I’m Hungry!

“Grangou! Grangou!” shouted the children who stood outside the wall trying to get our attention. “Grangou” means hungry In Haitian Creole. It was May 1997 when my family and I sat at an outside table at La Jacmelienne Beach Hotel in Jacmel, Haiti. We were having a light lunch, a luxury in Haiti, of a simple chicken sandwich. When I say “simple” I am not referring to the no small effort it took to just get this food in front of us by the staff at the hotel. René Préval was in his second year as the President of Haiti and would serve a full term. Haiti had previously had ten – that’s right, 10 – presidents in the eleven years since the corrupt and ruthless Baby Doc Jean-Claude Duvalier had been overthrown in 1986. Though progress is hard to measure in Haiti, Préval was a good president. He was so good that the US Peace Corps had renewed their presence in Haiti in 1996 after a period of much instability.

It was the Peace Corps’ renewed presence that took us to Haiti to see our son, who had been sent there as a new volunteer in 1996. (the Peace Corps would again suspend their presence in Haiti in 2005). As we sat there and ate our meal, Haitian children were gathered outside the wall and were peering in on us. They shouted, “grangou!” It troubled us. Here we were a family of well-fed Americans (except for my son who had lost a significant weight from his time in Haiti) enjoying a luxury while hungry Haitian children begged outside the wall.

God is Not Pleased

The scene reminded me of the story Jesus tells in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. We hear of an extraordinarily rich man who dressed in fine clothes and dined scrumptiously every day. Outside his gate lay a poor man, Lazarus by name, who longed for just for a crumb to somehow fall from the rich man’s table. His malnutrition caused sores to break out on his emaciated body. Dogs would come and lick his sores. Lazarus died, and the rich man eventually died too. No matter how wealthy and cushy a lifestyle one enjoys, the death rate is always one death per person.

What follows in the story is shocking. Lazarus is in the bosom of Father Abraham, and the rich guy is in Hades being tortured by the flames. The language of this role reversal is rich and colorful, but the point of Jesus’ story is that God is not pleased at the complete lack of the rich man’s ability to acknowledge the humanity of the poor outside his gate. It is the ultimate picture of tone-deafness in the rich and privileged to the plight of the planet’s underdogs.

The most marginalized people on the planet live in Haiti, suffering from the effects of extreme poverty. Stuck in this cycle and trying to survive on 50 cents a day they can’t afford clean water and go to bed hungry with shame for not being able to send their kids to school. Even worse, extreme poverty has resulted in over a million orphaned children in Haiti and created opportunity for child traffickers, as well as thousands dying annually from preventable diseases. Just a 90-minute flight from America’s abundance, this is a scandal of our shared humanity. God is not pleased.   

The Walls of America

As a follower of Jesus, I am troubled by the gates that separate the powerful and privileged and seem to immune them from the ills of humanity. During these last six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in this country, we have experienced a great wall that separates those who can work from home and the front line workers who are necessarily at risk everyday – those in health care, grocery store clerks, meatpackers, and many others. God cannot be pleased at this disparity. There is the great wall that separates the global north from the global south in terms of who is the perpetrator of climate change and those who suffer the most from its consequences. There is the great wall that separates those who can afford to have home tutors for their children from those parents who have to work and have small children who must fend for themselves with remote learning. There is the great wall that blocks black people from protection from police and a fair criminal justice system that others seem to take for granted. There is the ideological wall that separates peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors from often armed right-wing counter-protestors. And there is this great wall that distinguishes folks on what some economists call the K-shaped recovery curve. For the rich and those who have investments, the curve is upward. For the workers, desperate small business owners, and the millions of unemployed and facing evictions, the curve is steeply downward. And in the richest country in the world, there are those who have access to health care and those who do not. God cannot be pleased.

