What Do You Do with Charles Guiteau?

The concept of the Trinity is...complicated by how we choose to name the three persons of the Trinity. We struggle to find words to call them: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; God, Jesus, Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; Beyond Them, With Them, Within Them; Lover, Beloved, Love. Is God the First Person of the Trinity or all three of them together? These names imply interrelatedness, connection, and interaction, but some of them also imply gender, role, and hierarchy.

–Larry Duggins, Together, p 1. 

I recently read Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard. It recounts the details of the assination of President James A. Garfield. I am going to use one of the characters from that story now, so, if you want to read the book or are reading the book and don’t want to have any spoilers...go read at least half of the book.

Done? 

Ok.

Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield. Guiteau was widely understood to be irrational and unstable. He was a known liar, cheat, and fraud. He had been violent. He thought he should be the US’s ambassador to Paris. He thought it was his right to be the ambassador to Paris. He made his claim to anyone who would listen that he was the rightful ambassador to Paris.

He should not have been the ambassador to Paris.

He wrote letters, sat in waiting rooms, hung around, showed up at church, named it and claimed it and got nowhere. He was annoying, delusional, and proved himself to be dangerous. He was a voice crying out to be heard and he was not heard. No one knew what to do with his persistent bizarreness. He was certainly unable to do what he claimed he should do. What do you do with Charles Guiteau? 

Charles Guiteau was a symptom.

Of what? 

He was a symptom of what lies beneath. Beneath what drives humanity to do more, want more, have more. Beneath what makes humans silence what makes us uncomfortable. Beneath the veneer of deserving.

Humans love to assign blame. In ancient Israel, people would pile up all the blame lying around onto a goat and drive it out of the community. The animal would bear all of the faults and frustration everyone was walking around with out of the community. This practice must have worked in some way because people did it more than once. Once might be a weird experiment, but there is always something underlying a tradition. Scapegoating became a tradition because it worked. Everyone knew that their grumpiness wasn’t the goat’s fault, but they could blame the goat, drive the goat away, and feel some relief. We do this all the time. To those we don’t like, to those we don’t understand, to those we fear. If only we could get rid of the [goat], everything would be ok. Why? It is a symptom. Of something deep within us.

A community of grace is a community that listens to the voices of the dehumanized crying out. And not just the voices of those our group recognizes as marginalized. Grace insists like a festering wound. What does systemic racism say? What does brutal law enforcement say? What does the dismissal of the blue collar worker say? What do half a million homeless people in one of the richest countries in the world say? 

There are those who claim that the prophets died out long ago, but, my dear community, the voices we can’t stand are our prophets. They tell us something is wrong. They force us to refuse to accept a rebranding of the same broken system. They tell us to ask bigger questions. 

What is a Community of Grace? It is one who listens to the voice crying out, and hears their unutterable truth. 

We do not believe we are loved. 

But believing does not make it so.

A Community of Grace holds those who do not believe that they are loved in the arms of a God who is a triplicate expression of Love.

What do the voices of the delusional, annoying, and infuriating say? 

Do you love me?
Do you love me?
Do you love me?

Then feed my sheep...