Sunday
May 24
The Gospel According to Elmo
By Marsh Chapel
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Norman Rockwell could have painted the scene: Two parents and a child at the dining table, hands held, heads bowed, thanks given: for home, for family, for food. At the end of the prayer the parents say a solemn amen. Then, with gusto, verve, and vigor the child enunciates: Elmo!
Now, for most parents, this might be cause for amusement or even delight. But when one of the two parents is a priest, the thought that immediately crosses the mind is “Oh dear, what will the congregation think!?” Upon further reflection, however, there are certainly far worse models of God roaming around in human psyches than that of the soft, red, furry Sesame Street character Elmo. Perhaps this episode might even make a good sermon illustration!
To be sure, Elmo wins the sweetheart award on Sesame Street. Big Bird is anxious, Grover is inept, Cookie Monster is fixated, and Oscar the Grouch is, well, a grouch. Elmo is sweet. Elmo wants everyone to be kind to one another. Elmo asks forgiveness when responsible for something going awry. Elmo is deeply attentive to relationships and feelings and the wellbeing of everyone in the neighborhood. Elmo assiduously avoids pronouns, speaking exclusively in the third person.
Today is Pentecost, the celebration of the arrival of the Holy Spirit fifty days after Easter and the birthday of the church. The liturgical color of the Holy Spirit is red. Is not Elmo, the red Muppet, very much the embodiment of what God the Spirit is for us? The Holy Spirit is the comforter, who reconciles and renews, and the advocate, who attends to the building up of the community of the church.
Our poor, soiled, broken world is desperately in need of such reconciliation and renewal. Our world in which a train crashes, quenching the lives of eight and derailing the lives of hundreds. Our world in which felons on Wall Street seek to impoverish instead of enrich their clients, saying that “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Our world in which radical Islamists rape women and children in the name of God in order to produce more radical Islamists. Our world in which the president of a university cannot even bear to look at, let alone shake the hand of, a graduating student because she carries a mattress. Yes, we desperately need an advocate and a comforter.
Of course, all of these situations, and the very predicament of the human condition if we are being honest with ourselves, are hardly unambiguous. Ambiguity makes the ministry of the Holy Spirit hard to discern; it makes the Gospel according to Elmo hard to apply. How, for example, are we to balance kindness with justice? How can we ask forgiveness when doing so requires admitting culpability, which could get us sued? How are we to attend to relationships, to the feelings and wellbeing of all in our community, when our own feelings and wellbeing are far from secure? How are we to speak when seemingly any word we might say will inevitably offend, hurt, or otherwise piss off someone?
Human life is ambiguous. Consider Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. Michael was unarmed. Michael was black. Michael’s family said he was a good man. Michael stole cigarillos and shoved a store clerk. Michael was wrestling with an experience of the divine, and his rap lyrics revealed his struggle to reconcile an experimentum tremendum et fascinans. Consider Eric Garner, who died in a chokehold by police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Eric was unarmed. Eric was black. Eric’s friends described him as a “gentle giant” and a “neighborhood peacemaker.” Police approached Eric on suspicion of his selling loose cigarettes that had not been taxed. Eric was unable to work as a horticulturalist due to health problems. Consider Freddie Gray, who was arrested and placed in the back of a police van under the supervision of six police officers, and by the time he arrived at the police station, he was dead. Freddie was arrested for carrying a small knife. Freddie was black. Freddie was remembered at his funeral as loving, caring, and respectful. Freddie had been involved in twenty criminal court cases at the time of his death. Freddie was a childhood victim of lead poisoning. Three ambiguous lives. But if living an ambiguous life is a crime punishable by death, then who among us can be saved?
In addition to the plague of ambiguity, the human condition is also plagued by the inability to cope with ambiguity. Just as Cookie Monster fixates on cookies, we human beings fixate on the worst parts of one another and reduce each other to those parts. Much of the focus on the personal lives of Michael, Eric, and Freddie in the media fixated on their criminal pasts and the criminal circumstances that caused them to encounter the police. In most cases, these three men were reduced to being criminals. Clearly, thugs one and all, and there can be nothing ambiguous about a thug. This fixation is only exacerbated by the projection and transference of the taken-for-granted criminality of black persons onto each and every black life and black body even as white lives benefit from the projection and transference of the taken-for-granted competence, integrity, and nobility of white persons onto each and every white body. Any perceived fault, no matter how inconsequential, makes a black person a criminal, while white privilege covers a multitude of sins.
