Apr 02 | “Open Arms,” (Good Friday sermon, March 30th 2018)

I don’t know who first came up with the experiment, but whoever they are, they should really be given the credit for my first Good Friday sermon.

The scene is a busy street corner. The subject is a young brown man who appears Middle Eastern. As the crowds surge by, he sets up a sign which says, “I trust you. Do you trust me? Hug me.”

As he stands up, he puts on a blindfold.

Then, he opens his arms.

And stands there.

The video is a composite, but it’s clear from the changing of the light that he is on that street corner for quite some time.

At first, only a few people, usually in singles, stop and hug him. The first one we see is a woman. She looks a little older than he is. She pats his back with a smile on her face.

The second one, a blonde woman, ducks under one of his arms to hug him from behind and rock him.

A man in a maroon shirt next, who hugs him for a long time, resting his chin on one shoulder, then the other.

By now, the camera shows us a little knot of people has gathered, waiting their turn. Some are filming it on their phones.

A black woman leans in, hugs, steps back. His arms enfold her, and as she steps back, they open again. A middle-aged man takes his turn. The arms enfold, open, enfold, open, like a butterfly’s wings.

Some people come in twos and threes to hug him together. Someone brings him a small child, who he spins in a circle.

The video is about 6 minutes long. I counted 58 people, although I’ll bet he hugged more. Toward the end, three friends come to hug him together, and one of them beckons others to join until there are six or seven people hugging the man at once.

All kinds of people. Elders, middle-aged, and young. Men and women. A rainbow of skin tones. Young people in jeans and Tshirts. A man in a business suit, a girl in hijab.

All humanity, flocking to this young man, willingly vulnerable, widely wildly open, arms enfolding, opening, enfolding, opening.

A butterfly. A hen, brooding over her eggs.

To those of us gathered here, the posture should say it all.

Obviously the video is edited so we can’t be 100% sure if every response he got was a hug. But having left misanthropy behind in pursuit of more honourable viewpoints several years ago, I would suspect the alternative responses were probably just non-engagement. Human beings are lazy far more often than they are actively malicious, even though the results often work out to the same horrid behaviour.

Either way, though, it is a risky act. Evil does exist. And so does cynicism, which often drives people to mock or sabotage acts of sincerity like this.

But this is why it’s so prophetic. Because while being cynical is a buzzkill, it’s also easy. After apathy and blind obedience to authority it’s probably the easiest position to take. It’s easy to find fault and ignore nuance and the complexity of human intent. It’s easy to assume that nothing is worth saving. It’s easy because it encourages non-action.

Compare it to something like skepticism, which plants seeds that become the fruits of seeking and discernment, of curiosity and the desire for more knowledge. Skepticism like cynicism may lead us to question the motives of others, but it doesn’t stop there. Skepticism drives us to seek out the underlying narrative.

Cynicism is a weed that infects and kills everything in the garden. It has no fruit but resentment.

It’s not evil in itself – it’s more symptom than disease. It’s running rampant in North America right now, and it’s not hard to understand why. Sincerity and conviction have been used as weapons to justify violence and prejudice. It’s easy to feel morally superior to a rabidly shrieking Fundamentalist or open carry advocate or white supremacist terrorist. It’s fun to mock the depth of their incredibly flawed convictions, and it’s a comfort to imagine that we are level-headed and realistic, above such displays of torrid emotion.

But we are never immune, and our cynicism of any kind of sincerity helps no-one.

Maybe we should consider re-claiming sincerity.

What’s intriguing to me is the caption below the video, which is in Arabic. According to the illustrious Google Translate, it says, “We need to feel safe again and come back to trust each other.”

The phrase seems a bit clumsy. I don’t speak Arabic but I made a guess that if I did I might rephrase it slightly: “We need to go back to trusting each other,” or “We need to return to trusting each other.”

This in itself seems interesting – it suggests that at one time, we did trust each other. Did we? How long ago was that? “The good old days”? I feel like we’ve established pretty well that such a thing never really existed.

But I’m curious about the implications of the phrase with that possibly clumsy translation. “We need to come back to trust each other.”

Come back to where?

To suburbs? To villages? To tribes and families?

Come back to walking naked in a Garden, as unashamed of our bodies with all their wrinkles and spots and rolls and bumps as we were before shame existed, and as innocently trusting in our speech and postures and hearts as we were before we decided to sow the seeds of lies alongside the crops of trust.

Come back to whom?

Come back to an incarnate One whose ways to us are strange and odd, as the old hymn says, who chooses to show power by showing weakness, to show royalty by submitting to the cruel taunts and petty slavery and cynical struggles of Empire, who stands on a street corner willfully blind to the horror of humanity’s bitter heart with arms wide open, daring to be beaten while at the same time daring to be enfolded.

Come back to something that was woven into our veins and sinews that we never allowed to grow, because we chose to steal wisdom rather than trusting that one day it would be given to us willingly; come back to a hidden DNA, if you like, that if allowed to activate would indeed make us look very strange and odd ourselves, wandering through the world emboldened by a holy mischief, the kind of spirit that pushes us to hug strangers and put flowers into the barrels of guns and sing songs to the police that arrest us and aspire to the spiritual mastery of little children and eat and drink with outcasts and sinners.

This might seem like a tall order, but don’t despair.

On March 24th, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered by a member of the El Salvadoran death squads while celebrating Mass. His crime? Believing that the poor were holy, and preaching to the soldiers of El Salvador’s brutal regime that they had his explicit order as a Bishop to abandon their mission of murder for God’s law.

He wrote,

“The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts: it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is the Lord’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.”

“We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very, very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. …We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.”

No-one in this life will ever fully comprehend what this foolish Beloved of ours accomplished on the cross. What was done once, was done for all. We cannot aspire to recreate this fully, in this Body.

But we are the Body, and we can therefore be like God, and indeed, today, as three days from now, this is our call.

This is our call.

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