A Shocking Affront

Two weeks ago, there was a live re-enactment of the scene in Luke 16. In the midst of a global pandemic and defying CDC guidelines of social distancing and wearing facemasks, fifteen hundred people gathered on the south lawn of the White House to cheer a political party and its leader declaring itself to be the party of God. For every person who has spent the last six months playing by the rules, staying at home, wearing masks when in public, for every frontline worker who does not know whether the person closest to her is negative or positive for COVID, for every family that has canceled a wedding or a vacation or reunion, for every grandparent who has stayed isolated and has not been able to hug his grandchildren, for every congregation that has cancelled in-person worship, and for the over 190,000 Americans who have died while leadership downplayed the lethality of the virus, this gathering inside the walls that surround the White House was an affront, a travesty. God could not have been pleased.

Jesus Came to Tear Down Walls

Jesus came to tear down the walls that divide rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, gay and straight, black and white, and those who are in and those considered out. As Ephesians 2:14 says, he “has broken down the dividing wall...” Of course, it took the religious elite and the political leaders of the day to have Jesus taken outside the walls of the Holy City, to have him crucified on a garbage heap and for God to raise him from the dead on Easter to finally tear down the wall. Mark’s Gospel is explicit when Jesus breathes his last and the curtain of the temple is torn in two from “top to bottom” (Mark 15:18).

The church that gathers in the name of the risen Jesus is an anti-wall community. It is a community that gathers rather than separates. The genesis of how this Jesus community is to gather and to what it is to witness happened on the night in which Jesus was betrayed when he placed bread in the hands and wine on the lips of all those gathered, including Peter and Judas, and said, “This is my body given for you. This is my blood shed for you.” With that inaugural meal came the promise that the risen Jesus would eat and drink again with us and the instruction from the apostle, Paul, that when we eat and drink the meal we proclaim the Lord’s death and resurrection until he comes again. Jesus’ ministry of the inbreaking of the Reign of God from the feeding of the multitude to his eating with outcasts and sinners bear witness to Isaiah’s poetic portrait of the outcome to which the love, mercy, and grace of God is taking us all:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast… (Is. 25:6)

It is more than a feast of great food and drink. It is also a celebration of God tearing down and taking away the shrouds and sheets over all peoples, the swallowing up of death, the wiping away of all tears, and the end of disgrace for many. With the possible exception of Revelation 21 and the imagery of God coming to dwell with God’s people there is no greater visual portrait of what it means to say that love and life finally win.

The Common Table

In Decatur, Georgia a new congregation is being birthed out of the death of one of the many traditional ELCA congregations who have met a similar fate because of the stubborn walls of resistance to change and innovation and an unwillingness to meet this era. This new congregation has had to have a sense of humor because it was supposed to have launched with a lot of hoopla on Easter Sunday, April 12th, one month into the stay-at-home orders.

My wife, Harriet, and I are blessed to be a part of this new congregation. It is a congregation informed and shaped by Lutheran theology, but we are not attentive to the trappings of institutional religion. Seeing ourselves as a movement, we also do not spend a lot of time on dogma or doctrine. Our focus is the table – the gathering of all peoples around tables. We call ourselves the Common Table.

In a society fractured by inequity, suffering, and intolerance we all face a choice: to live for our own good or for the common good. Embodying the unshakeable hope and unrelenting grace of the risen Jesus, the Common Table works for justice and equity for those marginalized by society and declares that it has a seat at the table for everyone. As we fight for justice, love all people, journey together, and dream fearlessly in the name of the crucified and risen one, we will replace walls with tables. We do hope God is pleased.   

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

How Did We Get Here?

How did we get here? Here being the spectacle last Monday of the President of the United States standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding up a bible just a one-minute walk from what is now known as Black Lives Plaza NW. The prelude to the spectacle was a Law & Order speech, threatening military intervention against the nationwide protestors if mayors and governors don’t get their suppression-of-the-1st-Amendment acts together. Then the spectacle was abetted when a cadre on horse and in riot gear gassed, battered, and moved mainly peaceful protestors from the area. So, just how did we get here? To partly answer that question, I need to do some personal and historical work. I’ll be as brief as I can.

