Responses
to Violent Christendom 3 BFC 2017
Daniel
3:16-18; Mark 13:28-37; 1 Corinthians 1:27
October
1, 2017, World Communion Sunday
This fall I began a sermon series that seeks to engage with
and respond to violent Christendom. With
much of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity selling its soul to align
itself with American cultural imperialism, what we hear day after day is this
brand sold to us as the one and only true Christianity. They know, we don’t. They are right. We aren’t.
They have the Scripture verses, the repeated praise choruses, and the
radio stations. Progressive Christians
sometimes contribute money to a beleaguered NPR. Well, ok.
The most powerful people on the
Religious Right seem to be the most certain of how right they are. But does our faith call for us to be certain
and right or loving?
I
started watching one of the most popular TV adult animated shows, “Rick and
Morty,” because my son told me of guest appearances by people like John Oliver
and Stephen Colbert. The show is vulgar,
off-kilter, and hilarious. The series
follows the misadventures of cynical mad
scientist Rick Sanchez and his fretful,
easily influenced grandson, Morty Smith, who split
their time between domestic family life and interdimensional adventures. Grandfather Rick is always right, brilliant,
but forever sowing pain and discord in family life. After once again being disillusioned by his
grandfather, Morty, his grandson, has had it.
So when Rick says, “The fact
that I was right about them must be pretty hard to accept," Morty
finally breaks, "Yeah, it is. You know why, Rick? Because when
you're a jerk (asshole), it doesn't matter how right you are. Nobody
wants to give you the satisfaction."[1] Not unlike other great animated series, “Rick
and Morty” can sometimes say true things that you won’t be able to hear
anywhere else on TV. If you have ever
been in such a relationship, with someone who knows themselves to be right all
the time, it feels less like love and more like abuse.
All
of the Scripture verses read for us today make it clear that faith is not
necessarily about knowing God’s mind, knowing God’s plans for the future. And if you think you know, it may be just
that you don’t know. Doubt, struggle,
uncertainty, the willingness to change our minds is critical to a real
faith. It may even describe the
character of God.
According
to Jewish midrash, there are three times when Moses convinced God that God was
wrong. When God was about to punish the
Children of Israel for worshiping the golden calf, Moses says to God, “How can
you punish them for something they didn’t even know was wrong? You are holding them responsible and that’s
not fair.” And God relents. Admits Moses is right. God’s mind changes. The second time God ordains that the sins of
the parents be visited upon the children.
Moses says, “Well that’s just wrong.
It’s unfair. There are many
decent people who have just horrible parents.”
Some of us have experience with parents who are cruel or insufferable
but that does not describe who we are. Listening
to Moses, God thinks about it and says, “You know what? You are right. Let’s change that.” Then there is the time when God orders the
people to make war with another people.
Moses does something incredible . . . extraordinary. He sends a message of peace out to these very
same people. God says, “What are you
doing? This is not what I asked.”
Moses
responds, “Why would you wage war when you can try to make peace?” And God says, “That’s a really good
point. I am going to change that one too.” As Rabbi Sharon Brous said about these
situations, “What does it mean to realize you have made a mistake, to have your
heart, your gut expanded, to perhaps see things you didn’t see things you
didn’t before. We fall into the trap of
feeling like we have to stand by our decisions, by positions even though they
don’t accurately reflect where we should be.”
What if we could be like God and choose to be stretched to a greater
compassion?[2]
In contrast to the
certainty regularly displayed in evangelical and fundamentalist faith, doubt
has played an important part in the broader Judeo-Christian mythology and
tradition. Our faith is informed by a
doubt and struggle that often helps us to expand our hearts and grow our
faith. In Jennifer Hecht’s book, Doubt:
A History, Hecht says the prolific Christian writer and theologian,
St. Augustine knew that “doubt was understood as the only way to know
anything.”[3] The great German-American theologian, Paul
Tillich believed doubt to be an element of faith, a necessary tool of
knowledge. He went on to write that the
opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.[4] Madeleine L’ Engle quoted the great Spanish
writer Miguel Unamuno de Jugo.
Those
who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without
anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without
despair, believe only in the idea of God, and [are] not [truly] in [relationship
with]
God.[5]
It was Mother Teresa in her book of
letters to her spiritual advisers who continually confessed her doubts and her
experiences of the absence of God. She
had received a call from her teaching job at age 36 to go and serve the
poor. Then she heard nothing but
silence.
For
Mother Teresa,
The silence created “such terrible darkness
within me,” she wrote, adding that “within me everything is icy cold,” and “If
you only knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the pain is so great that
I feel as if everything will break. The smile is a big cloak which covers a
multitude of pains.”[6]
Doubt and struggle marked the life of Mother Teresa. Therefore,
when we engage friends, family members, and people of evangelical and
fundamentalist faith who speak out of so much certainty, we should know that
the longer tradition is one which is a wrestling with faith, a wrestling with
God, a knowledge that we belong to a living tradition that blesses us with the
ability to have our minds changed and grow.
As
Rabbi Brous went on to say, “Can we not find something that we believed from
our core, a political thing, a relational thing, a career thing, five years ago
that we now can’t say, well I’m a little different now. That’s part of the blessing of being
alive. Once we die, we don’t have that
ability go back and say, ‘Yeah, I was a little wrong.’” We can change our minds, expand our
hearts. We grow. It’s easier when the other is the one rigid
and destructive to the familial and political discourse. Maybe next time then we can have the courage
to admit that we were a little wrong. As
God did with Moses. In this day and age,
we need a God like that. I want to
believe in a God like that.[7]
Today
we celebrated World Communion Sunday. It
is the absolute best part of our tradition that no longer talks about being in
world mission to save people who are not like us or to make them like us or to
even say, “Give a person a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, feed them for a
lifetime.” Rather, I hope our
progressive Christian faith has grown to know that our own certainties have
prevented us from receiving the gifts of others, learning of another people’s
strength, particularly learning from people not like us and the economically
poor, and changing our mind so that we might learn something of God, that the
breadth of God’s love and justice is larger than we ever imagined.
Why would you wage
war when you can make peace, O God? And
God, hopefully with us, continues to grow.
May we all be stretched to a greater compassion. Amen.
[1] “Vindicators 3:
The Return of Worldender,” Rick
and Morty.
[2] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “When
You’re So Right You’re Wrong,” IKAR Los
Angeles, July 5, 2017.
[3] Dean Nelson, “The Paradoxes of Mother Teresa,” Sojourners, September/October 2017
[4] Paul Tillich, The
Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1952), p. 121; Anne Lamott twitter feed: https://twitter.com/annelamott/status/529295149554487298?lang=en
[5] Quoted in Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith &
Art (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 32. The wuote was changed to make it inclusive in
language.
[6] Nelson, “The Paradoxes.”
[7] Brous, “When You’re So Right.”
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