All Saints by the Lake, Dorval

Epiphany IV, Year A

January 29, 2023

Mac McKinney (left) and Bibi Bahrami (right) with other members of the Muncie, IN, Islamic Center.

 

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

This is one of those weeks where a preacher is dealing with an embarrasse de richesse, so much good stuff in the readings that it’s hard to know where to begin. But if I had to choose one of these three readings, I think I’d go for the reading from Corinthians. Paul’s rhetoric, and his embrace of paradox, are on full display here. It’s one of those passages where you hear it and it sounds thrilling and exciting, and then you start to actually think about it and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense – but then you really dig into it, and while it still may not make sense, it absolutely reflects the reality of what our lives are like and who God is.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” – this is one hundred percent true. The only reason that the symbol of the cross is acceptable to us modern people is that we don’t crucify people any more. I’ve recently been watching a Netflix show called “Barbarians,” set among the Germanic tribes on the border of the Roman Empire in the year 9 CE, and in the third episode several people get crucified for defying the Roman army’s orders. The cross was an ugly, brutal, excruciating way to die, and it was something that happened to thousands of people over the course of centuries, all but one of whom were not Jesus of Nazareth and did not subsequently rise from the dead.

So when Paul and the other apostles came preaching a gospel that centered around someone who died on a cross, what’s not surprising is that so many people scoffed at, ignored, or persecuted them; what’s extraordinary is that so many people listened to them and were converted. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

So much of our human effort is devoted to seeking wisdom and power. We want to know how things work and to appear knowledgeable; and we want to be able to make things happen the way we want them. And what all this boils down to, a great deal of the time, is the desire for control.

And the thing about humans seeking to control things – our lives, our environment, the people around us – is that it tends to have two results: it makes everybody involved miserable, and it doesn’t work.

The more we surround and defend ourselves with wealth, staff, weapons, unjust laws, whatever it is that we think will give us power over others and enable us to control our circumstances – the more brittle and unstable our situation becomes, and the less actual security we have.

True security comes when you have given so much away that others are eager to give it back; when you have done so much for others that they are eager to do for you; when everyone has mutually agreed to put down the guns and bombs and take care of each other for the good of all. This is the power and wisdom of God that from the outside, looks like absurdly risky foolishness.

I came across excellent examples this week of both the fragility of power and the strength of vulnerability – interestingly, both examples were from the Muslim world.

On the one hand, I read an account by Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian feminist journalist, of the story of Rahaf Mohamed al-Qunun, a young Saudi woman who fled her home country in early 2019 and, after a journey worthy of a thriller novel, was offered asylum in Canada. Rahaf was fleeing physical and psychological abuse by her family in Saudi Arabia that was symptomatic of, and inseparable from, the kingdom’s pervasive oppression of all its women. The men in authority in Saudi Arabia use an extremist interpretation of Islam to keep half the population in a state of what is essentially legal childhood; Saudi women must have a male guardian from birth to death, and cannot make basic decisions, like obtaining a passport or attending university, without the guardian’s permission. “Disobedience to the family,” including leaving the house without permission or being seen with a man who is not a blood relative, is a legally punishable offense for women under the law. Until recently, Saudi women were forbidden to drive cars. Activists who try to change these conditions are jailed, and female prisoners are not allowed to leave prison without the consent of – wait for it – their male guardians.

The more that the authorities try to crack down on women who dare to step outside these structures, though, the angrier the women get. The Saudi power structure sits on top of a fermenting volcano of female rage, and although there is no way of knowing how it will blow, that it will, at some point, blow is essentially inevitable. Meanwhile, the men’s efforts to control the women result in a society in which the most extreme and corrosive form of patriarchy twists and deforms the lives and souls of everyone in it, male and female.

As I was thinking about this, I read an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, a first-person account by an Afghan-American woman named Bibi Bahrami, who is the co-founder of the Islamic Center of Muncie, Indiana. A few years ago, a stranger came to the mosque, a large white man with military tattoos who seemed angry. Despite the obvious potential threat, Bahrami and her husband welcomed him, sitting in the mosque library and engaging him in conversation about himself and his family.

The visitor, Richard McKinney, known as “Mac,” kept coming back, getting to know the congregation and getting involved with its programs. Eventually, he joined the mosque.

But a few other members told Bahrami that there were rumors that Mac’s initial visit had been a reconnaissance mission: that he had intended to blow up the mosque with a homemade IED.

Bibi invited Mac to her home and fed him an abundant Afghan meal. Over the food, she asked him: “Is it true? Were you planning to kill us?”

And he admitted that yes, he had been. He had been a Marine and had been deployed in places where he had been taught to hate and fear Muslims. But the congregation’s compassion and kindness had changed his mind. The people of the Muncie Islamic Center forgave Richard McKinney, and later they even elected him president of the mosque.

As Bibi Bahrami points out herself in her article, these stories do not always have such happy endings. There is no guarantee that openness and generosity will actually keep us safe in the short term.

But whose soul would you rather have: that of Rahaf al-Qunun’s abusive father, or that of Bibi Bahrami, an Afghan refugee who sat down over a meal with a man who had been her enemy, as they met each other with honesty, compassion, and forgiveness?

Attempts to control others with power will never make for long-term security. Open hearts, open hands, open doors, are our only hope. Or, as the prophet Micah so succinctly puts it: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.

The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Amen.