hated Esau? Aren’t You the One who chose the Jews and ordered the destruction of Gentile men, women, and children? Aren’t You the One who created diversity and formed us in our mothers’ wombs, who chose the time and place that each of us would be born so that we would seek You and somehow find You? Aren’t You the One who gave us a Holy Scripture filled with changing laws, grace and judgment, restriction and freedom, hospitality and vengeance? Aren’t You the One who formed us out of star dust, made us a little lower than the angels, gave us dominion over Your creation, gave us the keys to forgive any sin, or to bind people if we refuse to forgive them? What were You thinking?

You called me Your child. What were You thinking?

I once was lost, but You found me. I was the chief of sinners, yet You bore my sin on the cross. What’s wrong with You? A love like that, I can’t fathom. No, you actually met me where I was and cared for me as Your child. You love me and forgive me even when I fail you seven times seventy-seven times. I want to be holy as You are holy. I want to be perfect as You are perfect. I want to be merciful and compassionate as You are merciful and compassionate. And even if I could get all of that 100% right for the rest of my lifetime, yet would I still look like an ignorant and hate-filled fool to Christians 500 years from now who have learned so much more from the mistakes and sins of history. My greatest efforts to love as You love will always only ever fail.

Seriously. This was Your great plan? It doesn’t sound that much better than the crappy ones we were coming up with.

But that resurrection. I just can’t shake it. All this death and suffering. All this miserable and useless struggle for Your kingdom come and Your will done on earth as it is in heaven. Over and over, You call people that You know will always only ever be fundamentally different and opposed to each other. You unite us in one fact, and one fact only: that Jesus Christ is our crucified and resurrected Lord and Savior.

So far, that has never been enough to make us One. That’s on us. Us. Us. Us.

And yet, You keep forgiving. Over and over we make ourselves Your enemies, so sure that we’re doing exactly what You want us to. All of us. Even the best of us. This was Your great plan? To show us what love is by loving us…over, and over, and over?

I relent. In sack cloth. In ashes.

You are God. Not me.

When not drawing the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves as youth minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.

Comments (2)

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This is the money shot right here

"We failed our LGBTQ siblings by making them scapegoats for our fundamental failure to understand them."

Among adherents of the extremist antigay ideology there are primarily (1) people who think "there are no gay people in my church or my town," and (2) those with an ax to grind, who have a history of an animus with an LGBTQIA family member. Both of course are as Vladamir Lenin's "useful idiots" to the cynical manipulators who view the conflict as an opportunity to advance their own raw, naked power as they engage in maneuvers parlimetary which would make Niccolo Macchiavelli blush.

Among groups (1) and (2) as noted above, however, one factor seems to stand out most of all: most of them are a bunch of Mrs. Grundys who are confused about sexuality and relationships. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. characterized them as "They have forgiven themselves and their friends of anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted by the sexuality of ordinary men and women," in his short story "Welcome to the Monkey House. Argue with any of them and sooner of later they will describe the forces opposing them as advocates of "Anything Goes," which ironically is the title of a satirical play and the title song by Cole Porter, himself a tragically flawed closeted gay man, in 1927. These types do not grok that Porter's farce was not in any sense a valid judgment on the Roaring 20s pop culture. They are immune to satire and irony.

And the brokers of this tragicomedy here? Laughing all the way to the bank, as usual.

George Nixon Shuler more than 5 years ago

Ouch!

With all due respect George, I think you have missed the point of this cartoon and prose - and then exaggerated your mistake by lambasting the people you see as the enemy. This cartoon and prose is definitely not about getting in a "money shot" or a "zinger" (Wesley Bros. is certainly thought provoking and witty, but never cutting in my experience). It's a lament about the fact that we all lost at the General Conference in St. Louis last week because our understanding was fraught with human brokenness. I get that you're angry and I pray you have peace, but demeaning and devaluing the motivations of brothers and sisters in Christ who believe differently than you isn't the response we need in the wake of what happened in St. Louis.

Jeff Walker more than 5 years ago