Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

This post was first published in the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios.

From Emergent To Empire Blue Shield

Diana Butler Bass sees the troubles in the Anglican Communion not in terms of right vs. left as much as grassroots vs. elites:

For centuries, faith was top-down: Spiritual power flowed from pope to the faithful, archbishop to Anglicans, priest to the pious, pastor to congregation. This has changed as regular people confidently assert that spirituality is a grassroots adventure of seeking God, a journey of insight and inspiration involving authenticity and purpose that might or might not happen in a church, synagogue or mosque. Spirituality is an expression of bottom-up faith and does not always fit into accepted patterns of theology or practice. Fearing this change, however, many religious bodies, such as the Anglican Communion, increasingly fixate on order and control, leading them to reassert hierarchical authority and be less responsive to the longings of those they supposedly serve. And that will push religion further into its spiral of irrelevance and decline.

The New Testament and early non-canonical writings are fraught with a comparable tension between the orthodox church and its failed rivals. Experts think that among the Gnostics' alleged heresies was their idea that God's salvation was as near as one's own faithful heart. Who needs a church for that? The Reformation also grasped from the grassroots, as does today's emergent Christianity. Bass doesn't call for the church's de-professionalization, but our doctrines do. We proclaim that all the baptized are called to priesthood and equality and mutuality in the body of Christ. My ordained sistren and brethren and I are theoretically temporary, like socialism on the way to communism and wilderness on the way to the promised land -- though Elaine Pagels, an authority on Gnosticism, does note that without the institutional church, Christianity probably wouldn't have survived Christ by more than a few generations.

As through the brass darkly, we can glimpse a more democratic church. Near the end of our Good Friday service at St John's, two lads in sneakers walked into the middle of our solemn liturgy carrying a rough, splintery cross and planted it in front of the altar. We ministers took off our vestments and clergy collars, tossed it all in a heap, and invited everyone to join us at Golgotha. Come inside the altar rails, we urged them. Come claim the place at the foot of the cross that belongs to you, for good and for shame. "No need to wait in line. Just crowd up here. It's not an altar anymore," I said. "It's just wood that's been nailed and glued together." We rearranged the ministers' chairs in a circle and stacked our prayer books and hymnals on the bare table. Some sat on chairs or the floor; others stood, just as people did one afternoon while watching Jesus suffer. Huddled within the sanctuary, we 60 witnesses put our arms around each other, said a few more prayers, ate up what was left of the consecrated sacrament, and went home.

Like most spiritual leaders, a priest wears a special outfit and game face and carefully observes liturgical forms. For a few moments on Good Friday, I felt the peace of being a companion and fellow witness. Since then, it's been back to the work of the ordained and professionalized in the complex institutions our churches and schools have become -- board meetings, worship planning, preaching and teaching, visiting and comforting the afflicted, budgets, phone calls and e-mails, mass communications, diocesan work, and never-ending due diligence. Might God and we evolve spiritual communities where all responsibilities and competencies are shared by volunteers? The professional pastor is called to mediate the empowerment of the laity to the full extent of their gifting. It would be harder to do without us entirely (though the LDS, with its non-stipendiary ministries, may be a model). Even at new, emergent communities, hierarchy will be an inevitable temptation. A moment must always come when a devoted volunteer finds she's spending so much time on the grassroots adventure of Christianity that she asks if at some point she might get dental.

Moonstruck

Perhaps because we're deeply conscious of our worst tendencies, our fascination with perpetrators can muffle compassion for victims. God staged the perfect death so we'd learn to love life as much as God does. My Good Friday sermon, "All About Jesus," is here.

You might not realize it (St. John's School seventh graders do), but it's the movement of the heavens that brings us modern people to church each Easter Sunday. My sermon for the Sunday of the Resurrection, "Moonstruck," is here.

The St. John's Choir's magnificent "Hallelujah," from Messiah, which sent us out into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit and God's love, is here.

"Could You Not Keep Awake One Hour?"

The John Chrysostom chapel, prepared for the all-night prayer vigil, beginning after tonight's Maundy Thursday service and continuing until noon on Good Friday

Sermons: "Fade To Black" And "Hallelujah!"

People just like us were honoring institutions and traditions they loved. They were tired and scared. They were trying to do their jobs and keep the peace. As they gave in to what social scientists call ethical fading, they had no idea that they were killing God. Would we? If we attend to the song of the risen Christ in our hearts, we don't actually have to worry about it. My sermons for Good Friday and Easter.

Three Sermons En Route To Easter

Good Friday is an impossible paradox. Jesus's killing was inevitable. It was completely unjust. It was drenched in glory. By the same token, our deaths are inevitable. We'll each contend with unjust circumstances in our lives. And we each have the capacity to make our lives a glorious anticipation of the realm of God. Listen to my sermon here.

At the Easter Vigil at St. John's, the most important service of the church year, it was good to hear the voices of our youth retelling the creation story from Eden through the deliverance from Egypt. It was good to hear the voices of the corporate church raised in support of our 12 baptismal candidates. And it was good for God to hear our voices proclaiming, "Alleluia! He is risen!" That's Lisa Naulls rehearsing the youth choir beforehand. My Saturday night sermon here.

On Easter morning, it's hard to evade the peril of deciding that Jesus's resurrection was merely symbolic or spiritual, since if God's action in raising him is in doubt, so is the notion that there's any benevolence in the creation beyond the minds and intentions of its creatures. Our Easter faith is that Christ wants his people to have hope, peace, and a faith in God's transcendent and perfect love. My Easter Sunday sermon is here.

Good Friday Songs: "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord"

Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, performing in 1960

By A Perversion Of Justice He Was Taken Away

Christ Carrying the Cross, Hieronymus Bosch, c.1450-1516