The Best of Us - The Worst of Us

When I was a little boy, my father often played the folk music that had become popular in late fifties and early sixties. I grew up listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joan Baez, and a group called the Weavers. They were from an earlier era but had been "rediscovered" in the folk music resurgence.

One particular song from the Weavers made an impression on me, a Woody Guthrie ballad entitled "The Sinking of the Reuben James." It was about a US ship sunk by German U-boats during World War II. Guthrie wrote the song during the war, but the version I learned from the Weavers, sung in 1960, had an added verse at the end.

Many years have passed since those brave men are gone
Those cold, icy waters, they're still and they're calm
Many years have passed and still I wonder why
The worst of men must fight and the best of men must die

I thought of those lyrics as I read about the heroes killed in Portland when they came to the aid of a Muslim woman being accosted by a white-supremacist. Two of the best in our society died at the hands of one of the worst. They died precisely because they did what was right, because they stood up to evil.

In today's gospel reading, Jesus sends "the seventy" out on a mission trip. As he instructs them for their work he says, "See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves."Clearly this is more than colorful speech, more than metaphor.

It is difficult to make sense of such a world, to understand how it is that the worst create pain and conflict, while the very best suffer and die as a result. We do not want it to be that way. Sometimes we insist it is not that way. That is why it is so tempting to "blame the victim," to imagine that people somehow deserve their suffering, their tragedy, their poverty, their loss.

Of course Jesus is the perfect example of that not being so. He is the innocent one who suffers at the hands of the guilty. He is killed for doing what is right, just as the two men in Portland were. In a very real sense, Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche embodied Christ in a way that many who speak in Christ's name so often fail to do. That these two men gave themselves for someone who happens to be Muslim, a person many Christians feel free to hate, only makes their incarnation of God's love that much more poignant.  

I am heartened to hear so many people speak of Best and Namkai-Meche as heroes, as the best of humanity and American values. And yet, all too often, we prefer the ways and methods of the worst of us. We prefer the way of power and force and intimidation. We prefer to look for a reason that the other does not deserve our help. We prefer to look the other way in the face of suffering rather than risk ourselves to help, a tendency that only grows stronger the more different the other is from us.

In this time when hate is seeing a resurgence, when many feel freed to demonize the other based on their politics or faith or color or orientation or birthplace, I wonder if the tragic events in Portland last week might not have some small measure of redemptive power. If we can indeed embrace the actions of Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche as the best of us, as a model we are all called to emulate, then perhaps their deaths will serve some lasting purpose.

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