Another day, another hashtag, another black sister or brother’s picture plastered across social media. More local police dressed like they are ready to invade a medium-sized country (wonder where the riot gear was when white men were standing in state capitols across the country armed with assault rifles for their right to get a haircut?) another lynching broadcast to the world from a smart phone where it will appear in a news feed between a meme and an ad. 

More outrage, more tears.

As my dear brother texted me last night, “It never ends.” And as I thought about his words, I thought, “he’s right…” I thought I about Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Philando Castile, and Botham Jean, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice (gosh that breaks my heart, just a boy, a little boy with a toy gun), and now Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and so, so many others. The one thing I thought about is:

I wish I never knew their names. ^[1]I feel this disclaimer is important. I say this not as a way of centering my own experience. I am referencing the way these people’s names represent larger societal sins. This is not about me … Continue reading

I say their names, I want to bear witness, if nothing else to just say to my sisters and brothers of color that I am with you, that I see you, that I will work alongside you in the Christian spaces I lead in to name and to dismantle white supremacy. But when it comes to these dear people who have been killed in the crossfire of evil, I wish I did not know their names.

You see, naming is usually a joy. My wife is on the verge of giving birth to our fourth child and we have prayed and reflected on what blessing of life, what name, what word that we will speak that will give shape to the world of our son’s life. Naming is such a gift, it expresses responsibility, we get to name this child. Naming expresses blessing, it expresses solidarity, and care, naming expresses hope and a future for the child and the family.

But this endless cycle of names, names that represent daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children of God made in his image is calling us to read another list of names I wish I did not know: white supremacy, whiteness (not white skin but whiteness it manifests in our culture), racial difference. These powers and principalities that have taken up residence in both the American way and the white evangelical church in America.

And this sort of naming tries, it tries to expose an ongoing slavery, a demonic force that holds America and the white church in America in its grasp but we keep hushing the voice or worse yet, signing along with it. This naming sounds like condemnation but really is like the message of the Gospel of Jesus itself to embrace freedom through confession, for those who speak the name of these systemic sins under the name that is above all names it is “an aroma that brings life” but to those who silence it’s invitation to healing, it is the very “aroma of death.”(2 Cor 2)

Naming

Naming In The Beginning

From the very beginning of the story of the Scriptures, naming is portrayed as an important demonstration of responsibility and care. As God brings forth the world in delight, he blesses the world, “it is good” reaching the climax of his symphony in Genesis 1vv26-28. “Let us make people in our image, male and female, he created them and let them have dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and everything that moves upon the land.” As he signs his name on creation, with his imago dei, every daughter every son a reflection of the God who made the universe, God cannot contain his joy: it was so very good. 

In Genesis 2, we get another camera angle on the creation of humanity. This time we see not simply the work of the conductor but that of the potter, the poet. God crafts Adam from the dust of the earth and breathes his very breath into his lungs. Don’t miss this, George Floyd, hand-crafted by God to reflect his image, proclaimed “very good”, was robbed of the very gift that God had given him. Do you know what we call those who try to take away God’s gifts, who set themselves up in antithesis to God’s good purposes in the world. They are anti-Christ. 

God charges Adam with naming the creatures (Genesis 2v19). God formed humanity, those made in the image of God as co-regents, stewarding and sustaining creation. So he brings to Adam each of the animals put under his care and sees what he might name them. Adam’s concern for creation is signified by his naming of that which he is charged with overseeing. Adam first names Eve with a song, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” and even after the two have succumbed to the serpent’s lies, he names Eve, the mother of all who are living, signifying his ongoing concern and care for her. 

What’s God’s Name?

Fast forward into the future, Moses stands on the scorching sands of the wilderness, shielding his eyes from the bright blazing bush before him, he blares out the question to the voice that beckons him, “Suppose I go the leaders and they ask me who has sent me, what do I tell them?” (Exodus 3). The voice from this shrub adorned in unquenchable flame answers, “I am.” God is not being elusive here. You see, naming has its limits. The God who has no limits cannot be contained within a name, because he cannot be controlled, cannot be tamed. God doesn’t completely dodge the question and he doesn’t offer something hopelessly otherworldly and esoteric. Rather, God expresses his very nature, life, existence so affirmatively and so fluidly. God is that which is, the great I am that is always over and above the “it is what it is” of our world.

Naming The Darkness

Moving along in the story, Jesus of Nazareth as he is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God confronts a man so overwrought with demons that the townspeople are trying to chain him up in a cave (Mark 5). But the manifestation of evil in this man is so powerful that he simply cannot be contained. This man is a terror to the town of and a danger to himself. Notice the question that Jesus asks him, “What is your name?” The myriad demons from within the man respond, “We are legion for we are many.” Jesus then casts the demons out. 

