Dividing walls, home-making, and an invitation to Donald Trump

"For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us"
(Ephesians 2:14)

Last Friday (13th July), a small group of us from Hodge Hill (including my 10 year old) headed down to London to join the protest against Donald Trump's visit to the UK. Infamously elected on the promise to build a wall (and make Mexico pay for it), Trump hasn't yet built that wall, but has built, or reinforced, all kinds of other walls: between white and black Americans; between Christians, Jews and Muslims; between Israelis and Palestinians; between men and women; between rich and poor; between able-bodied and disabled people; between straight and gay people; between humanity and the earth... the tragic list of divisions could go on and on...

And so we were there, not just to say No to him, but to say No to all he represents: the vicious, divisive use of immense power for immensely self-serving ends. It was exciting, adding our small numbers to a crowd of over 250,000 people, embodying visible Christian (some of us had dog collars on) solidarity to this immensely diverse body of human beings united in a common cause. It was, for my 10 year old, a brilliant education in the practice of protest politics, and a training ground for us, I have no doubt, for many more marches and protests to come. It was one big, loud No to the evil powers of division and hatred, and a big, multicoloured Yes to an alternative society: one where people of diverse skin colours, nationalities, faith commitments, genders, sexualities, dis/abilities and much more, can bridge those divides and celebrate their diversity, carnival-style, together.

But there were some aspects of the event that troubled me. Many of the placards focused in personally on Trump - inevitably - and were often comical in their rudeness. But this was about much more than his hairstyle, his level of intelligence, or his personality.

Our placards mostly followed the theme of building bridges, not walls, and reassuring those around us that Christians can actually be positively affirming of women, black people and LGBTQ+ people - despite some of the tragic contemporary embodiments of white-supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic so-called 'Christianity'. But just as the voice of an inclusive, affirming Christianity can get lost in the media amplification of Christianity's worst proponents, so in a crowd of a quarter of a million people there was little space for subtlety and nuance about our reasons for being there. The chants that we rehearsed before the start of the march were perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the march. "Say it loud, say it clear, Donald Trump's not welcome here." That was OK - although even then, something in me longed to be able to imagine some kind of 'welcome' that might be more hopeful, positive, that might God-knows-how change some of this. But the one that really stuck in my throat was when the chant-leader reminded us that women were "under attack", refugees were "under attack", black people were "under attack", Palestinians were "under attack" - and called us to respond, "Stand up - fight back!"

Stand up, yes. Fight back? Well, that's surely where a Christian committed to non-violent activism needs to find a different way. When we were preparing our placards the week before, in our Common Ground Community gathering in Hodge Hill, one of our community members wondered if our planned trip to London was truly 'prophetic', in the tradition of the biblical prophets, or was something else. Not necessarily negative, just something other than 'prophetic witness'. And I'm now sure he was right. Perhaps, in a small way, our presence was a challenge back to the Church, where it reminds silent, looks inward, sits on the fence. Adding our bodies to the crowd was expressing our solidarity. But if we were to be truly 'prophetic', we would I think have chosen 'the road less travelled', saying our No without violence - physical or verbal - inviting Donald Trump into some kind of Yes, some kind of 'joining', some kind of alternative future which would still have required him to get over his own dehumanising prejudices, relinquish his own immense power - but which would have called even him to come and find a home.

Jews, Gentiles, and Jesus

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians - Paul, or someone in his tradition - is a Jew, writing to non-Jewish, Gentile, Christians. It is tempting, when we read these letters in the Christian New Testament, to imagine the Christian Church as replacing Israel (what in the technical jargon is called 'supercessionism'), rather than joining Israel, holding on to the promise of the covenant that through Israel the whole world will be blessed and 'saved'. (The African-American theologian Willie James Jennings traces in thorough detail the connections between this supercessionist theology and the white supremacist ideologies that colonised, and brought slaves to, the Americas.)

But in the letter to the Ephesians, the writer reminds his readers that they were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (2:12), and that "now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near" (2:13). Jesus, the Jew, is God's invitation to both Israel and the Gentiles to 'come home together', to join together as fellow members of the household of God. 'For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" (2:14).

Salvation, here, is not about a ticket to heaven. It's more than individual forgiveness. It's about joining God's commonwealth of redemption and reconciliation. Or, in the words of writer Gillian Ahlgren reflecting on the lives of St Francis and St Clare, 'the "gospel life" is not grandiose or exaggerated... it is a simple and humble and joyful creation of a dwelling place for the divine - the making of a space for God's presence, in our hearts, our homes, our communities, and our troubled world' (The Tenderness of God, p.120). Gillian's words resonate with the closing prayer we use in our Shabbat prayers here in Hodge Hill, which draw on the ancient Jewish tradition in which Jesus himself was formed: "May God's shalom (God's peace, justice, healing - God's presence, even) be in our hearts. May God's shalom be in our homes. May God's shalom be in our lives. May God's shalom be in our world." This comes to the very heart of the mission of the church - because it is the heart of the mission of God in the world: the simple and humble and joyful making of a dwelling space for God.

