University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

On my daily appointment with the treadmill in Tuesday’s predawn, I was flooded with two images that came across the television screen. The first was the scene of an injured and bull who leaped in to the stands at a bullfight in Spain. The bull raged through the crowds and scattered people in its wake, injuring a few people and shocking the viewing public. We thought slaughter was to be tamer than that.

The other image was the first news of the death of Coretta Scott King, a woman who had dealt with her fair share of raging bulls in her life and through it all kept her faithfulness and her commitment to nonviolence.

Through all of this, the image of the raging bull has danced around in my imagination.

Then on Friday, I got the call from UBC’s former pastor Nadean Bishop who told me that her daughter had just taken her own life.

We see raging bulls all around us. The question we need to ask is how do we tame the raging bull.

We need to first ask what makes the bulls rage.

Then we need to find ways to stop making the bulls rage.

And if we can’t stop them from raging, then we need to find a way to manage their rage.

And if we can’t find a way to manage their rage, then we’re in big trouble.

So let’s look at the source of the bull’s rage. In a literal sense, the bull was cornered. He was injured and was going to take out his aggression on anyone nearby. When you get into that kind of mindset, when you are a cornered and injured bull, it makes no sense to reason with you about why you’re upset. You are fighting for your life and rage is the final desperate thing you can do. A raging bull, when threatened will act out of desperation. It no longer cares who is in his way. It gets attention.

When I think of the raging bulls in today’s world I think of terrorism. I think of racism, I think of homoprejudice (which is different from homophobia) and its self-righteous exclusion. And I even think about the proliferation of depression. I am not calling people raging bulls, although some may appear that way, but I think that some people caught in racism, homoprejudice and severe depression might have the raging bull mentality.

The raging bull mentality is a defensive mentality that acts out of that sense of being cornered. It doesn’t know where to turn. It leaves people injured and even dead in its wake. It is not rational. As such it can’t be quickly reasoned with. It cares not who is injured by its fury. It is a last desperate act of an injured party.

In the 40^th movement of Handel’s Messiah, the Bass singer asks the question quoting Psalm 2, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers take counsel together.”

If we are not careful, a people who have been victimized, may well become a raging bull. I don’t pretend to know about the desperation that has unleashed the raging bull of Al Qaida. I certainly don’t want to make any excuses for their despicable actions. But I wonder if a part of it may have to do with the fact that our world is not being moral enough in the way it runs its economy. I know that the US is seen by many as the big enemy of the world largely because of our control over and consumption of the vast majority of the world’s resources.

It doesn’t help that we continue to pollute our world.

It doesn’t help that we collude with the IMF and the World Bank to keep the third world in perpetual debt.

It doesn’t help that we unleash a doctrine of preemptive strike against suspected terrorist harboring countries.

It doesn’t help when we spy on our own people or use apocalyptic religion to justify all of our world dominance.

It should not surprise us that we might unleash raging bulls.

The chorus of people, the masses, respond to the Bass’s question in the next movement of Handel’s Messiah with these words: “Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us.” We unleash raging bulls all the time.

The irony of racism and homoprejudice is that the raging bull ends up being the ones presently in power instead of those victimized. They stir up their flocks with rhetoric that puts them in the victims stead. They are taking away the American way of life. They are taking away our schools. They are stomping on the scared institution of marriage. They want your children next. And if we get stirred up enough the raging bulls will come out and God help us if we are in their way.

Coretta Scott King saw first hand how the raging bull cut down her husband Martin Luther King and so many more people. She saw the way that people who had lost their rationality could do unspeakable things. And she struggled her whole life to create a world where the raging bulls would not have a foothold.

She sought ways to make sure the bulls never got to the raging point. That was her genius. It was her Christian duty. It was her vision that merits attention today.

She and Martin embraced a concept of a vision of a beloved community. One where not only did people not judge one another on the basis of their skin color, but that dealt with each other on an equal basis regardless of their personal abilities or their economic standing. To treat people with less than full dignity not only dehumanizes the other person and potentially unleashes the raging bull. It also dehumanizes us. If we seek to simply win over an enemy and not seek reconciliation with a brother or sister, then we have ultimately gained nothing.

