A Prayer From Bishop Rob: How Little I Have Known You
A Prayer From Bishop Rob: How Little I Have Known You
O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, I’m just beginning to see how little I have known you.
You didn’t talk like me, in the accent of a New England prep school or the Ivy League, or with the elegant linguistic economy of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer — a book you never held in your calloused hands.
The other day, O Jesus, I heard a black man speak. His brother was murdered when a white officer of the law knelt on his neck, suffocating him.
The brother spoke within marbled halls, in an expensively paneled room on Capitol Hill. And he used language — nothing profane and nothing obscene — but language which didn’t sound at all like the way I talk.
And this is a sample of how I was taught to talk about you, O Jesus of Nazareth,
Just as the postmodern sublime is figured through both the fragmentation of form and a (pseudo) regathering sublime is figured through pastiche or bricolage, so too the Christian sublime involves both the shattering the Christ-form upon the cross, and a regathering of that form through the resurrection, a regathering that has an intrinsic element the regathering of the scattered disciples into an ecclesia...
O Jesus of Nazareth, what does that even mean? Would you even recognize that we were talking about YOU in all that code? More likely, we were just talking about ourselves—to people like ourselves.
The language of George Floyd’s brother contained verbs that didn’t always agree in the number of their subjects. Sometimes he said, “I’m axing you...” instead of how I learned to make a request.
And, like John the Baptist, he took an ax to the root of my supremacy. He spoke Truth. More truth, because it came from your own broken heart, O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee.
I heard him more than I’ve heard anyone witness in those stately leather-chaired rooms before. Rooms where Laws are made. It was the language you more likely spoke than how I speak. Forgive me, O Jesus of Nazareth, I have dismissed your syntax all these long, empty white-washed years.
O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, When you were lynched on that hill by the garbage heaps of Jerusalem, by officers of the Law, you cried, “Into your hands I commend my Spirit.”
The Book of Common Prayer took those words and bleached them into such bloodless concepts: oblation, satisfaction, atonement. But what you were saying then and what you’re saying to me now, right now, from the lynching cross, is “I can’t breathe.”
Jesus, I don’t know Black. In college here in New Hampshire, Black writing, Native American writing, Asian American writing, Gay and Lesbian writing were all electives, not serious, believed to come from a lesser muse and inferior talent. If you need a “gut,” take those, I heard, and for heaven’s sake don’t take them seriously. So, I avoided those classes. Gutless.
O Jesus, I could have met you in the strains of Coltrane’s Love Supreme, or Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Morrison’s Song of Solomon, or in Baldwin, or Erdrich, or Angelou, or Hughes, or the songs of Marvin. But in that old oak empaneled English Department, with its afternoon teas and white-buck shoed croquet on the manicured lawn below Baker Tower, —the Tower with the caricatured Indian and the peace-pipe weathervane on top - we all found ways to dismiss your revealed Truth, Truth we substituted for playful and clever theories about semiotics and metaphorical structure. Nothing that would disrupt how to love and move in this world of unlikeness.
O Jesus of Nazareth, they shot you right out of their Western Canon. With the sublime chords of Handel in the background you were, Despised. Rejected over sherry in crystal stemware.
O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. They made fun of the way you talked, of who you hung out with, (or should I say whom?). And when you got too uppity, they hung you, from splintered timber, nothing like the clean silver and brass cross I wear while sitting at my desk, air-conditioned.
O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. You didn’t look or talk or dress like me. To be honest, Jesus, your friends usually make me nervous. To be honest, O Jesus, more and more you make me nervous. But I trust you.
How long and how many times do I need to remember that I don’t really know many people who look more like you, O Jesus, than who look like me? And so, my dear Lord, the truth is I have not really known you as much as I’ve thought or as much as I’ve claimed.
And I’m not alone. Help us. O Lord Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. Help us. Amen.