A Tale of Two Stories

On December 24, 1978 my wife and I sat holding our two small children before candlelight around our Christmas tree in our home in the Niavaran section of Tehran. Outside in the street was mayhem as military forces battled revolutionaries in a struggle that would lead to the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and give way to a new Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the violence raged, we sang Christmas carols in hope that our voices would dampen the sounds in the street.

As we held our children, two stories were being told. There was the tired old story being told in the street – a story driven by the human quest for power and dominance. It is a story as old as Cain killing his brother Abel and lives on in every place and time through formal armed conflict and in our daily lives of conflict, whether at the office, with a member of the family, or with police in riot gear in the streets. As a country whose history is steeped in war and multiple forms of conflict, we Americans know this story all too well.

The second story being told was in the words of the carols we sang. Pay attention to this verse:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die,

born to raise each child of earth, born to give us second birth.

Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn king!”

This counter-story speaks of a God of infinite grace who comes to us not as a tyrant, bully or bearing arms but as a defenseless baby declaring amnesty to a world trapped in the consequences of our sin and participation in evil. The hymnwriter Charles Wesley stood on this side of the empty tomb and chose to already declare in a Christmas carol a crucified Jesus risen with “healing.”  The words of this carol express a gospel which brings life and light to ALL, raises up each child of earth, and makes it possible for us to experience a second birth – a do over – as people in the world. Maybe we would get it right this time.

These two stories are completely different in the worldview they present and the allegiances of each story’s followers. They both cannot be true. One cannot embrace both stories. Allegiance to one story puts you at odds with the other.

The Jesus Movement is Born

When the women first ran from the empty tomb preaching the first sermon, “Jesus is risen,” and when the Spirit would birth the Jesus movement that became the church, the early followers knew the distinction between the two stories. They knew that they were in the world but not of it. When they gathered, they confessed that the crucified and risen Jesus was Lord and not Caesar. They lived by radically different norms than the society around them and in which they still had to daily participate. When they gathered for worship, the celebration of the Eucharist was crucial for forging their identity and calling as people who not only bear witness to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus but also to the eschatological promises the meal represents - “a foretaste of the feast to come.” The most prevalent biblical image of the outcome of the human story is that of a banquet – an all-inclusive party – in which God wipes away every tear, ends suffering and death, and swallows up everything that would divide us, demean us, or crush us. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the down payment of that promise and the Eucharist is liturgically participating in it as if the future is already here.

We know the church was eventually persecuted and endured terrorizing brutalization because of its unwillingness to declare Caesar as Lord and his empire as God-ordained. Living out of its story, the church continued to hold to the words of one of its earliest hymns:

Let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself… and humbled himself…   (Philippians 2:5-8)

The Movement Gets Sick

I know something about malignancy. Were it not for a drug I take every night, I would be dead from an incurable form of leukemia. When I sat in my hematologist’s office for my first consultation after a bone marrow biopsy confirmed the malignancy, she told me I probably had had the disease for quite a while before a routine annual physical detected something wrong in my bloodwork. Two things are instructive here: 1) The disease formed in my bone marrow where blood cells are produced and where healthy cells became malignant. 2) I had the disease without knowing it. So, I lived with a lethal disease originating in the very core of my body and did not even know it.

In the early 4th Century, the bone marrow of Christianity began to get sick. In a dramatic development in the relationship of the Roman Empire to the Jesus movement, Emperor Constantine, wanting the Christian God’s assistance in battle along the empire’s perimeter, made a deal that would soon result in his mandating Christianity as the official religion of the empire. In quick order the two distinct irreconcilable stories became one. As we fast forward through western European history, the marriage resulted in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. Bishops and secular leaders became interchangeable in their leadership of the agenda of the empire. Constantine presided over the Council at Nicaea. Bishops led armies into battle. “Onward Christian Soldiers!”

Instead of Christianity providing an alternative story out of which to live in contrast to any worldly form of power and dominance, it became a prop for the empire’s agenda. Likewise, the empire’s support of the church gave it power, a power that corrupted. The malignant church of the empire meant spiritual support for conquering and subjugating the “infidel” beyond its borders. It meant occupying, dominating, and exploiting “the other.” The agenda was carried out with the assurance that the empire’s will was the will of God. It was “us,” the superior, versus “them.”  

