A Pentecost OL BFC 2017
Genesis 11:1-10; Acts 2:1-21
June 4, 2017
The 31st
General Synod, the national meeting of our beloved United Church of Christ,
will happen in Baltimore, Maryland, this summer. From our church Rev. Marc Stewart, our
Conference Minister, will be going. As a
delegate, Sophia Heilman will be going along with her mother, Rev. Tracy Heilman. One of our new members, Laura Keating, will
be going. As always, General Synod will
provide incredible speakers, workshops, and worship experiences. I am very jealous as Rev. William Barber II,
the President of the North Carolina NAACP and the leader of the Moral Mondays
movement will be the featured speaker.
Rev. Barber has provided a blueprint for how people of progressive
Christian faith might bring their faith to bear on North Carolina
politics. Like clockwork, every Monday
resistance, protest, and transformation has acted like a drip, drip, drip to
hew out of the rock of injustice a more just, loving, and compassionate North
Carolina.
In two more years, the 32nd
General Synod will be held in Wisconsin, and I would love to have a number of
members from this church attend. We
might fly, carpool, teleport, or watch online to share in what I have
experienced as one of the blessings of the United Church of Christ.
I attended the 19th
General Synod, in St. Louis, Missouri.
The featured speaker was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who stood and spoke
these words, “You and I have been created because God loved us. God loved you. And God loves you. And God will go on loving you unchangeably forever
and ever. That you and I were created not
because God needed us. You and I were
created because God wanted us. And so
you and I are the result of the bubbling over, superabundance of the divine
love. It means that you and I are
precious, precious creatures. The ones
into whom God breathes God’s breath.”
Seriously, I remember Tutu saying
those words so honestly and so earnestly, that tears ran down my cheeks. (choked
up) “Desmond Tutu told me that God loves me!” Indeed.
At that 19th General Synod in St. Louis, way back in 1993, a
radical resolution was also passed. The
United Church of Christ General Synod
passed a resolution that said would be a multicultural, multiracial
church. I say radical because the United
Church of Christ has historically been a white church. So this resolution would require our
transformation as a church. I remember one
of the arguments made for passing this resolution, though not included in the
text of the resolution, was that all we were doing, all the United Church of
Christ was doing was recognizing is that we live in a multicultural,
multiracial world. The United Church of
Christ, at a national level, agreed to work on reflecting the present reality
of the wider world.
We may remember that Dr. King
referenced Sunday morning as the most segregated hour of the week. And that is still probably true.[1] The church has much work to do. But here’s the rub. Even if the church, nationally and locally,
works at representing the present reality of the wider world, if we do not work
at being the multi-cultural, multi-racial people in the public square and in
places where political power matters, all we will offer is a feel-good idealism
that does not reflect a God who is involved in the grit and grist of human
life. What we do inside the church is
practice for what we are to do outside these four walls. To quote Dr. Cornel West two weeks in a row, “Justice
is what love looks like in public.
Justice is love with legs on.”
While our national and local church
may want to lean into a world that is multi-racial and multi-cultural, it is
Whitefish, Montana’s own Richard Spencer from the alt-right or alt-reich, who strongly condemns the idea of
a world ever more multi-cultural and multi-racial.[2] Spencer is deadly afraid of a world where
white dominance is losing its monolithic grip.
I believe that if we think Spencer’s
viewpoint is marginal, we are kidding ourselves. At the base of his belief system is a value
in domination that is at the heart of much of evangelical, fundamentalist, and
conservative Christianity. I think that
domination rhetoric is a seductively strong part of mainline Christianity as
well. I say seductively because I think
that “domination” rhetoric softens around places where we might passively
assent. We might not be ok with racism
against African-American folk but we are ok with the everyday racism against
Native peoples. We might not be ok with
racism against people of color but we are ok with women not having adequate
health care. We might not want
domination over against people of color within our own country or for women to
be second class citizens but we are fine with the violence done against
immigrants and refugees. We may even go
so far as to claim that we do not want chemical warfare done against Syrian
babies but we certainly don’t want to provide safety, sanctuary, and refuge for
those Syrian babies making their way to our own country.
