Deacon Roberts’ Homily from Our Last Day of School

Yesterday was the last day of school. If you saw yesterday's email, you know that we covered a lot of ground, including some fun video and pictures. But also and more seriously, in our morning prayer, Deacon Roberts shared theological perspective on the present crisis in our country. Below is a copy of that homily.

In the last few weeks, students have asked: how can a classical curriculum prepare us for the urgent questions and suffering in our world right now?
 
One answer: in today’s morning prayer, let’s linger over the scriptures, and trace how they orient us for the current crisis. I hope this train of thought models the process that all of us can follow any morning or evening when we pray and form our consciences.
 
Let’s start with today’s opening sentence – “The Lord listens to the needy, come, let us bow down in prayer.” It’s from Psalm 69. It’s obvious but it nevertheless needs repeating: the Lord cares about the poor. A prayer life is incomplete if it doesn’t include zeal for the downtrodden.
 
Then the hymn speaks about “light coming from chaos” and night being a time of fear. Chaos and disorder are bad things. Civilization is fragile, and so we pray for the rule of law, for basic decency, safety, and peace.
 
Then we have excerpts from another Psalm 102, a Psalm of lament. The Psalmist begs “do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress” and “the bread I eat is ashes, my drink is mingled with tears.” Again, any human emotion is appropriate to bring to prayer. God is ready for our tears, grief, rage, exhaustion, and frustration.
 
But also notice – we bring these things to the Lord in order to have them transformed. The end of the excerpt talks about being reborn, about the Lord hearing our groans and freeing us from the burden.
 
Then this morning’s reading from Isaiah, which promises that even tyrants and warriors are subject to the Lord’s judgment. All who revel in violence or oppression – you better watch out, because the Lord sees you, and his judgement is not indifferent. 
 
Finally the antiphon for the Isaiah reading, as well as a similar antiphon for the Canticle of Zechariah. Three times, today’s morning prayer repeats that the Lord is “slow to anger.” We also hear that the Lord is merciful. That thickens the plot. It forces us to always ask how to integrate zeal for justice with mercy and patience.
 
How do these scriptures orient us for today?
 
Here’s a story I’ve been thinking about this week. I read about a grown African-American woman who was talking with a friend about long ago when they were Girl Scouts together. The first woman said how much she enjoyed the woods, the hikes, campfires, sleeping outside. The other woman agreed, but she said her mom, who had been one of the chaperones, found it hard staying up all night standing guard. “What,” the first woman replied, “I never knew about that. Was she afraid of bears?” “No,” the second woman explained, “she heard the Ku Klux Klan was active near those woods. She worried that if word got out about a troop of black Girl Scouts, the Klan would show up.”
 
As a man who loves camping – as a dad who has chaperoned many student camping trips – this small story hit close to home. The Klan is not something we’ve ever had to worry about on a Martin Saints trip. But this story is just one of countless stories we’ve all heard lately, stories that force us to admit there’s a problem in our country. Let’s admit that white privilege is sometimes a real thing. Let’s admit that black people live with stress and danger that white people don’t even have to consider. Honesty about the state of our world should fuel a passion for justice. Racism is an outrage.
 
Furthermore – recalling more of those stories we’ve all seen and heard lately - police brutality should always scandalize every Christian. Police brutality is a wicked irony, for it means that those who are supposed to protect and serve have become the danger. When we pray the Stations of the Cross or sorrowful mysteries of the rosary – for example, when we pause to contemplate the scourging at the pillar, or the crowning with thorns - we’re meditating on a New Testament version of police brutality. 
 
So what do we do with this anger, our longing for justice? What is our next move? I’m against racism…so perhaps should I cheer for anti-racist mobs and rioters? How much looting and vandalism does it take to cancel out a cross-burning and a lynching? Didn’t Jesus say “eye for an eye”?
 
No. Jesus calls us to a better place. Jesus did not rally a mob in order to avenge himself. On the contrary. Jesus was condemned by a mob. Pontius Pilate was playing to the mob when he let them choose Barabbas. 
 