American Malignant Christianity

The Reformation launched in the 16th century was directed at much of the corruption within the church and eventually led to widespread reformation and counter-reformations. But as with empire Christianity, the fuel for the Reformation movement was often as much nationalism as theology. When Europeans came to America to settle, they carried the malignancy.

The conflation of an empire-formed Christianity with the sense of cosmic specialness (i.e. Manifest Destiny) held by white Americans has resulted in a deadly malignancy. It was malignant Christianity that sanctioned the genocide of native peoples, the slave trade and America’s deep sin of slavery, the deprivation of rights to women, the resistance to civil rights movements, forms of hatred and exclusion towards members of the LGBTQIA community and the Law and Order agenda. It is malignant Christianity that justifies the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world. With 4.4% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 22% of the world’s incarcerated, with blacks having an imprisonment rate at five times that of whites.

It is also malignant Christianity that justifies our God-loving country hanging onto the death penalty, a distinction shared only with Belarus in the modern western world. It is malignant Christianity that justifies incoming travel bans against certain peoples, building a wall at our southern border, and separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. Moreover, it is malignant Christianity that is complicit in America being the most violent country in the world in terms of gun violence and gun ownership. It was just two years ago at the NRA prayer breakfast in Dallas where a keynoter wore a shirt proclaiming, “Jesus loves me and my guns” and declaring that owning an assault rifle was a God-given right.    

The hold that American Malignant Christianity has on our culture is akin to the knee that pressed down on George Floyd’s neck for almost 9 minutes. And if you think my portrait of American malignant Christianity is just hyperbole, talk to any pastor who has initiated a discussion in a God-fearing and Bible-believing church about moving the American flag out of the sanctuary. There is a reason in this turbulent season the President of the United States thought a photo of him holding a Bible would be a good idea.

Being Saved

In the 3rd chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is visited at night by a leader of the Jewish council. His name is Nicodemus, and he is struggling to spiritually understand what Jesus is doing and saying. Jesus speaks to him about being born again. (Or being born anew or born from above. The Greek word used by Jesus can be translated multiple ways.) Malignant Christianity has taken this exchange and turned it into a form of individual salvation, even defining what one must do to make a deal with God that ensures entrance into heaven after death. Jesus was concerned with something else, the repentance of God’s people. The “you” who must be born again in the Greek text is plural. It is “you,” collective people of God. “You” must recover your identity and calling. That will take an entire rebirth. You are the ones chosen to be light to the world, showing the world how we all live on this planet in love and goodness with one another. It is through you whom all the people of the world are to be blessed. For God so loved the world that God sent the only son to save it. God did not send the son to condemn it. God did not send the son to make a deal. God sent the son to bring life and healing for all. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; we are all one in Christ Jesus. All means ALL.

Being saved means we repent from all the ways that we have tried to convince ourselves that God has aligned with our agenda and schemes and instead we align ourselves with God’s, which is to bring healing and wholeness to all the world. We must resist all forms of Malignant Christianity with treatment. Just as my nightly regimen of Imatinib shuts off my malignant cells’ ability to emit an enzyme to reproduces more malignancy, our treatment against the sickness of Malignant Christianity is Jesus – what Jesus did for us, and more importantly what he did to us. He changed everything, and we must too.

We must resist by speaking the truth. If the last two weeks have shown us anything, there is a spirit blowing through this nation. Young and old and black and white are being summoned to a movement. The church that bears witness to the crucified and risen Lord has something to say. Preachers out there, speak the truth. Do not be partisan but do be political. Jesus was political. Look at his own declared agenda. Look at his speeches. Look at those with whom he dined and embraced. Look at the systems of injustice to which he spoke “woes.” Jesus was a protestor. His Sermon on the Mount announced a change of affairs. His entry into Jerusalem was a protest march. He attack on the temple was a demonstration. He took sides with the poor, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. He spoke truth to power. He was lynched by both the government and the religious people, but God raised him up. He rose again because love and life for all people finally win.

