Josh Bascom, “Cutting Through the Divisions”
Enough has been said about how divided this nation and our communities feel these days; red vs. blue, black vs. white, masks vs no masks, the examples feel endless, and they’re tragic and exhausting. We might think that we can escape these divisions by making ourselves more insulated, perhaps by spending more time with family and friends, but all we need to do is recall scenes at Thanksgiving tables and a few too many glasses of wine to remember that the ax of disagreement and vehemence can come down with incredible pain upon any relationship at any time.
But nothing seems more divisive in this world we’re navigating through than the topic of my lower back. I blew my back out a few weeks ago, and when I either had to explain my absence from something or was seen walking gingerly, I was instantly, and always kindly, bombarded with hot takes on what I should and shouldn’t do. I thought that I’d found the mountaintop of opinions and judgements when I first got a dog and couldn’t walk down the mall without getting fifteen tips on where I should get a better leash or who I should take puppy classes from, but then my wife and I had a child and we entered the world of tiger moms vs dragon moms, of attachment vs detachment parenting and an overflowing shelf of books that were kindly lent to us and we kindly read as a manifesto of everything we were getting wrong. But now my back hurts, and I’ve mentioned the word chiropractor out loud in public, and nothing could have prepared me for the intensity and volume of guidance and counsel I’ve been receiving. I truly appreciate this advice, it seems like it’s coming from a good place, but I had no idea how strongly entrenched folks were on one side or the other in the great war that’s raging between physical therapists and chiropractors.
In the end regardless of whether our back hurts or not, we can’t escape the divisiveness of humanity boiling over around us or within us. Our hearts, our inner lives are full of just as much division as the rest of the world. From the common feelings of simply second guessing ourselves, to the deeper sense that there’s a great chasm between what and where we want our lives to be and who and where we actually are. With all of these divisions that consume us there is the implication of one path or one side being absolutely right and one being absolutely wrong, and we either make a promise to stay where we are and stand for this image and version of justice, or we make a promise to ourselves that we’ll progress and that we’ll become that kind of a person or stop being this kind of a person.
In today’s reading from Genesis, Abram is impatiently waiting for the great chasm of childlessness in his life to be overcome. And despite the fact that his vision of the future, of having a family, has been promised to him by God Himself, Abram has doubts, and like every human who has ever lived, he has a strong desire to take things into his own hands. He still doesn’t have any offspring, but God says to him that He has given him a promise, and God doesn’t make promises that He doesn’t keep. So, God takes Abram outside and says, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
This is perhaps one of the most influential passages throughout all of Scripture, “And Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” St. Paul wrestles with it throughout the Book of Romans, and Martin Luther’s entire view of our relationship with God and the entire Reformation shifted after sat with this phrase in a German monastery and reflecting on this passage’s powerful implication that righteousness has been given to us as a gift because, and only because, of our faith in the Lord and what the Lord has done and promised to us.
For many of us, including Martin Luther himself, it’s difficult to think of the word righteousness without it being directly attached to our own character, our own actions and the specific lives that we live and present to God on the Final Judgment Day. It’s ingrained in our minds to think of a righteous person as someone who has made the right choices, who lives the right kind of life, and as St. Paul says, it’s been written on our hearts that we ought to be righteous people. So we act in self-righteous ways, trying to project our righteous identities out into the world for fear that if we don’t we might be perceived to be someone on the wrong side of one of our great societal divisions. The only problem is that the Bible tells us and our lives reveal to us that we aren’t righteous people, that no one is righteous, no, not one. We are born into this world with a desire and longing to be righteous; we know that things in our lives ought to be a certain way, but they just aren’t. Once again we feel stuck and divided off against the righteous person we want to be and the person we actually know ourselves to be. There’s a dividing line that runs straight down through own hearts.
“Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Thankfully what God sees as righteousness, is not what we see it to be. What God sees as righteousness, as the right way of being in this world in relationship to each other and to God, is not an image of a proud, self-righteous man or woman, thanking God that they have all the right bumper stickers on the back of their car, and that they are not like those unrighteous sinners over there. What God sees as righteousness is the lives of people like you and me, people who are at the end of their ropes, people who have tried to take things into their own hands and have come up empty or disappointed, people who are very truly and very painfully unrighteous, and yet, have looked upon the promise God has made to us with faith and hope—the promise that God has removed, forgiven and forgotten our unrighteousness through his death and sacrifice on the Cross.
You might have seen or heard of this article written last week in the New York Times by Emma Camp, a fourth year student at UVA. On perhaps one of the biggest media stages there is today, Emma wrote about the divisive culture on campus here in Charlottesville and throughout the country. She says that the expectations of conformity to one particular version of righteousness have gotten so bad and so intense for everyone, both liberals like herself as well as her conservative friend, that they no longer feel safe voicing their opinions. She writes;
“A friend lowers her voice to lament the ostracizing of a student who said something well-meaning but mildly offensive during a student club’s diversity training. Another friend shuts his bedroom door when I mention a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism. His roommate might hear us, he explains.
I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.”
You don’t have to be a college student to relate to this. You just have to have been in a relationship where the fear or possibility of judgement has ever lingered, or you just have to gone on the internet in the past ten years. This story of a 21 year old, in our own town, going to the New York Times and telling us that she doesn’t feel safe voicing her own opinions because they might not fit neatly within the echo chamber of her classroom or campus and its particular version of righteousness, it’s heartbreaking. But it’s not surprising. These divisions have been around ever since sin and unrighteousness have been a part of the world and our lives. She herself quotes from students and faculty all over the country experiencing similar things—if you’re not on our side, then you’re on the wrong side, no room for debate, no room for conversation and certainly no room for relationship.
Well it turns out that there is only one true version of righteousness, but it’s God’s version and not ours, and that’s really good news. Because according to God we have been given righteousness through faith in God in the midst of our unrighteous lives, in the midst of being on the wrong side of all the issues, in the midst of our failed expectations and broken promises. What we need and what we are given is grace.
Thankfully, God keeps his promises, even and especially when we don’t. Thankfully, His gift to us is not something that can be take away from us, regardless of where we might fall on any social, political, or deeply personal divide.
Towards the end of this passage from Genesis, after God has reminded Abram that he has been given a divine promise of provision and grace, God says to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Then Abram brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other. This is what it looked like to make a Covenant in the Ancient Near East. Unlike a contract, which can be broken, a covenant was an unbreakable union that was often made by killing and cutting animals in half and then having both parties walk through them. The deal was “cut” in this specific way to symbolize a kind of binding curse upon each party. If the covenantal terms were not met, the covenant wasn’t broken, instead it would result in a curse of ultimate division and death on both parties as they became like the bloody carcasses they passed through.
In the case of Abram in our passage, the animals were split in half and laid out, ready for both parties to walk through and the curse to fall upon them both. But then, perhaps overcome by the immensity of entering into a covenant with God, Abram fell into a deep sleep and God alone passed between the animal pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and all the people of God. On that day God’s promise of blessing, favor and forgiveness, no matter what, was made, and on that day the curse fell upon God Himself, and God alone.
On the Cross, the curse that we deserve fell upon Jesus, on God Himself, and God alone. The curse for our unrighteousness was taken on by Jesus and in return we have received the righteousness of God. This is the scandal of the Gospel, it’s the Gospel message itself, That God keeps his promises, even and especially when we don’t. That two thousand years ago Jesus died for you and for me, for all of us, right or wrong, friend or foe, across all the dividing lines, so that today, we have been brought and put back together as the one true body of Christ.
Amen