That domination rhetoric is
unabashedly part of so much evangelical, fundamentalist, and conservative
Christendom that it undergirds a huge force in our public square and where
political power matters. I would argue
that that quest for domination is finally coming to full flower as any social
or common ethics are traded in for a Christendom that only knows personal
morality. That Christendom believes
God’s will to be done when “our people” are in charge of the school board, city
council, and State and national government.
If “our people” are not in full control at these levels, we are the marginalized,
the victims of a church, a school, a community, a country we never intended to
share.
And here is where we, as Christian
people of faith, need to draw the line.
Our tradition is not about a singular, monolithic belief system or particular
culture that must conquer and dominate to reveal its power.
Today we have two contrasting
stories before us—the Tower of Babel story and the Christian Pentecost story. In the Biblical narrative, just before the
Tower of Babel story and after the Biblical Flood, God renews humankind’s
relationship with the Earth, puts limits on their violence, the original sin,
and commands them to scatter across the earth.
In a display of arrogance, humankind refuses to scatter and organizes
around a monolithic imperial centralism.
That monolithic imperial centralism manifests itself in humankind’s plan
to build a tower counter to God’s command as if they were divine, as if to
emblazon their own name on the tower.
God intervenes. The nations are
dispersed and cultural and linguistic diversity is instituted. Cultural diversity is seen as a hedge against
dominating centralism. The
redistribution and dispersal of social and political power is essential to the
struggle against monolithic domination and empire, and in service
of God’s Beloved Community.[3]
In contrast, the story of Pentecost
has God’s Divine tongues of fire not speaking in one singular, monolithic
language. Rather, each Jew, who has come
to Jerusalem from around the known world, hears God speaking in their own
distinct languages. God’s power and
glory is revealed in diversity.
Throughout Scripture, God gives diversity as a gift so that all of
creation might experience the manifold ways God is revealed and is at work in
the world, so that we might experience the incredible breadth of God’s love in
people and cultures that are not like us.
Throughout history, Christianity has gone off the tracks when it has
embraced the dominant culture, often a culture that is asking for monolithic
allegiance and sometimes asking for no more than passive consent to do the most
abominable things to the most vulnerable of people.
Many of you know that I believe
progressive Christianity has ceded power to violent and dominating Christendom when
we have endorsed the separation of Church and State as the only faithful
response to the values we put forward to order human life. Violent and dominating Christendom will never
assent to this arrangement—the separation of Church and State. They are in it to win it. In the
end then, all we do is extract our faith, supposedly containing our most deeply
held values, so that violent and dominating Christendom is the only one speaking
faith values into the public square and political process.
At
the most recent Montana Association of Christians Connection meeting in Butte
this past fall, both gubernatorial candidates spoke to us. Candidate Greg Gianforte (an evangelical
Christian) shared his most deeply held values from his faith to explain who he
was to our gathered group. Mind you,
this was at a religious gathering.
Meanwhile, Governor Bullock spoke about his faith as a private concern
and then began to rattle off a set of values that closely corresponded with my
faith values. In that gathering of
Christians, Candidate Gianforte was the only one who appeared motivated by
Christian faith. Progressive Christians
seem to be forever diminishing their faith, suggesting that almost every
important public issue is not faith-related, so that the only people speaking
their faith are those who believe in Christianity über alles. Why are we so
surprised then when these same Christians act attacked and victimized when
their entitlement is brought into question?
They are used to speaking unopposed.
Quaker Biblical scholar and
activist, Ched Myers, reminds us that “diversity is our reality; the challenge
is how to build a just society around it.”[4]
Even hidden in our history, Myers notes, is the understanding that America has
always been a multicultural, multiracial project. Of the 22 settlers who founded and settled
the city of Los Angeles there were eight mulattos, eight Native Americans, two
blacks, one mestizo and only two Spaniards.
