Jordan Paul

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise... The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense. —Daniel Berrigan, SJ

Dear Friends,

I am often accused of shoehorning Daniel Berrigan into conversations. And to be fair, I do. I’ve even put a sticker of a famous picture of him on my water bottle, positioned in just the right place so it’s visible when I’m drinking from it. I’ll let you look up the whole story, but, in brief, he was an anti-war protestor who was arrested after burning Vietnam draft files with napalm, sentenced to prison, and then spent four months successfully evading the FBI all while still making surprise public appearances to preach and give speeches.

In today’s Epistle, St Paul draws a contrast between the wisdom of God and the “wisdom” of the rulers of his time—wisdom that led those rulers to crucify Jesus. God’s wisdom, he writes, is accessible to us through the Holy Spirit. Yet, despite the disproportionate number of our leaders that identify as Christians, they do not seem to have internalized that wisdom, making the same mistakes again and again throughout history. Sure, as the Book of Common Prayer teaches, we’re all “miserable offenders,” and there is indeed “no health in us.” But that is only magnified by power.

We have built a world where we execute our fellow citizens despite strong evidence of innocence. We have built a world where we would rather murder the poor and intellectually disabled rather than devote the time and energy to caring for them. We have built a world where a satirical newspaper has resorted to running the same article repeatedly every time there is a mass shooting. And we have built a world where a Christian politician can say, with a straight face, that he “did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen”—as if there is a reason to be carrying that weapon around a foreign country for purposes other than massacring  countrymen, just not his own.

Nearly every Sunday, we recite the Nicene Creed. In it, we proclaim that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” While we should await that coming with anticipation, we should also pause to think whether we should also await it with some fear. Fear not just because of what we may have done or enabled in life, but because all those who have come before us could be coming with Him. From the women of Afghanistan, to the kids of Sandy Hook, to the residents of every island and coastal nation that our oil and gas companies will drown rather than sacrifice profit.

Which returns me to Daniel Berrigan. May we learn from his example and become better Christians for it, resisting injustice wherever we encounter it in our lives, and always having a willingness to speak truth to power.

Christ have mercy,

—Jordan