And unlike government and media rhetoric around integration ('come here and do things how we do them') - a way of thinking we can sometimes be tempted into as a church too - what we're talking about here is a joining-together-in-diversity: a 'making flesh' of our 'kinship' with one another, across our differences, beyond our divides and our hostilities. "Kinship," Gillian Ahlgren writes, is "what happens to us when we refuse to forget that we belong to each other... Kinship is not service and it is not charity. Kinship, like solidarity, is mutuality, known as we share vulnerability, joy, challenges, hopes, dreams, and desires. It is the shared space where the tenderness that formed us calls us home." (p.148)

Which is not to say that any of this is easy - or warm, fluffy, and fuzzy. An invitation in to this joining, a welcome in to this kinship, demands something of us - something that, perhaps for some of us, is too much. "The kingdom of God," as the hymn goes, "is challenge and choice". It demands change of us. "The 'kingdom' of God, then, will be a society in which there will be no prestige and no status, no division of people into inferior and superior. Everyone will be loved and respected, not because of one’s education or wealth or ancestry or authority or rank or virtue or other achievements, but because one like everybody else is a person. … Those who could not bear to have beggars, former prostitutes, servants, women and children treated as their equals, who could not live without feeling superior to at least some people, would simply not be at home in God’s 'kingdom' as Jesus understood it. They would want to exclude themselves from it" (Albert Nolan, in Tenderness of God, p.132).

Glimpses of the kingdom

But it is possible. We've caught more than glimpses of it here in Hodge Hill, in our journey of community-building with our neighbours. Amidst the couple of thousand people who came to our third Hodge Hill Carnival a couple of weeks ago, our multi-faith Place of Welcome, a partnership between Christian and Muslim friends and neighbours, offered a place of cool shade, drinks and freshly-baked cakes, and somewhere to take the weight off your feet. And within the Place of Welcome was our Peace Tent, a quiet place for "prayer, thinking and getting your head together", as the sign said. And a place where, 3 times during the day, Christians and Muslims met together to pray, with simple, open, Christian-style and Muslim-style prayer times - where we learnt much from each other about our different ways of praying, and discovered common ground - holy ground - beneath our feet.

We've shared stories here and here about some of the other 'wow' moments in our Firs & Bromford neighbourhood over the last few months - among them some shared Iftars (fast-breaking prayers and meals during Ramadan) and our wonderful first FAB's Got Talent evening. All of these, for us, embodiments of glorious community across our differences, are gifts to us as church here - invitations to us as a church - not for us to sit in church and wait for 'them' to come to 'us' so that we can celebrate together our kinship in Christ, our shared membership of the kingdom, but for us to go to where community is growing and flourishing and deepening around us in our neighbourhoods, to join in, and be enriched and challenged and changed by what we encounter there. And this, for us in Hodge Hill, is the particular gift that what we're calling 'messy and missional church' brings to our wider extended church family here - even as our other expressions of church can offer that much longer story of receiving and celebrating and wrestling with our kinship in Christ over so many years in the spaces we've been more accustomed to calling 'church'.

So listening, and learning, and receiving from each other, so that the dividing walls continue to be broken down, is an absolutely essential practice for us as Christians here. As American writer Parker Palmer puts it, "What we need is not simply the individual at prayer, seeking to stand in his or her own sacred space. We need a corporate practice that seeks a space in which we can all stand together. We need to know that God wants to bring us together as God’s people and that we must listen to each other, in the words and in the silences between them, testing our own truth against the truth received by others. We need to know that God will work a greater truth in all of us standing together than can be worked in any one of us standing alone” (quoted in Tenderness, p.138).

'Come home, Donald'

And so back to Donald Trump. In the midst of the sound and fury, the undiplomatic chaos and the carnival of resistance, around his visit to the UK last week, I discovered at least one still, small voice speaking a profoundly prophetic Yes…

The Scottish Quaker writer, environmentalist and ‘spiritual activist’ Alastair McIntosh has pointed out that Donald Trump’s mother emigrated from the Isle of Lewis, and that her ancestors would have suffered the trauma of being brutally evicted from their land in the Highland Clearances on the island in the 1820s. McIntosh notes that the landlords who enforced the clearances introduced to their new tenants a harsh, black-and-white Calvinist worldview of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘elect’ and ‘damned’, ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, and a deep internal sense of dislocation. Could it be, McIntosh wonders, that Donald carries within himself something of this family trauma, a deep, internal woundedness – that attracts others who carry a similar internal woundedness in themselves? And the displaced becomes the displacer, the preyed-on becomes the predator, the oppressed becomes the oppressor.

In spiritual activism, says McIntosh, when we push with one hand we must support with the other. And so McIntosh the poet, who like Trump’s mother himself grew up on Lewis, invites Donald (in a poem written in 2011 when Trump was 'merely' an aggressive businessman building a golf course on protected land on the Scottish coast) to ‘come home’…

“… from beauty’s desecration of true nature free and wild … from climate change vainglorious in ‘guiltless decadence’ Come home, Donald … Come home in your mind! Come home to gentle honest folks! Come home to nature’s guileless way! without greed without force without tears Renounce the rootless sands of capital and pride! Renounce the decorated corpse of suppurating wealth! Renounce those ‘vicious … violent’ so-called winning ways! … Come home, o Donald Trump, come home to this new start … and build a golden Tower to be your greatest work of living art … that rises from the fairway as the meteoric human heart Transmuted … Transfigured … Transubstantiated Come home, Donald … just come on home.”

The good news for Donald Trump, the good news for our neighbours here in Hodge Hill, is the good news also for those of us gathered right here: "now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." The summons of the gospel is to no more and no less than this: the "simple and humble and joyful creation of a dwelling place for the divine – the making of a space for God’s presence, in our hearts, our homes, our communities, and our troubled world". Together, let us continue that simple, humble, joyful work.
Amen.

[adapted from a sermon preached on Sunday 22nd July, 2018, in Hodge Hill Church]