Tag: Guilty

“Nothing Seems to Satisfy”: Craving Solidarity

Luke 18:13d: “‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”

Introduction

Something has to change
Undeniable dilemma
Boredom’s not a burden anyone should bear
Constant over stimulation numbs me
But I would not want you any other way
Just not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive[1]

Who’s in your corner? Who’s on your side? Who’s your “ride or die”? Who’s the Louise to your Thelma?

If you’re having difficulty answering any of those questions, I don’t blame you. Names do not come readily to me, either. Over the course of the past five weeks, it’s become clear we’re in a dire spot, moment, event, era, time, whatever this is right now. The reality is that we sit in the turned-over ground of our obsession with suspicion. We are overrun by sola suspicio running amok. If there is no truth, if it’s all about my productivity, if no one is trustworthy, and if our communities lack substance to nurture where do we find anyone or anything to be for us? If our communities cannot foster relationality and can only dismiss identity and destabilize stability, who is left to be on my side, in my corner, my “ride or die”, my Louise?

I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way, blend and balance
Pain and comfort, deep within you
Till you will not want me any other way
But it’s not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive[2]

Sola suspicio has its place; but it cannot be where we live, it cannot be our best friend because with sola suspicio we must question and doubt everything and everyone; in this scenario the only people we can trust is ourselves. So, let us arm ourselves with weapons, horde material goods, work until our fingers bleed and our hearts stop, and keep looking over our shoulder for the threat of our replacement. There is no room for love here, there is no room for peace, there is no room for hope, there is no room for faith. There’s just nothing. And so we attempt to numb away the gnawing sensation that there could be more than this.

Something kinda sad about
The way that things have come to be
Desensitized to everything
What became of subtlety?
How can this mean anything to me
If I really don’t feel anything at all? Yeah
I’ll keep digging
Till I feel something[3]

With sola suspicio there is only one emotion left, and it’s a beast: fear. Sola suspicio demands fear. Tromping about waving its banners colored with the status quo and the unimaginative, hollering at the top of its lungs, Sola Suspicio reminds us at every turn: be afraid, nothing is true; be terrified, you are replaceable; be wary, your neighbor is not to be trusted; be alert, are you getting yours? It lures us to consume everything we can get our hands on and then soothes us into a deep post feast sleep coma. But we wake up again and are sent on more wild chases looking for something, anything, to give us sustenance.

We are craving solidarity, but nothing ever satisfies.

Isaiah 53:4-9

Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and God has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Isaiah’s prophetic prayer highlights that whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, something is desperately wrong, and we are weary and faint; starvation does that to the body. This is our plight; this is not the product of divine chastisement; it’s the product of our own hands.[4] We’re caught up in the muck and mire of the tension between being held captive and being complicit in our starvation and the starvation of others. Isaiah says, all have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way.

Today we’re forced to recall the one person who identified deeply with the human predicament fell victim to the clutches of suspicion. Today we remember it was our inability to trust, to hope, to have faith in, and to love God more than ourselves that sent Jesus to suffer death. Today we remember that the son of God and the son of humanity hung on the cross, held by meager nails, a victim of our inability to accurately judge between good and evil. Today we’re reminded that we try soothing our existential hunger with the mythology of the kingdom of humanity: the myths of power, greed, status, and privilege. Today Christ dies because we are afraid, terrified of anything new, loyal to the lies of the status-quo. Today we stand guilty of being willing to pervert justice to our desires, bend it to our whims content with absolutely nothing rather than something.

Conclusion

In our hunger for God, we called out to God and pleaded for God to show up. And God did. God showed up in deep, deep solidarity with us; identifying with us in our weakness and vulnerability by being born and living as one of us. But it was too much for us; Christ exposed our captivity and complicity with destructive structures oriented toward death. And so we told God we wanted something else not-God.

Today God is dead; there’s no solidarity. Today, the church is gone; there’s no community. Today, relationality failed; we’re alone. Today, we sold our identity for 30 shekels; we’re replaceable. Today stability crumbled, and we’re abandoned to the hunger.

(for part 1 click here, part 2 click here, part 3 click here, part 4 click here, part 5 click here)

[1] Tool, “Stink Fist”, Aenima, Verse 1 and Chorus

[2] Tool, “Stink Fist”, Aenima, Verse 2 and Chorus

[3] Tool, “Stink Fist”, Aenima, Verse 3

[4] Abraham Heschel The Prophets New York, NY: JPS, 1962. 151

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Our Stories This Story: Us

I recommend reading/listening to the sermon from Ash Wednesday, which functions as an introduction to this Lenten series. You can access it here. For the previous sermons in this series, (“The Youth”) click here,(“The Parents”) click here, and (“The Worker”) click here, (“The Old”) click here, and (“The Others”) click here.

