There are ways to build bridges between us over which our disagreements and even outrages can flow. This sermon, preached on March 1, 2020, at Davis Community Church (audio sermon recording here), reflects on Romans 12.9-21 and addresses the friendship, long term, patient, and gutsy can bring about social transformation.
1.
“People are hard to hate close up. Move in.”
It’s a quote from sociologist Brene Brown's conversation with Krista Tippett around the theme, “Strong backs, soft fronts, wild hearts.” They're talking about the life-giving, healing link between vulnerability and courage that helps us move beyond the present crisis of destructive communication.
Last Sunday I reflected on the power of our words, how fear often drives us to weaponize our words, and how weaponized words, all too common today, move us not only into conflict but also into acts of violence—emotional and physical.
The gospel of Jesus urges us to challenge destructive ways by moving closer to others. If we can find ways to get close to others, especially those we dislike and are tempted to despise, if we acknowledge our fears and practice curiosity, we can use words, not as weapons, but as creative expressions that work constructively not destructively.
“When you are really struggling with someone,” says Brene Brown, “and it’s someone you’re supposed to hate because of ideology or belief, move in. Get curious. Get closer. Ask questions. Remind yourself of that spiritual truth that we are inextricably connected. Ask yourself, ‘How am I connected to the other in a way that’s bigger and more primal than our politics?’”
Brene Brown’s extensive research about human behavior suggests that human beings aren’t stuck in an endless cycle of conflict, we can move forward, we can work against the current divisive climate that’s so toxic, we can resist the impulse to retreat inside our echo chambers of other like-minded people; we can stop weaponizing our words.
“People are hard to hate close up,” she says, “Move in.”
It’s a catchy phrase. It would be nice if it were true.
2.
As a congregation, we’re at the beginning of our Lenten study season. For six weeks we’re engaging in a series of conversations we call “Six Civil Conversations to Restore Hope in Humanity.” We’re acting on the assumption that if we can learn to speak differently to each other, we can learn to live differently with each other. We’re acting on the belief that if we can learn a different way of encountering people with whom we disagree, even the most modest disagreements, we might learn ways to do that when it’s more difficult.
Last week, in the Lenten group I’m part of, some of us thought all this sounded nice, but we wondered if it’s do-able.
“People are hard to hate close up. Move in,” is a catchy phrase and might work sometimes, but some of us thought that “sometimes” isn’t often enough to make it worth the risk.
The reality is that neighbors can do terrible things to neighbors. When the Balkans splintered into genocidal violence in the early 1990s, neighbors did awful things to each other. People who live close to each other in India today are doing terrible things to each other. Some of us confessed that there are such real and dangerous divisions in our families that we’re not sure we want to get close; it’s too painful, too fraught with peril. And if we can’t get close to a member of our own families, is there any hope in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, or political parties?
Here’s my own paraphrase of our conversation: “History doesn’t lead us to believe that proximity is a guarantee against enmity.”
Maybe enmity is so hardwired into us that proximity only makes it more possible for us to brutalize each other. Maybe that’s why we have an inclination to move away from others and secure ourselves behind our protective walls.
Maybe we can’t change. Maybe we just need to be realistic about what divides us and give up our dreams of harmony.
3.
Like Brene Brown, our sacred texts either know something we don’t or they’re naive to the realities of our world.
“Bless those who persecute you,” says Saint Paul in today’s scripture reading. “Bless and do not curse them. Live in harmony with one another; do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. If you enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Maybe this is an example of religious idealism. Maybe we should label it as spiritual bypassing, ignoring what most thinking people know to be true.
Or it could be that religious spirituality knows something about our humanity we don’t yet know well enough, something we don’t yet trust fully enough, something we’re not yet courageous enough to try.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” said, G.K. Chesterton, “It has been found difficult, and left untried.”
The Christian ideal, the Christian vision, requires us to live from a vision of something you cannot see, something you’ve likely never seen, something you will never see completely. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It requires a certain kind of faith—faith is not fully knowing, but leaning into the little you do know.
4.
Do you know what the largest living organism is? An elephant? No. A whale? No.
It’s bigger than a whale, yet hides out of sight. It can fill over 250 semi trucks, but spreads itself paper thin.
It’s a mycelium dwelling in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregan. A humungous fungus that weaves together zillions of living organisms into a whole you’ll never see, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Like mycelium, there is a living spiritual organism that weaves together zillions of animate and inanimate things—all things—held together in a harmony now hidden from our eyes, yet something we can know, feel, lean into, draw ourselves into. That’s the reality we religious people call “Christ”—the Reality in whom all things live and move and have their being.