You see Jesus’ life demonstrates that naming the evil that is gripping a person’s life is another way of expressing care and concern. When Jesus names evil, he demonstrates his power over it. In contrast, throughout Mark’s Gospel the demonic forces recognize Jesus as the Son of God, not only in the earthly sense but in a cosmic sense. Jesus forbids these demons from revealing his identity, his true name. Jesus will only be named fully, in Mark’s Gospel, as he hangs on the cross. The Roman soldier, a centurion, part of a Legion no less, as he beholds Jesus on the cross remarks, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15v39)

Throughout the Gospels and Acts, the apprentices of Jesus are given the name of Jesus as the means of warfare with the dark forces of the world and the balm of healing (e.g. Acts 3v6). As God reveals his name to us, in the Jesus his son, we are not given power over Jesus, but relational access into his creative and generative, pro-life, anti-death ways. As Mary weeps outside the tomb of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus speaks the first word of the new world, demonstrating his mastery over death. The word that he chooses, is a name, “Mary.” Jesus proclaims the dawning of the new world with the use of name, an expression of intimacy and relationship. 

Naming Our Sin

Our access into this relationship of peace, life, and ultimately power (though not power wielded for our own sake but for the sake of the world) is contingent upon us accepting the grace of the name of Jesus as our Savior and Lord and consequently naming our own sin. The clarion call rings throughout the Gospels, “Repent.” Repentance, metanoia, means to “change one’s mind, to make a change to principle and practice, to change the past.” Repentance is an invitation to name Jesus as Lord and ourselves as sinners not so we can endlessly beat ourselves down and belittle ourselves as hopeless, broken, worthless worms but so that we can be crowned yet again with the “Good and very good” of the God who made us in his image, so that we can know to need Jesus (the I Am) is to find life itself, and so that we might have power to live new (i.e. repented) lives. 

Every “Gospel presentation” I have ever heard in church has made it that simple by quoting from 1 John 1v9: If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us. Confession, the greek homologeo literally to “name the same” or “use the same words.” Confession is aligning our hearts with reality, or in another way is naming that which is so that we might no longer be slaves to it. 

It is evident from the narrative of the Scriptures that that which cannot or will not be named cannot be our concern and it cannot be controlled. If the church will not speak the names of our black sisters and brothers who are victims of a systemic conspiracy against the pigmentation of their skin, then let us not for a moment pretend as if they are our concern. And if the church will not name the Legion of demons that inhabits these eruptions of centuries of accumulated idolatry, we will continue to be slaves to their power.  1 John tells us if we confess our sins, we find forgiveness and healing but the converse must also remain. If we will not name our sins, we will find no forgiveness, no healing, and no freedom. 

Dante Stewart in a gut-wrenching reflection on the circumstances surrounding the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery wrote these lines:

How long do we have to wait for progress? How many have to be brutally murdered before people believe that we are actually telling the truth? What is the cycle of violence and apathy costing us? Why are we the ones who have to believe God has a good plan for us in the future but the best plan for them in the present? How long do we have to endure these types of talks until people realize that white supremacy is not ours to solve but their problem, their children’s problem?

Dante Stewart- Ahmaud Arbery and The Trauma of Being a Black Runner

It’s “their children’s problem.” Those children, are my children and they may be some of your children. Dante Stewart names white supremacy and he names it as our problem. The question that remains for us, will we? Or will we minimize his pain, ignore his tears, will we call it by another name —”bad luck” or “let’s wait to hear the whole story” or “see he had a criminal record.

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the day we remember the moment the Holy Spirit named his new creation family, the church, giving them one language, forming them as a body. The church has always been a mosaic of differents, a scandalous interweaving of strands in society that would never cross otherwise. Paul takes this metaphor of the body to the extreme (1 Cor. 12) because for him, it is the clearest picture of what the church is to be, one organic unit with Jesus as the head. Right now, our eyes are weeping as they stare through tears in trauma and shock at the wasting sickness in our arm. What’s more the great physician has named the diagnosis: white supremacy.

As Willie James Jennings says in his commentary on Pentecost:

Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the dis-ciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.

Willie James Jennings: Acts A Theological Commentary

The question is will we ignore the the invitation to wholeness, to intimacy, to healing? Will we continue to allow this infection to spread.

Or will we receive the gift of a name, a name that is bigger than our sin, a name that is more just than our defensiveness, the name that is above all names.

Will we say the name of Jesus? Will we say their names?

