The Both/Andness of it All

Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us away from dualistic thinking and into a world where all things merge into One. AMEN

Every time we pray, every time we listen to the Word of God, and every time we worship, we are called to enter a liminal space of kairotic time, God’s time full of opportunity, and to practice, as best we can, imagining how all things merge into one, and how all will be reconciled in God’s time. 

Here we are in ordinary time, the season after pentecost and the longest one, called thus not to point to its mundaneness as to set it apart from “special” liturgical times. And just as we engage in patterns of sleep and wakefulness, so the Church alternates between two movements of time in the year: high holidays and penetential seasons and everyday life or as one writer has said between the “Joys of celebration and the grunt work of growth”.  So time and seasons in the church are embedded in cycles which revolve. 

Reverberations and Alternations of time seem particularly important right now. In fact, I commented at a clergy gathering recently that as we struggle with the 2 epidemics, of COVID and of Racial Injustice, we are both in a prolonged season of Lent even though in Pentecost. Moreover, we seem to be realizing more than ever that our linear chronological distinctions have been exploded or imploded by the Holy Spirit calling us to consider more deeply the mercy and justice of the Oneness of God’s time and space toward which we move. 

There is a both/andness to this time. It has and will have a place in salvation history. It will be thought of less as either a time of loss or a time of gain as a time within the great divine scheme of restoration and reconciliation. Both here and yet to come. 

We are, I believe, being called to a penitential season like Lent or Advent even, when our rules of life have been interrupted and need to be reframed. We are in a time of radical change, a social justice movement which is to expose the mercy and justice of the prophets, the divine mercy and distributive justice of the Living God.

Dualistic thinking will no longer serve or save. Only a kind of both/and way of being will keep us engaged with Kingdom work and help us fight biological and social infections. Only exploding the hyphens and “ors” will allow a fulcrum or cross piece center to stabilize and balance the end pieces.

Ours is a theology of the cross and at that cross we grieve and hope. On that cross are hung love and sorrow. The entire shape of a Christian’s life and hence responsiveness is guided and shaped by the cross of desolations and consolations. The cross is not a dualistic concept; it is the stable merger of all opposing forces reconciled in Christ. 

I believe that in this time of COVID and Racial Injustice we have been brought to that crucible of everything: love and hate, justice and injustice, healthy and unhealthy, infected and not, exhaustion and exhilaration, peace and chaos, rich and poor, abled and disabled, marginalized and powerful, slave and free, doubter and believer. 

Between the apparent opposites where I have put an “and” is tension. We are called to live in that tension. We might prefer rich to poor; we might prefer healthy to sick, and as we examine each dyad a merger or connection takes place which shortly becomes a continuum. It is the continuum of life. 

Systemic racism is particularly complex as it is hard to label sides; to do so is to gloss over the depth of dysfunction. The only way ... the only way we address the pain of systemic racism is to break its pieces apart, which means we break too, and conjoin them instead of separating or parsing them with God’s grace.

And that leads me to Romans 5. Ironically this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans was offered at the beginning of Lent before we were shut in and apart, to help us examine a critical element of character: humility. It is one of my favorite passages in the Bible and one which has been with me these last weeks.

Suffering, of which we have seen our unfair share, evokes various responses and the one God calls us to is endurance. When we endure and persist and persevere, again toward the cross, not the corporate ladder, we develop character: courage, generosity, calm, clarity, conviction, resolve, faithfulness...

And that character so developed produces hope, the kind which Mary has at the foot of the cross, the kind the disciples realize and the kind which is infected with love and mercy and causes our hearts to burn.

That burning hope does not disappoint.

The both/andness of this story is in the continuum. One is not either courageous or not. One is not either hopeful or not. One is on some spectrum of hope and courage being developed. We are in process of becoming.

Wherever we are on that continuum, whoever we are as Christians, we are called to join and follow this Way of Christ. We are called to speak truth to power. To give glory to God. To love our neighbor. There is no either or about it.

When we step into this nondualistic continuum we are swept up and away into a community of mercy and compassion. We give it and we receive it. We become repairers of the breach, at the hyphens, and restorers of the faith, with glorious glue. 

As you listen to Sherry’s recording of the Church’s One Foundation, listen for connection and cohesion, for stabilizing, for the Water and the Word. There is nothing dualistic about it!

And so I invite you to release your tendencies to separate and divide, to dualize, and to remember the great Both/And of all: The Kingdom is Both here and Yet to Come. There is nothing ordinary about that. It is extraordinary!

May God bless you with discomfort…

Discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships,

Discomfort, so that you will live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger…

Anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,

Anger, so that you will work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears…

Tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, starvation and war,

Tears, so that you will reach out to comfort them

And turn their pain into joy.

And, may God bless you with foolishness…

Foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world,

Foolishness, so that you will do what others claim cannot be done.

Amen.  (Franciscan Benediction)