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It’s All in How You Look at It
The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
4 November 2007
All Saints’ Sunday – Year C
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
He was born to be a leader, but trained to become a lawyer. The government didn’t like the idea of black lawyers. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. And, when he felt that he had exhausted all peaceful means, Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) began preparing to use force.
He was convicted of treason and sent to prison with a life sentence. He spent his days working in a lime quarry and his nights sleeping in a tiny cell. It was blisteringly hot in the summer and bone-chillingly cold in the winter. The refection of the African sun off of the stone in the quarry robbed him of some of his eyesight and permanently blinded many of his fellow prisoners.
Mandela knew what it meant to be victimized, and it led him to a radically new understanding of forgiveness.
He emerged from prison to become the first President of the African National Congress actually elected in South Africa. Yet, when Mandela finally had the power to demand vengeance, he offered forgiveness and mercy instead. He asked his jailer of twenty-six years to sit on the platform with him at his inauguration.
And South Africa, which once stood for the horror of apartheid, now stands for the hope of truth and reconciliation.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
She was baptized an Episcopalian, but became one of the most revered figures in the history of American Catholicism. Dorothy Day (1897-1980) founded a newspaper known as The Catholic Worker, and later turned its offices into the first of many “houses of hospitality” that fed and housed people who had been displaced by the Depression.
Yet, she faced rejection most of her life. She was branded a communist, thrown in jail, repeatedly investigated by the F.B.I. and almost killed on several occasions.
Day knew what it meant to be victimized, and it led her to a radically new understanding of hospitality.
She understood that one person’s chains mean that we are all enslaved. And, her commitment to living among the poor still serves as a model for neighborhood revitalization efforts around the country.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
He was the son of privilege. Smart and well-educated, he spoke out against the Nazis as they rose to power in Germany and then used his connections to get a teaching position in New York. But, after only a few weeks, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) decided to return to Germany to be with his people. This time he used his connections to get a job in military intelligence, where he joined a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. When the conspiracy was discovered, he was thrown in jail. Eighteen months later, when it became clear that he had been involved in a failed assassination attempt, he was hanged.
Bonhoeffer knew what it meant to be victimized, and it led him to a radically new understanding of holiness.
His letters and papers from prison reveal a vision of a holy life as something to be lived out in full engagement with the secular world. He wanted the church to move from the periphery of the cultural circle to its center. He wanted believers to learn to talk about God without relying on traditional religious language, which he thought served to keep God at a safe distance from real problems. And, he wanted believers to look at history from the perspective of the outcasts, the powerless, the oppressed and the reviled. He thought that their suffering served as evidence of God’s suffering in the world.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Each of these saints – Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day and Dietrich Bonhoeffer – knew what it meant to be victimized. And, it changed their perspective. It caused them to see the world in a new way. They were drawn toward the suffering they witnessed. And, as they stood with the accused and looked up at the accusers, they learned something about God that they hadn’t known before. They came to believe that the story told by the losers in this world revealed a truth that had been left out of the story told by the winners.
It was, if you will, as if the stone that had been rejected by the builders became the head of each of their corners.
The point is not that God calls us to become victims. None of these saints sought to become a victim. The point is that God is with the victims and there isn’t any way that we can move closer to God without also running the risk of becoming victims ourselves. Crowds that believe they need victims are usually unwilling to let go of them without a fight.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
We say that in the waters of baptism we are buried with Christ in his death, by those waters we share in his resurrection and through those waters we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. It is an initiation without sacrifice. But, it is an initiation that demands a change in perspective.
It’s all in how you look at it. As we identify ourselves with Christ and his death, we are identifying ourselves with a victim – a giving and forgiving victim. We are taking the perspective of the loser in the story as our perspective. We are stepping out of the crowd holding the stones and into a community that is built on the memory that the victim was innocent.
And, it is from this perspective that we are reborn. It is from this perspective that we get a radically new understanding of forgiveness, hospitality and holiness and the new social order that these gifts generate. An order that doesn’t depend on power and violence. An order that doesn’t need victims.
Thank God we have the examples of the saints to show us the way!
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Comments? Contact The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr. at: gmaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org