Saint Paul glimpsed this. It’s his mystic vision of a realty hidden from our eyes; it is no less real than the mycelia beneath our feet, hidden in the soil of the earth, linking things together in a vast tapestry of life.
“For in Christ,” wrote Paul, “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through Christ and for Christ.”
Paul’s teaching isn’t mere idealism, it’s the deepest form of realism.
Because of his inner vision into the hidden reality of life in the cosmos, he could say to those of us who would live into that vision: “Live in harmony with one another; do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. If you enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
5.
Derek Black and Matthew Stevenson are living into that vision, even though neither of them claim Christian faith. You’ll hear more about their remarkable story in this week’s podcast from Krista Tippet’s OnBeing.Org. It’s part of our Lenten Study. It’s a witness to the truth that Saint Paul’s teaching and Brene Brown’s wisdom isn’t pie-in-the-sky idealism.
Derek Black grew up in the home of some of America’s most prominent white supremacists; he was the white-nationalist heir apparent to his god-father, David Duke. When his racist ideology was outed at the New College of Florida, he was spurned and ostracized by most—which only helped to solidify his distain for political correctness and justify his sense of white supremacy.
But there was one student who chose a different path.
Matthew Stephenson, one of the only orthodox Jews on campus, invited Derek to Shabbat dinner.
Stevenson later said, “I saw people treating Derek very poorly, trying to make his life as miserable as possible, a misguided attempt to change his mind.”
Derek Black says the people inside his ideological bunker would have never have used the word, “racist,” to describe themselves. “Racist” was identified with being a “bad person,” and “we weren’t bad people. We told ourselves we didn’t hate, and we didn’t dislike anyone. We were just interested in preserving the purity and supremacy of white culture; we believed that statistics and science were on our side. We didn’t think we were bad; we were right. People didn’t like it, but we were affirming what we thought was factually true.”
For two years, Matthew Stevenson protected a space for Derek to be recognized as a human person. They didn’t talk race or politics; instead an atheist and a Jew talked religion. And for two years Stevenson held space at those Shabbat dinners for Derek to experience Jews as fully human too. Two years of an experiment in friendship with no other goal other than living into a shared humanity.
People don’t change because someone tells them how misguided or stupid they are. When that happens, they separate, and when they separate, they entrench, and when they entrench, change becomes very difficult—for the vehicle for change, relationship, is gone. Without a relationship, it’s easy to hate, or in Derek’s case, to feel himself superior.
Friendship with people who were supposed to be at odds with each other created a tension necessary for change. Dissonance opened up—the inability to continue holding beliefs that were in conflict with reality. These Jews, these real human beings he was eating with every Friday night and talking about intellectual things, were not ignorant, and there was no evidence of their inferiority. Among these unlikely friends, Derek learned empathy. And empathy, fostered by proximity, broke down the enmity that was such a large part of his identity.
But here’s the real secret—
Derek says, “I don’t want people to misunderstand my story. I worry that people will take this thing between Matthew and me and think all you have to do is have friendly conversations at the dinner table. It doesn’t work that way. Friendly, regular, quiet conversations over time made it possible for me to finally hear the outrage Matthew and others felt over what I’d been saying most of my life. If they’d been outraged from the start, they’d have made me a more fully committed white nationalist. It was friendship that made it possible for me to finally feel empathy for the real people my thinking was hurting, to feel the common humanity we all truly shared.”
There was something hidden they leaned, or maybe stumbled, into—a faith experience, if you want to call it that, that changed Derek’s understanding of things he’d long thought were facts. There was a wholeness he was touching, a unity, a weaving of life with life; separateness and supremacy was actually a harmful delusion.
Derek Black eventually broke out from behind the walls of white supremacist ideology and broke with his family. He’s now completing a PhD at the University of Chicago, examining the medieval European roots of racism. He’s also the subject of the book Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow.
7.
“People are hard to hate close up. Move in.”
Matthew Stevenson did.
It’s a beautiful story of transformation. Maybe it’s still easy for you to dismiss it as something rare, something you’re unwilling to reach for, something that demands more risk than you’re willing to tolerate.
If so, it’s a vision that’s not so much been tried and found wanting; it’s been found difficult and left untried.
But why settle for easy, when so much depends on the gamble?
Let’s try what’s difficult, that’s what faith is for.