Reduced to criminality, Michael, Eric, and Freddie, among so many others, have been cast as monsters. Their faults have been taken as constitutive of their whole being. Regardless of any good they might have done in their lives, regardless of the love they might have shared with family and friends, regardless of the circumstances they may have endured, the sum total of their lives is assigned the label of monster. Now a monster is an aberration, a sign of something deeply wrong with the world. Monsters are evil. Monsters are morally deformed. Monsters do not belong, cannot belong, must never belong because their very being is incompatible with the goodness of the world and the moral order.
It is under this banner of rooting out and destroying monsters that millions of black men have been disappeared from American society. The New York Times got their reporting wrong here. They report that there are 1.5 million missing black men. Further, they report that “more than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.” The problem is not with their statistics. It is with their rhetoric. They make it sound like there is no cause for these absences or that these black men simply disappeared of their own volition. Poof!
NO! Here, for once, it is necessary and right to use the passive voice. These black men have been disappeared. They did not disappear all on their own; their disappearance was done to them. Because they were identified as monsters they were killed or incarcerated. It is convenient for us in northern North America to think that the phenomenon of “the disappeared” is a result of the metaphysical realism of Latin America. On this weekend when Oscar Romero is beatified we are attentive to the pervasive plague of disappeared persons throughout most of the twentieth century in Latin America. As it turns out, the phenomenon is home grown as well.
You too are part monster. You too have monstrous parts of yourself. We all do. Boston College philosopher Richard Kearney notes that the English words hostility and hospitality share a common root in the Latin word hostis, which in turn has the ambivalent meaning of either enemy or host. What hostility and hospitality have in common is that they are both possible responses to strangers, to others, to those we have not encountered before, to those we cannot account for, to those we do not understand. Hospitality assumes the best but is prepared for the worst whereas hostility assumes the worst and cannot comprehend anything else. We have the capacity for both, for hostility and for hospitality, within each of us.
Right now Oskar Gröning is on trial for three hundred thousand counts of accessory to murder for his activities during the Shoah, the Holocaust. This may very well be the last trial of a Holocaust-era Nazi. How is it that so many people could be convinced to participate in such cruelty, such inhumanity, such systemic evil, such gross monstrosity? It turns out that we all can. We are all susceptible to the ideas that if others are doing it, it must be okay, that if an authority is ordering it that it must be okay, that we are not the monsters, they are, and that the monstrousness of others justifies our own monstrousness in return.
The conviction that we are not in fact monsters creates the need to somehow cope with the experience of monstrosity in life. A typical human response is to create a scapegoat. In ancient Greece, a criminal or poor person was cast out of society in appeasement of natural disasters, which were taken of signs of divine displeasure. Some things never change, it seems. In ancient Israel, the sins of the Israelites were ceremonially placed on an actual goat, which was then driven out into the desert. Both cases are example of the human inability to cope with our own monstrosity and so the need to cast blame elsewhere.
Here in the city of Boston we know something about monsters. For the past five months our city has relived the monstrous actions and reactions of the 2013 Marathon Bombing. We have collectively empathized with the pain and suffering of the victims of that day, including Boston University graduate student Lu Lingzi. We have explored the motivations, influences, and acts of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of thirty counts stemming from the events of that day and sentenced to death for six of them.
In the coming weeks Dean Hill will have more to say about Tsarnaev and his sentence, but today we must ask whether sentencing him to death, or even to life imprisonment without any pretense of rehabilitation, has as much to do with his being a monster as it does with our own need to insist that we are not monsters? Surely a central function of scapegoating, of shifting the locus of the monstrous, is to assure that monstrosities reside elsewhere and not with us. No, we are not monsters, we have killed all of the monsters. No, we are not monsters, we have a special place for the monsters over there. We are not monsters because we did not do anything as bad as what he did. We are good, he is evil, no ambiguity, end of story.
