Pride, protest, and the language of lament
The long season of Sundays after Pentecost, also called Ordinary Time, feels anything but ordinary this year. The “long pause” of the pandemic has given way to a rush of civil unrest around race and racism in this country, and there is plenty of grief to go around.
LGBTQ+ Pride month usually evokes joyous celebration. But this year we’re contemplating how the progress achieved by one segment of the human family can be leveraged for the sake of another. We want to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter, in part by carrying on an internal, mostly white-people-to-white-people conversation about racism and white supremacy, the original and ongoing sins of the North American project and the North American church.
We’ll use Psalm 27 as the supporting reading every week, casting it as a Pride psalm and an anti-racist psalm, as it expresses faith in the promise of divine shelter for those who are most vulnerable in this world. “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”
Singing at the end of the world as we know it. Jerusalemites exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE found it impossible to go on with life as usual. Their songs went silent. They swam in a swirl of sadness (“there we sat down and there we wept”) and rage (“happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us”). Psalms of lament give voice to both these feelings; both are welcome in God’s house, God’s family, God’s ear. Any church that denies or ignores the emotional/spiritual cost that is being extracted from us all is whistling in the dark.
In the haunt of jackals. Originally a prayer after losing in military battle, this psalm speaks to the sense that God has abandoned innocent people in their struggle. “Taunters” and “revilers” scorn the pray-ers, filling them with “disgrace” and “shame.” Their “bodies cling to the ground.” They declare their innocence – i.e. they are persecuted for the “crime” of their identity, rather than punished for any actual wrongdoing. Here we notice that this prayer could be on the lips of queer protesters at Stonewall, or black protesters at BLM riots across the country. It ends with a challenge to God: “Wake up!”
They set your sanctuary on fire. When religion is weaponized against God’s own interests (i.e. against the dignity of the whole human family), how do the faithful remain worshipful and hopeful? This psalm tells of the infiltration and desecration of the Jerusalem temple by foreign troops. We have seen the Bible, the church, and Christian faith itself desecrated by those who claim its power for the exclusion and denigration of queer people, of black people, of women, and more. What does it mean to be Christian against the tide of evangelical (majority) support for inhumane policies and practices?
The hate u give. The “imprecatory” (“cursing”) psalms give us permission to confess the hate that builds up in our hearts, poisoning us if we keep it in. When we ask God to hurt people who have hurt us, and/or people who are hurting others, we are demonstrating a kind of humility, submitting ourselves to God’s own judgment about who/when/whether to punish. We release the hate and its consequences from our hands, placing the enemy in God’s hands. We are not the judge, jury, executioner – as much as would like to be. It is safe to admit that here.
Confession as relief. A conspiracy of white silence around race and racism makes it damn near impossible for the white church, white LGBTQ+ persons, and white people generally to own our part in the chronic systemic oppression that breaks out in acute episodes of insult, injury, and even death. Ultimately, racism is hurting all of us, denying all of us our full humanity. “[Our] strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah.” This episode of the podcast closes with a litany of confession written by Remi Shores.