David said it best in Psalm 51: “Against you, and you alone, have I sinned; I have done what is evil in your sight.” When we wrong others the ultimate offense is always against God.
I boldly I confess that all of my own past acts of insult or injury had some gradation of premeditation and purpose, and not just in the heat of the moment. In other words, I meant to do them, seeking my own remedy, personal satisfaction, or some kind of attention-getting rise. I feel confident that a rational (or rabid) sense of intention and accomplishment rested behind each and every action or statement for which I later apologized, but rarely to God.
I wish others were willing to admit the same, because the many recent publicly-aired apologies of news and radio moguls, who know better, have become sickening. They are the smooth-over that pleads, “I know I have compromised my [already-sorely questionable] credibility and integrity, but I’m essentially doing this to beg to keep my job”. The substance of these apologies is irrelevant, but we have come to expect them as America’s public appeasement, ignoring the fact that passionate remorse is difficult enough to convey, and exponentially so when the plea was preceded, just days before by venomous, libelous, misogynist, bigoted, or racist insults.
I suspect that Rush Limbaugh, Franklin Graham, and even my beloved Ed Schultz from the Ed Show, all know, as well as I do, that the silver bullet insult that fires from the mouth of your spouse or loved one is forever suspended in the air. All the flowers, gifts, diamonds, even great make-up sex, will not erase the sound of the “B”, “C”, or “D” words in the heat of an argument. It's an even higher hurdle with a stranger, which is absent the covenantal safety net.
This week’s Gospel lectionary of Jesus turning over the tables of the money-changers in the temple is the kind of anger that will never need an apology, because it establishes that an insult against God is the ultimate insult. Similarly, when we defile another’s personhood, integrity, intelligence, faith tradition, or humanity, we negate God’s holy creation, and the divinity for which each and every one of us was created. Matthew Fox aptly called it, Original Blessing.
During Black History Month worship services in white churches I have experienced White members passively, but passionately, apologizing to me for the centuries of oppression, suppression, and dehumanization against my African ancestors. This always made me uncomfortable, because the fact is that those acts were everything but passive. They were blatant acts of cruelty and violence. They were done with calculated evil and conviction, supported by carefully legislated laws, and laced with thin and blasphemous attempts at corroborating them with Biblical principles. The true offense was, and still is, against God. If anyone needs an apology, it's God.
I would like to hear Rush, Franklin and Ed take a lesson from King David and apologize publicly to God, and then maybe I will believe they are sincere.