What is it that God requires of us? To do justice, and love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

We Must Persist

The most marginalized people in the Western Hemisphere live in Haiti, suffering from the effects of extreme poverty. With tenacity and resiliency, The Haitian Timoun Foundation is devoted to the people of Haiti to bring about a just future with life-changing impact; yet, the COVID-19 pandemic brings significant challenges.

On Monday of this week, Bryan Stevenson gave the commencement address to the new graduates of the Emory University School of Law. Stevenson is a Harvard-educated lawyer who chose to dedicate his life to addressing the structural injustices in our country, particularly in the criminal justice system. He is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (Montgomery, Alabama), the author of the bestseller, Just Mercy, and is the focus of the late 2019 movie release by the same name. In his address, Stevenson lifted up four imperatives for fighting for justice, imperatives that I find to be immediately transferable in our fight for justice and life for all people in Haiti.

1) The Power of proximity.

HTF was first imagined out of a 1997 trip to Haiti in which I both fell in love with the Haitian people and culture and at the same time was powerfully impacted by the ravaging effects of poverty and injustice. I was convicted deep down in the core of my bones. This was “not right.” You can read about Haiti in a book and see occasional newspaper articles, but it is not the same as being there. Over the years, HTF has garnered strong support from people and covenant communities because of a practice of frequent immersion trips in which we enter the lives of those we serve. Unfortunately, for almost two years those trips have abated. First there was widespread unrest and then the onset of COVID-19. In this time of distancing, HTF must figure out how to still capture the power of proximity. We pray that regular exposure to these messages might enable you, the reader, to be proximate, even if you are physically not.

2) Stay hopeful.

The real enemy of justice is hopelessness. I remember a 2008 conversation in Mirebalais with Gauthier Dieudonne, the director of the CLM project at the time the initial pilot projects were ending. He spoke of the hopelessness among Haiti’s ultra-poor women. To look into their eyes is to see the absence of life. CLM and the overall work of HTF are built on hope. Hope empowers us to believe in what we cannot yet see. It compels us to stand up and speak for what is possible. Daily we are reminded that we have seen what is possible, and we continue to believe with a hope that will not quit. We invite you to continue to hope with us.

3) Change some of the narratives we have inherited.

In 2009 on an immersion trip, a first-time participant was appalled at the mountains of trash, filth clogging waterways, and the shocking sites of poverty in Port-au-Prince. It happens. His first response was to blame the Haitians. They do not care. They really are animals. It is a view shared by many, including our current U.S. president. As the week unfolded, he began to learn Haitian history - its history of inhumane slavery, the narrative of extreme complicity of the U.S. in inflicting repeated harm on Haiti, and the U.S. propping up brutal dictatorships and exploiting Haiti. Being confronted with a different narrative and with his own experience of amazingly resourceful Haitians who are part of the HTF family resulted in a conversion experience. This person became one of HTF’s most vocal advocates, strongest financial supporter, and among the first to go to Haiti to assist with relief efforts after the devastating 2010 earthquake. A narrative that we can change right now is the notion that COVID-19 has rendered us helpless. Not true! If you have been keeping abreast of HTF’s activities in Haiti you know of our tenaciousness, resiliency, and capacity to pivot to initiatives of immediate impact.

4) Willing to do uncomfortable things.

In this global pandemic it is easy to retreat in fear and self-preservation. In a nation in which “Looking after Number One” has raised individualism to perhaps our highest value, we must continue to beat the drum for justice in Haiti. If not us, then who? No justice ever happened without the will to stand up and stand with the most marginalized, even when it is not popular or comfortable. The temptation we all face is to be so overwhelmed by the sea of pain and economic suffering right now in the U.S. that we can no longer see or care about our brothers and sisters in Haiti. May it not be so!

There is much work to do. Please help us persist.  Donate at www.htflive.org.

That all might have life!

 Rick Barger

 Founder