Standing and Kneeling at the Same Time

Establishing a Center of Spiritual Resistance Pt. 3

One exhibit at The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. still haunts me after all these years. The visual of a damaged lintel above a Torah ark from a German synagogue echoes in my mind because of the powerful words on them which Nazis attempted to hack away, but which remained somehow in symbolic defiance:

Know before whom you stand.

The defaced Lintel at the Holocaust Museum DC

This painful juxtaposition…

The power of these old words serving as a reminder of what is most important about human existence – we are not alone in the vast cosmos, but we are created, kept, and witnessed by a God who is both ultimate Love and ultimate Justice.

The thick gashes through the powerful words serving as a reminder of what is most wrong about human existence – we do not want to be accountable to others or to God for the things we feel we must do to survive.

Here at The Golden Thread, we’ve been exploring the dreadful mistakes the German Christians made during the rise and fall of the Third Reich because their worldview and actions are common to us all and the outcomes of their choices are instructive. They made agreements with evil, that’s true. Yet these agreements didn’t occur in some dark cellar with ritualistic sacrifices and pacts made with Satan. We like to imagine them in this way because it helps us distance ourselves from them.

The truth is that they made small, ordinary compromises along the way that didn’t seem consequential at the time, but which created a momentum that hurled them headlong into one of the greatest evils in recorded history. These compromises began with ordinary things like nationalism, loyalty, courage, fairness, and morality. They were so fascinated with the “slippery slope” of the so-called moral decay of liberalism that they didn’t see their own slide into insanity coming.

One of the most consequential (and most ordinary) sins they committed was the abandonment of humility that comes from beholding God and God’s creation with awe and wonder.

They forgot before Whom they stood.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose family was killed in the Holocaust, and who dedicated the remainder of his life to cultivating a public awareness of God, said this about awe and wonder:

"Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe."

When it comes to that which should evoke the highest levels of wonder in us, humankind made in the image of God, stands above all creation as the most awe inspiring. C.S. Lewis beautifully underscored this point when he wrote:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

It is perfectly ordinary and understandable that politicians and lawmakers, military generals and geopolitical strategists look out at humankind and reduce their worldview and decisions to what is most expedient and beneficial to their own nations and interests. After all, they are thinking about things which are merely mortal. And they’ve agreed with the notion that no matter how much we wish and pray for world peace, it is a fact of life that humans are locked in a struggle for survival that requires an “us vs. them” mentality.

Or, at least, that’s the way it’s always been and it’s the only “reality” we know.

For Christians, however, that way of thinking is neither ordinary nor understandable because our hearts have been enlightened to the fact that all the earth, and especially humankind, is filled with the glory of the God we love. Jesus taught us explicitly how we are to conduct ourselves in the world, including with those we see as our “enemies.” He left us with beautiful parables and imagery, signs and miracles, and a lived example to follow in cultivating hearts and minds attuned to the awe and wonder of God. He wasn’t only teaching us an ethic by which to live, but also about a new reality by which to see.

He compelled us to see all humans as our neighbors, to consider the miracle of God’s care for even the lily and the sparrow, the disrupting power of the smallest seed and the nourishing potential in even meager fishes and loaves. He constantly offered us the new perspective that can only come by being born again into fresh eyes that are able to see the world like a child –

A big, unified, beautiful, loving home where all creation can be safe.

He wasn’t naïve. He wasn’t painting a picture of a utopia, nor was He unaware of the harsh realities of human existence. Indeed, He faced our violence, our denial of God, our refusal to look at ourselves and our systems of dominance, and He gave Himself to us to do with as we willed.

And when we couldn’t take His incessant exposure of what we become when we turn against God, ourselves, and others anymore – we took His life to shut Him up and shut Him out.

Christian baptism, among other things, is meant to signify that we are culpable in the collective suffering of creation as well as in the suffering of our Creator and that we repent of our sins and choose a new, different life founded on love and forgiveness. We are meant to reject all agreements with evil and, instead, to agree with God’s ordained pattern of human existence – that is, the pattern of Love.