Mobs are dangerous. Mobs obliterate the tension between justice and mercy, righteousness and patience – the tensions that all Christians are called to live in.

Christians are called to subvert oppression much more creatively than that. Let’s remember today’s Psalm. When we feel outraged, when we are exhausted by evil, we take those feelings to the Lord in order to have them transformed. The Lord is slow to anger, and so we too are accountable to patience. We should not allow ourselves to get drunk on our rage. We should be slow about jumping to conclusions. We need to discern carefully whether and when we march and how we advocate.
 
At one protest this week in London, a mob vandalized Abraham Lincoln’s statue. Perhaps to the outraged mob he was just another dead white guy from history. But this is the man who freed the slaves. The mob also vandalized Winston Churchill’s statue – the man who defeated Hitler, an actual fascist. Lincoln and Churchill were sinners like the rest of us, and if you probe their records, there are some big holes. But freeing slaves and defeating Hitler wasn't enough to earn the mob’s respect, because mobs don't think. The mob’s rage is cultural suicide. It is insane and frightening, the kind of darkness and chaos rejected by our opening hymn.
 
Here’s another example. The other day, I was wrestling with my conscience. What is my personal responsibility to the Black Lives Matter movement? Of course I believe that black lives matter. As I have said many times at Martin Saints, when you read Martin Luther King Junior’s letter from the Birmingham jail, especially here at a classical school, you have to sit up and take notice that he’s building his argument from scripture, Augustine, and Aquinas. If we’re going to march in Washington to defend the unborn, then, when the moment calls, we’ve also got to stand up to show solidarity with others created in the image of God, very much including and often in ways specifically focused on black lives.
 
But when I was wrestling with my conscience, I was wrestling with a slightly different question: what do I think about Black Lives Matter, the specific organization, as in capital B, capital L, capital M? What do I think about B-L-M when it’s thrown around as a hash tag on social media, or on a protest sign?
 
Trying to discern this question, I went online to look at the Black Lives Matter website. I read the “what we believe” section. There’s some good stuff in there. But also some weird things, about “disrupting” the family and being queer-affirming. We Catholics cannot bend our knee to these things. What I especially noticed was, in the paragraph about the family, it mentions “mothers, parents, and children,” but leaves out fathers. Yet nearly 60% of African-American children live in homes without their dad. How can you have a movement about the future of the black community, and yet shirk from the problem of absent fathers? Of course that is a difficult and sensitive conversation, but we need to be creating space for it, not shutting it down. 
 
As with Dr. King, Christians rest on the Bible and the natural law as the foundation for our opposition to racism. But the same Bible, that same natural law, has more than a few things to say about sexuality. The truth is one, the truth is integrated. We’re made in the image of God, and this love is merciful and sacrificial, and so the poor need help, racism is wrong, and fathers should stick around to take care of their kids. Don’t let anyone force you to choose, because it all flows from the same faith.
 
Now, in our culture today, this faith is inconvenient. If you think that what our culture calls “social justice” has part of the truth, but also you understand the concern for “family values,” then you cannot really be at home in either political party. Truthfully, neither slogan is adequate to the moment. And our wariness towards both left and right doesn’t make us moderates in the middle. It makes us Christians, offering the world an alternative that the world struggles to even imagine. We have work to do.
 
As we continue with morning prayer today, let’s consider our political judgments and allegiances very carefully. Let’s be careful about the media we consume, what we let stir us up, and let’s not follow either the right wing or the left wing script. Let’s channel our complicated feelings into prayers that are honest, raw, but also patient and discerning.

The Lord is coming. The Lord is righteous. The Lord’s ways will win. In the meantime, we are called to be the Lord’s witnesses down here in the mess. But as we make our witness, we have to resist the temptation to take shortcuts. The truth will set us free, but that means patient and courageous insistence on the fullness of the truth. 
 
Amen.