By Bill Leonard
Like most everyone in the United States, I find myself struggling to sort out the events of the last few weeks — terrible tragedy in the massacre of nine African-American Methodists, “thunderbolt” Supreme Court decisions (President Obama’s word) regarding the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and varieties of Christian “witness,” offered across the racial and theological spectrum.
I’ve heard and read some superb sermons delivered in churches across the country, as public-culture-events compel preachers and communities of faith to confront issues spiritual, political, sacramental and prophetic — often with diverse, even contradictory, readings of Scripture, tradition and religious experience.
Amid pain, loss, celebration and controversy, I keep coming back to the irony of it all. My American Heritage Dictionary (p. 692) says that irony involves the “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.” Somehow that idea seems tucked away in another definition, this one found in the New English Bible, specifically the book of Hebrews (p. 384): “Faith gives substance to our hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see.” Faith “makes us certain of realities we do not see”; it involves (dare we say it) the “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.” Irony and faith collide in certain national events.
Take marriage. Isn’t it ironic that while LGBT folks were advocating for the right to have their marriage relationships recognized as legally comparable to that of heterosexuals, the latter group seemed to distance themselves from that traditional relationship in ever greater numbers. A recent Pew Research Center study suggests that marriage increases are almost exclusively among college graduates, and notes that “less educated adults have become less likely to ever get married. In 2012, 73 percent of 35- to 39-year-olds without a B.A. degree had never married. In 1950, that group was at 92 percent. In 2012 81 percent of college educated 35- to 39-year-olds had ever married. In one recent study, 44 percent of those questioned said that cohabitation was acceptable before marriage. Revisiting the nature of marriage in general may be an important emphasis for churches in the immediate future. Will same-sex marriages cause heterosexual couples to reconsider the relationship? Ironic.
And there is the irony of religious experience. Amid an act of terrible hatred and death, the witness of the black church was profound. In his amazing homily, President Obama traced that profound religious experience across the history of the black church, noting: “Over the course of centuries, black churches served as ‘hush harbors’ where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah — rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.” Such faith-affirmation is not a false bravado or shallow triumphalism, but a depth of hope and encounter with the Spirit amid the killing fields of a Methodist meetinghouse.
St. Paul’s words capture the gospel irony exemplified at Mother Emanuel: “Hard-pressed on every side, we are never hemmed in; bewildered, we are never at our wits’ end; hunted, we are never abandoned to our fate; struck down, we are not left to die. Wherever we go we carry death with us in our body, the death that Jesus died that in this body also life may reveal itself, the life that Jesus lives” (1 Cor. 8-12).
Then there was President Obama and the homily. Ironically, the President who has been labeled a Muslim, a non-American and an unbeliever, spoke to the moment, not only in the context of pain at the loss of Reverend Clementa Pinckney and eight other church members, but in the community of the black church, where religious experience and justice are ever fused. The President honored Pinckney as minister and legislator, spouse and father, and then moved to issues of justice, declaring: “For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.”
Hearing those words, I remembered the words of Reverend Ronald Bobo, one of the first African-American students I ever taught, now longtime pastor of West Side Baptist in St. Louis, when he told me straight up: “You white folks talk like the kingdom of Heaven, that great getting up morning, is all eternal bliss; streets of gold and gates of pearl and not a care in the world. It’s different in the black church. For generations, we got so little justice in this world, so we hoped for justice in the kingdom of God, a time when God would set things right — if not now then someday.”
So perhaps Mr. Obama’s move from memorial, to memory, to justice wasn’t ironic at all. It rests in a faith tradition where justice is elusive; but hope endures; “the incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.” That may define irony, but it sounds like grace to me.
This column has been edited to correct a typo in the fourth paragraph.