Do not forget, friends, that the Holy Spirit can be monstrous too. The Holy Spirit is not scaled to human life, to human interests, to human desires, to human ideas and concepts. In explaining the chaos resulting from the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, Peter identified the coming of the Holy Spirit with the words of the prophet Joel:
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Our Psalm affirms that the creation of all things is accomplished in the sending forth of the Holy Spirit, including the creation of the Leviathan, a great sea monster often associated with Satan himself. Contrary to calling us to cast out the monsters from our midst, the Holy Spirit calls us to convert hostility to hospitality and to recognize God in the playful sporting of the Leviathan.
This vision of God as wild, capricious, and dangerous is hardly comfortable. The conversion of hostility to hospitality requires resisting some very basic human impulses in order to attend to the unruly, uncouth, disruptive, monstrous presence of God. Christian faith in fact teaches that the inability to resist the impulse to hostility is sinful, and moreover is the very sinfulness that resulted in Jesus’ crucifixion, the crucifixion of the unruly, uncouth, disruptive, monstrous incarnation of God. But we have not learned. We continue to fail to convert hostility to hospitality. We persist in the sinfulness of hostility that cannot embrace the Gospel call to kindness, forgiveness, attentiveness to relationships and the wellbeing of others.
And so on this feast of Pentecost I ask you: Shall we then also crucify the Holy Spirit? The Gospel of John promises that the Holy Spirit “will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” In spite of the presence of the Holy Spirit, we persist in sin, unrighteousness, and judgment. We continue to cast others into the totalizing category of monsters while failing to recognize our own capacity and actual practice of monstrosity. Just as human sinfulness, unrighteousness, and judgment resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus, is it unreasonable to wonder if we are not, in our persistence in hostility, participating even now in the crucifixion of the Holy Spirit?
For much of Christian history, the Holy Spirit has been identified with the church, largely on the basis of the passage from the Acts of the Apostles read today. Theologically, the idea is that the Holy Spirit calls the church into being to enact God’s ongoing work in the world. The problem is that too often the church becomes convinced that the logic of this theological view works in both directions such that not only does the Spirit call the church to enact the work of God, but also whatever work the church does is therefore the will of God.
Anathema! The church is just as capable of distorting, rejecting, ignoring, and even inventing what the Holy Spirit calls it to be and do as any other flawed human institution. Thankfully, quite a few people have come to realize that this is just what too many churches have done and continue to do. Just last week the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life reported that the percentage of the population who do not identify with any particular denomination has grown by over 3.5% in the past seven years, from 12.1% in 2007 to 15.8% in 2014. The hypocrisy of too many churches in claiming to know the will of God, who is a saint and who is a monster, is increasingly incredible and intolerable to many. Thanks be to God! Are these folks giving up on God? Perhaps, but I would venture to guess that it is more likely that they are giving up on the flawed human institutions that hypocritically claim to have a handle on God and attempt to tell the Holy Spirit that she may blow where she wills so long as it is through the eye of their needle. Churches too can be and sometimes are monsters.
The good news of Jesus Christ for us today: the gospel according to Elmo. Do not forget that Elmo too is a monster. If you look on his Wikipedia page, under “species,” Elmo is listed as a “Sesame Street Muppet Monster.” Like the call of the Holy Spirit, the gospel according to Elmo to be kind, to forgive, to attend to relationships and the wellbeing of others, to convert hostility to hospitality, to confess that we are usually wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment, is monstrous good news. From the perspective of human brokenness, ambiguity, and inability to cope therewith, this good news must seem a monster. Shall we crucify Elmo? Shall we nail his furry little hands and furry little feet to a cross, as monstrous human sinfulness brought about the crucifixion of Jesus, whose Gospel was just as unruly, uncouth, disruptive, monstrous as Elmo’s? For my daughter’s sake, I pray we do not.
Shall we crucify the Holy Spirit? Repent! The kingdom of God is at hand and we are wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because we do not believe Jesus; about righteousness, because Christ ascended to the Father and we see him no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world is condemned. Convert your hostility to hospitality: the gospel according to Elmo, and the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
-Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC +, University Chaplain for Community Life
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