We have become what we despise in another—judgmental, unwilling to hear another side, even violent.

Coretta Scott King worked on the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington DC after Martin Luther King’s death in order to say that the struggle of poor people goes beyond race and is economic. This is a much more threatening thing than the race card. Coretta Scott King was calling for an economy that mirrored our so-called morality as a nation. She called for living wages for people, health benefits, decent jobs and dignity in the workplace. Things we are still hearing that people need. How far are we away from this King’s dream? She also spoke out against war and said that the civil rights struggle included the rights of all people, even specifically the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

I heard Coretta Scott King Speak at my alma mater twenty something years ago. She said that people had misnamed and therefore misinterpreted the movement of Martin Luther King as passive resistance. She said that there is nothing passive about nonviolence. She called on us to be engaged not in passive resistance, but active nonviolence.

Active nonviolence continues to ask the hard questions.

It continues to educate people.

It continues to try to make relationships even with those with whom you disagree.

It continues to do direct action when negotiation fails.

And it continues to resist the temptation to violence which might just unleash a raging bull or two.

In today’s parable, Jesus tells of a person who comes to a friend’s door in the middle of the night so he can give bread to a friend who has come to visit. In the ancient culture, it was essential that they offer hospitality to a stranger. It would be unthinkable to deny this person’s request. Such is the moral economy of the peasant. Even when they are without many goods, they will give you what they have because you are a guest and you honor them by your presence. We saw this in Nicaragua when the people gave so much of themselves to us, even if it meant that they suffered a bit. We got the choicest rooms in their homes, the best food, gifts like you would not imagine and a humble experience of being with people more connected to God than I could even hope to be.

Initially, the friend does not open the door. This was a shameful thing to do, not opening the door and refusing the opportunity of hospitality. But the neighbor had forgotten the community obligation. He was tired and maybe was saving his bread for his own consumption. But the neighbor kept on knocking. His persistence reminded him that he needed to do the right thing. His persistence reminded him and the whole town that we needed to have an economy based upon morality and that part of that morality meant that no one would go hungry and that a stranger was as important as a member of your own family.

The book or Revelation calls those who are in the churches in their apocalyptic time to engage in persistent resistance to the forces of evil which were personified in the emperor and his minions.

We need some persistent non-violent resistance these days. We need resistance against the forces of judgment and demonizing and warfare.

It is the resistance that offers hospitality in the face of injustice. It is the resistance that stays persistent not only because we demand justice for ourselves, but because of that denial of justice does to our adversaries. King sought to do good so all could enjoy the beloved community.

The only way to effectively tame a raging bull is to make sure the bull has nothing to rage about.

The most effective form of resistance is non-violent and life-giving instead of life-taking. It means imagining how we can transform our enemies into friends. That’s what we need to be looking at long-term if we are to tame the raging bulls of the world. We need to not give them something to rage about.

As I look at the raging bulls that are inside so many of us in the form of depression and despair, I can’t help but think that we need to find ways that we can befriend those who need it. It may not be a way to ultimately tame the raging bull of depression, but might be the place where we can offer a word of hope to a person in need.

I heard the news of Nadean’s daughter Susan’s suicide and I thought about those close to me who have contemplated suicide. To commit suicide is to succumb to the raging bull. It leaves all of those around it bruised and broken. I wondered what it might have been like to be the friend at midnight who had felt the door closed on their faces one too many times. I wondered if I had closed that door, too.

There is no easy answer to this. We can’t ultimately stop someone from committing suicide. But we can offer sincere friendship to those who need it. Sometimes we can be like the friend knocking on the door at midnight persistently reminding our friends that they are not alone—that they have a friend.

That we are willing to grant them hospitality and even hold their hands so that the raging bulls will not have the final say, but friendship and hospitality will.

Radical befriending is subversive, liberating, even God-inspired work. It is ultimately what Jesus called us to do. It is what Jesus called us to be. The moral economy is an extension of our capacity to offer friendship to those who need it most.

May we so do it.