Last week, I broke on a Zoom call. It wasn’t the incessant blue light from my screen or the ache for actual human interaction. I was listening to my friend and mentor, Michael Carrion, describe the pain of the people that he formerly served as pastor in the South Bronx. Carrion, who recently transitioned the church he founded into the capable hands of leaders that he help train, now works for Redeemer City To City. We were on a call of church planters and pastors and each of us was describing a little bit of our situation within the circumstances of the pandemic. Michael spoke of the 13,—slow down and read it again. Thirteen women and men.— 13 beautiful souls just their church, Promised Land Covenant Church, had lost to the virus. He detailed the painful realities of how people in the neighborhood where his church gathers, the South Bronx, which pandemic or no pandemic suffers an unjust amount of trauma and pain. He described how his people have been treated by the healthcare system, how the shelter in place laws have not simply been a minor inconvenience to his people confined to well-stocked and spacious homes.

And it just crushed me. I could have turned the video off, I could have hid behind the black box of my name but that didn’t seem right. So I just sat there, with my face in my small green-dot window to the world, weeping. 

American Christians—and really Americans on whole—are not well-versed in lament. Everything within our culture trains us in a lifelong propaganda campaign to deny death and minimize suffering.  But when a friend is on a Zoom call, bringing the reality that this virus is inflicting right through the walls of your comfortable shelter in place, it causes you ask anew the question, “God where are you?”

John 11

Martha

In John chapter 11, Jesus arrives at a funeral that’s already been going on for several days. Jesus’ friends, Martha and Mary, are foremost among the mourners as they are heartbroken over the loss of their dear brother, Lazarus. As Jesus approaches their house in the village of Bethany, Martha hears of his arrival and goes out to meet him. She says to him, with a mixture of faith and disappointment, “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother would not have died. Or stated another way, “Jesus, where were you?” 

Martha is trying to reason her way through this tragedy, she is looking on the bright side. Jesus tells her, “Your brother will rise again.” And Martha responds in perfect orthodoxy, “Yes, I know at the resurrection on the last day, Lazarus will live.” But she’s missing Jesus’ point. Jesus says to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am, the same name that was spoken to Moses when he asked the voice in the burning bush, the name that defies boundaries, is now speaking to Martha. This word has taken on flesh in the person of Jesus, the resurrection is not a fixed point in time but is very presence of the incarnate son. 

Now I must press pause on the story because it’s quite likely that you have read this story before. Earlier on when Jesus was told that Lazarus was sick, but still alive, John 11 tells us that “though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (v. 6). All of this can feel a little robotic, as if Jesus is just going through the motions, “knowing the outcome.” I understand the impulse to view God’s sovereignty in the sense that he knows everything will happen. People often respond to moments of tragedy with cliches like “God wasn’t surprised” or “God has a plan.” And all of that is completely true. But, and don’t miss this, that is not the point that the biblical authors are trying to illustrate. As we go on in the story, can I invite you, to get in step with the cadence of the story? There is high drama here, This is not a foregone conclusion and Jesus will not speed the story along.

Mary

As we re-immerse ourselves in John 11. Jesus’ interaction with Martha has held the question in the background, what about Mary? Martha heard Jesus was coming and she ran to him, trying to make sense of the situation. Martha expresses her disappointment to Jesus, “Lord, if you would have been here…” but she is still able to face him. Mary, on the other hand, cannot even look at Jesus. Disappointment in God may sound like a lack of faithfulness but it truly is borne out of a profound sense of what God has done and who he has shown himself to be. Habakkuk prays as he watches his city crumble all around him, “Lord, we have heard of your great deeds, in our time do it again” (Habbakuk 3v2). Disappointment raises the question, “God we know you’re able, where are you?” And Jesus faces this deep disappointment from both Martha and Mary,

Jesus sends Martha to tell Mary that Jesus wants to see her. There is a beautiful gentleness in all of this. If you’ve ever had the sense that you have hurt someone, your impulse may be to want to rush in and fix it, but Jesus is allowing for the possibility that Mary does not want to see Jesus. So he sends Martha to invite her. Mary goes to Jesus and she falls at his feet (v. 32) and she expresses this same disappointment: “Lord if you would have been here my brother would not have died.” Remember how Jesus answered Martha? Martha was able to go and see Jesus, she still held some semblance of hope in Jesus (“even now”), even if that hope needed expanding. 

But Mary. Mary is broken. Jesus doesn’t respond to her the same way. Jesus doesn’t try to fill the great chasm of her pain with any words at all. V. 33 says: “When Jesus saw her weeping…he was greatly disturbed in spirt and deeply moved.” 