Sermon on Isaiah 53: 1-9

Psalm 22:28-30 To [God] alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before [God]. My soul shall live for [God]; my descendants shall serve [God]; they shall be known as [God’s] for ever. They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that [God] has done.

Introduction

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My Empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt[1]

Nine Inch Nails “Hurt”

We’ve become a people who pass on death rather than life.

I wish I had better words. But I don’t. We very literally pass on death. We bring life into the world and then that life must come to terms with the fact that it will die. It’s the burden of existence: death. There is no point in time where life is actually safe from the threat of death. Cribs aren’t safe. Car seats aren’t safe. Homes aren’t safe. Businesses aren’t safe. Stores aren’t safe. Schools aren’t safe. Playgrounds aren’t safe. Beaches and mountains aren’t safe. Roads aren’t safe. The air isn’t safe. As someone who has lost three pregnancies, not even my body is safe from the threat of death. We are fragile, fragile beings in a world that carries the dialectic of life in death and death in life.

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything[2]

Nine Inch Nails “Hurt”

We, ourselves, carry the dialectic. New and stronger muscles demand the death of weaker ones. The genetics that give us life and uniqueness also bring the death sentence, sometimes realized too young. Dearly held conceptions of reality that carried us at one point, die to allow new ones in. Hearts thump vibrantly in new love and then break when love turns sour. We give life to new technologies making our life better only to watch them bring us death.

I wear this crown of [Dung]
Upon my liar’s Chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still here[3]

Nine Inch Nails “Hurt”

Diving deeper in to human existence, can we even love others, if we don’t act very loving to ourselves? Between habits that have become hindering rather than helpful and narratives that haunt and loom over our mind and spirits, we destroy ourselves in an attempt to survive. It’s a paradox: we will do whatever it takes to survive even if it means dying.

Should I mention our inability to create long-lasting and life-benefitting systems and judgments? We render judgments about others and things, about the world that end up bringing death and not life, or bring life to just a few and take it from others…many, many others deemed worth the sacrifice. Even systems starting off well-meaning and decent become septic when we—in our voracious hubris—would rather die than see something new take its place. We’d rather that people suffer than maybe change the way we think about things because that change would require us to die to something that has brought us (too much?) comfort over the years. We’d rather leave behind people who love us because they’ve changed rather than dare to change with them. We’d rather grow cold than admit defeat or fault.

We’d rather sentence a good man to death than allow him to bring us life.

Isaiah 53: 1-9

He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Isaiah 53:2c-6, 8-9

The agony articulated by one of the Isaiahs is our agony.[4] Today, this is where we are. Agony. We are in agony because we are exposed. Exposed to the core. Some how we must hold our goodness of divine creation and our guilt of complicity in the myriad forms of death swirling all about us. We can be good and guilty. We can be beloved and guilty. (We must ditch the binary of guilty is bad and not-guilty is good. If we can’t, we’ll find ourselves justifying more and more death and violence and our confessions will become more and more false.) We can be good and guilty of participating in systems, narratives, ideologies, theologies, dogmas, doctrines that harm other people and ourselves. I know I am guilty of this. I know you are guilty of this. We are all convicted here.

Isaiah’s prophetic prayer highlights that whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, we are in agony and are suffering. This suffering is not the product of divine chastisement; it’s the product of our own hands.[5] We are caught up in the muck and mire of the tension between being held captive and being complicit in our suffering and the suffering of others. Isaiah says, all have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way.

So much so that we’d rather sentence a good man to death than allow him to bring us life.

Conclusion

We are in agony, we are suffering, we are led astray, we are isolated, and we are exposed.

We clamored for Jesus’s death and we got it. The judgment of God is surely upon us. Today, in this story, we are reminded that Jesus bore our iniquity…because he bore our very, very bad judgment informed by the doctrines and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and not the kingdom of God. The weight of that judgment, as we watch and witness the death of God by our hand, renders us to our own death. Today, our stories come to a cataclysmic head-on collision with God’s story; none of us survive.

Today, we realize we do not know what we are doing…

[1] Nine Inch Nails “Hurt” Chorus

[2] Nine Inch Nails “Hurt” Verse 1

[3] Nine Inch Nails “Hurt” Verse 2

[4] Abraham Heschel The Prophets New York, NY: JPS, 1962. 149.

[5] Heschel Prophets 151

Posted on by laurenlarkin 1