The great liberator, Simón Bolivar said to the Congress of Angostura in
1819, “Europeans have mixed with the Indians and the Negroes, and Negroes have mixed
with the Indians; we were all born of one mother America, though our
[ancestors] had different origins.”[5]
As people of faith, we need to
become articulate about and develop expressions of a unity that does not
come from uniformity but from a congruence and solidarity that works through
our valued diversity to find a communion.
We do not merge faiths so much as we draw deeply from wells of our own
traditions and learn about the living waters of other faiths.[6] Our church becomes the place where we
practice working through our diversity to become one bread, one loaf, one body
and then takes that example and practice out into the political realm to
develop a pluralism where our common journey may be marked by different
symbols, but covenants to walk the road together. Our church represents the tensions,
frustrations, and ever-wider diversity.
Can we then be the place and example for this to happen? “Pluralism is heretical wherever the church
continues to be infected by Constantinian assumptions about its privilege and
power within society.”[7] Our church should be a haven for heretics.
Pluralism is not giving up our convictions. It is not about an uncommitted
relativism. In fact, in the struggle for
justice we are called to a solidarity which entails acceptance of difference. Pluralism is refusing to exercise our
convictions from a position of domination.
We say that one of our faith values is a humility that offers the
possibility to be transformed by someone who is not like us. In humility, we also hold out the possibility
that we might be wrong. In humility, we
also say that being right does not mean we punish or take away the rights of
people who do not agree with us. This is
what we mean when we say, “No matter who you are or where you are in your
journey, you are welcome here.” We show
a commitment to social inclusion because we recognize violent and dominating
Christendom’s long history of exclusion and the denial of peoples who are not
like us to exist with full and equal rights.
Plurality
is found in the radical Biblical tradition we follow. “The Exodus God ‘calls and names’ certain peoples, cares for all peoples, and takes the side of the poor” as a demonstration of God’s
character rooted in justice. Contrary to
violent and dominating Christendom’s rejection of plurality, the New Testament
assumes that plurality, values it, works through it to come to a common font where
God’s love for us is affirmed and a common table where all are fed.[8]
If
the Christian Church is to have a future, we must overcome the damage done by
violent and dominating Christendom to become an example for our community and
to find our voice in the public square so that we can say, “My faith convicts
me, tells me that great truth and meaning can be found in other traditions, and
so I join hands with them, particularly the poor for whom my God weeps and
cares for, to say that we will not be broken by your hatred, by your violence,
by your sense of entitlement. You may build
a gleaming white tower or wall and put your name on it . . . but I say, we say,
we have built a table around which many languages and cultures, races and
genders come with their power to build something more rich with color, more
varied in its vibrancy and design, and an example of the Beloved Community dear
to God’s heart.
In
the public square and in the places where political power matters, we say, “You
may invoke God as your rich War Lord but we abhor the divisions, discord, and
death your God creates for everybody but you.
We see things differently. We
also call to God. We call to Her as a
Quilter, piecing us together in community, as a Midwife, giving birth to
something new we could not have imagined, as a Bakerwoman who seems to think
that multi-grain bread brings goodness
and life to us as a people. God’s divine
love is among and between us like wind and flame, so that all of us, no matter
our race or language or culture, may hear God speaking not in one language, but
in our own language. So let it be. So let it be. Amen.
[1] Cathy
Lynn Grossman, “Sunday is Still the Most Segregated Day of the Week,” Amrerica:
The Jesuit Review, January 16, 2015, http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/sunday-still-most-segregated-day-week.
[2] Clip of
“American Race: White Privilege in America,”
TNT, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/22/475006624/in-american-race-charles-barkley-is-a-true-believer-in-the-power-of-dialogue.
[3] Ched
Myers, Who Will Roll Away the
Stone?: Discipleship Queries for First
World Christians (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1995), p. 317. I
mean, “Trump Tower,” come on! This is a
little too easy. Much of my reflection
is taken from Myer’s incredible text on resistance.
[4] Ibid, p.
313.
[5] Ibid, p.
312.
[6] Ibid, p.
315.
[7] Ibid, p.
316.
[8] Ibid,
pp. 316-317.
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