Jesus Wept.

And then, v. 35 tells us: Jesus began to weep. Jesus doesn’t fast-forward to the ending, he doesn’t assure Mary oh it’s all ok, it’s all part of some impersonal plan, he enters into her pain, he embraces his own pain (Lazarus was Jesus’ dear friend and is described in this chapter as the one he loves). Richard Hays remarks, “At Bethany, the incarnate word stood wordless.” 

As Jesus weeps, the one who gave the vast oceans of saltwater their form now forms an ocean of love, the one who brings the rain to fall on the earth now waters the soil of Bethany with his sorrow, a microcosm of the endless heart of the Father confined to a few drops of salty tears. Makoto Fujimura remarks that all the mystery and beauty of the Gospel is found in that soggy dirt as Mary’s tears merge with Jesus’ to spring rivers of life.

And then Jesus asks his own version of the question—where?— “Where have you laid him?” Echoing the call of God in the garden to his wayward children, “Where are you?” He stands before the tomb, again “deeply moved.” Martha protests any opening of the tomb, “Lord he has been dead a long time”—or stated another way, “even this is too much for you.” But Jesus responds, “Martha, did I not tell you if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 

And friends this is where this story meets ours today. Nicholas Wolterstorff in his lament for his dear son says, “It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought that meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.” We have to enter into the story, to feel the weight and the grief of this moment. NT Wright says that if Jesus was carrying the sorrows of the world on the cross then it is our call as Christians, the Church, “to express and embody the sorrow of God.” 

It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought that meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament For A Son

Lament As The Way Forward

I get the impulse people have to rewind to the old normal or to fast-forward the forging of the new normal, to embrace the missional possibilities of this moment, to distract ourselves away from the hard realities that this pandemic has revealed and accelerated. But Jesus reveals to us that the Church’s vocation is to be a people of lament. A people who enter in to the grief of our world, who weep on behalf of the loss all around us. This is not because we need be endlessly sorrowful about the world, or pessimistic, or fatalistic, or hopeless. But rather, because as the tears of Jesus show us, there is power, beauty, and life in the tears of God.

Through tear-blurred eyes, Jesus asks the question “where have you laid him.” Out of , not in spite of, Jesus’ deep anguish comes a new possibility. Many of our most brilliant and cherished artists have been people who have been intimately familiar with suffering. Vincent Van Gogh, for instance, painted Starry Night with its darkened church lights and bright night sky from the confines of an insane asylum. Artists feel the weight of the world’s existence and transfigure it into beauty, their glory from their sorrow.  The power of Jesus’ lament is that it is a light that shines in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome. The sorrow of Jesus is endowed with the love of God, the love that can, in the imagery of David Bentley Hart, harmonize any dissonance in the melody of creation or in the words of St. Paul, the love that “no height, no depth, not angels, demons, not life, nor death can ever separate us from…” (Romans 8).

Jesus is the ultimate artist, creating beauty out of sorrow, joy from weeping, resurrection from death. But he shows us that the way to newness is not in denial, not in hurry, it is not and end-run around the anguish and disappointment of the world, moving from mountaintop to mountaintop—rather, his way, the way of the cross and the tomb, is the path forged through the valley of the shadow of death.

Tributaries

I have cried many tears these past few weeks. I cry every Sunday morning, just sad that we cannot gather, sing, hug, share communion, and prayer. I cry when I think about our friends in places like Haiti. I cry when I hear the stories of my NYC pastor friends and the pain they are dealing with. I cry when I look to the future and consider all that we may be losing in this season. My tears feel so inadequate, so powerless. Maybe I’m like Martha and Mary, I just wish God would have been here and would have done something about it. But perhaps, like Martha and Mary also, I kneel in the shadow of one who loves this world, who loves my family and friends, who loves me more than I could ever love. Perhaps my tears are not the source but are merely the tributaries of the sorrow of God. Perhaps out of this sorrow new life will come forth. 

Perhaps my tears are not the source but are merely the tributaries of the sorrow of God. Perhaps out of this sorrow new life will come forth. 

The beauty of Lazarus raised to life is borne out of the sorrow of Jesus. Jesus can stand at the tomb of Lazarus and call out his name because he feels the weight of the tragedy and is not overwhelmed by it. We all want the latter, to stand firm and confident in the face of crisis, pain, and loss, but I think we often miss that the gateway to hope and joy, to resurrection and life is do be deeply moved by the pain of our world. The church will create new beauty and hope out of the depths of this pandemic, but only to the extent to which we are willing to enter into the pain of this moment. 

Jesus wept. We should too.