Refusing to capitulate on what we know to be wrong while simultaneously choosing to surrender to love requires something of us that often seems impossible. It’s infinitely easier to adopt an “us vs. them” mentality of againstness than to try to walk the narrow path of Christ. How do we accomplish this then? What is the practical step that helps us do this seemingly impossible thing? We must learn, as Bishop Michael Curry describes, to stand and kneel at the same time. He says this about the standing/kneeling heart posture:

“It’s important to learn how to both kneel and to stand at the same time. To kneel in real humility, to know that I’m not God. This is the best that I can do with the light I’ve received. And I’ve got to honor and respect the fact that you differ with me on whatever the issue or concern happens to be, and I’ve got to kneel before you as my brother, my sister, my sibling, and honor the image of God that is in you because you, like me, are a child of God.”

This is the way we follow in the example set by Christ. On the night before He was killed, He kneeled before His disciples – all of which would abandon Him, all of which were still unable to “see” the reality He had worked so hard to reveal, all of which would prove to be unfaithful and sinful in their cowardice, and all of which were terrifyingly made in the image of God Almighty – and He washed their feet in the most profound visual of God’s loving commitment to blind and violent humankind.

He stood in His identity and mission while kneeling before those we might consider unworthy. And He didn’t stop there.

He commanded them – and us all -- to do the same. In fact, He said that if we refuse to kneel in awe and wonder because of the God who endows creation with God’s very glory, we cannot participate with God in what God is doing. Despite the narrow-focused teachings of this example that we’ve received in the Western church, Jesus isn’t instructing us here to white-knuckle a performative servant leadership act for the purposes of symbolism. He knows that if we practice standing and kneeling at the same time, we will eventually learn how to truly, deeply, and profoundly love both God and others. Moral theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said this about the natural development of love that happens when we allow ourselves to move love out of our brains and into the world, being moved toward others and deeper into intimacy:

“The law of love is not obeyed simply by being known. Whenever it is obeyed at all, it is because life in its beauty and terror has been more fully revealed to man. The love that cannot be willed may nevertheless grow up as a natural fruit upon a tree which has roots deep enough to be nurtured by springs of life beneath the surface and branches reaching up to heaven.”

Life in its beauty and terror being more fully revealed to us. This is the invitation Christ was extending in His example of standing and kneeling at the same time. We stand in the face of terror when others crumble into self-preservation. We kneel before beauty when others seek to deface it because they don’t understand it.

The German Christians of the Third Reich didn’t kneel in honor of the image of God in Jews, homosexuals, and all the rest of the “unworthy” of which they wanted to rid their country. Just as the Nazi soldiers defaced the holy Jewish lintel which reminded them of their proper place in relationship to God and others, the German Christians defaced their faith and their souls while agreeing with the anti-God evils of dehumanization and dominance.

When The Satan came roaming to destroy God’s glory, they weren’t prepared with a center of spiritual resistance. They had abandoned childlike awe and wonder over seeds and lilies, sparrows and neighbors. Their glorious, God-gifted eyes were instead focused on war, power, self-protection, blood, and soil. Their theologians and pastors had distorted God’s will into “orders of creation,” but abandoned the order Jesus had established in the process – the order of love which requires standing in a violent world while kneeling in love before others at the same time.

We are faced with this same challenge today, beloved ones. Evil is roaming the earth, and our love is growing cold in the face of intensifications of violence, power-hunger, and greed. Do we have a center of spiritual resistance that can withstand the onslaught? Will we be found simultaneously standing and kneeling, come what may? Or will we fold under the pressure of survival? Will we agree that things like awe and wonder, seeds and sparrows, neighbors and feet washing are silly, and perhaps even dangerous, in the face of “reality?” Or will we agree with God that humans are not mere mortals, that our thoughts and actions have deep consequence, and that we are hand-made by God to bring light, love, and glory to this world?

Will we embrace the terror and beauty of a life lived not in the deception of allegiance to blood and soil, but in the reality of God, our roots nourished by Love, beckoning the world to know before Whom we all stand?