Responses to
Violent Christendom 6
Micah
6:6-8; Amos 5:24; Mark 12:30-31; Matthew 25:31-40
October
29, 2017
The
Lutherans have been going crazy this year.
They are actually meeting with the Roman Catholic Church to heal the
great divide. This year marks the 500th
anniversary of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 Theses on the door of the church
in Wittenberg, Germany. There had been
many abuses, poor practices, and wrong paths the church had been about which
had led to a call for reform, but the precipitating event had been a church
effort to make afterlife salvation up for sale to the highest bidder. Legend has it that the Dominican friar,
Johann Tetzel, would say, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul
from purgatory springs.” We thought
about using something like that for our church offering but we haven’t found a
good rhyme with ATM card.
Martin Luther’s call for reforms within the church were
about “democratizing access to the holy.”
Theologian and Church futurist Phyllis Tickle cites Anglican Bishop Mark
Dyer’s observation that, “the only way to
understand what is currently happening to us as 21st-century Christians in
North America is first to understand that about every 500 years the church
feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale."[1] Tickle puts it this way, “about every five hundred years the empowered
structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an
intolerable carapace (carapace meaning something like a tortoise’s shell) that
must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur." When that 500 year emergence happens, Tickle reflects, a new and more
vital form of Christianity comes forward and the
previously dominant form of Christianity is reconstituted into a more pure and
less ossified expression of its former self.[2] Could it be that is what we are on the
threshold, what our congregation is responding to, as God uses our
institutional biorhythms to shatter the tortoise shell so that the emerging
renewal and new growth might occur?
I think we are always tasked, as people
of faith, as Christ’s disciples, with charting a path that is often not covered
by mass media. While certain parts of
the Reformation were charted by those supported and protected by political
power, another more radical reformation undertaken by small groups like the
Anabaptists returned Christianity to its understanding of humility and
nonviolence.[3]
I want to encourage that radical reformation undertaken
by those small groups in response to the tortoise shell of evangelical and
fundamentalist Christianity. I have
asked us to build our own frames, ask questions, trust your uncertainty, focus
on content of Jesus, and to not get caught in the Bible thumping of believing
that one of our tools for faith only says one thing.
We must also not only respond to what fundamentalist and
evangelical Christians say to us, we must have something positive to say about
what we
believe to them. And then we need to
repeat it over and over as a way of recognizing that deep faith is more about
courage than it is about complexity.
What is your
spiritual mantra, maybe even a koan, your “go-to” word or phrase that guides
your feet, opens up to a wider complexity, and begins to define the life you are
trying to lead? Is there a Scripture
verse you might use, take as your own, maybe a question like “Who is my
neighbor?” or “Am I my sister, brother, sibling, cousin’s keeper?” How does that mantra, koan, or question
reflect all the decisions you make as a person of faith? How does it operate as a baseline to make you
courageous, loving, and compassionate? I
remember hearing interviews with people who hid Jewish people when the Nazis
came calling. When asked why they did
what they did, the response, more often than not, seemed to be, “Because that’s
what you do.”
When Tracy was in seminary, every student was asked to
come up with a mission statement to define not only what they believed but what
their ministry would be. Tracy, who sees
her primarily role as an educator within the church took as hers, one that we
used last week to distribute Bibles, “My role is to help a congregation see
their lives as sacred stories and to see sacred stories as their lives.”
I am not one for jewelry or extra
things I have to account for, so it is one of the treasured gifts Tracy gave me
that I wear every day. It is a foot
necklace that reminds me of that African proverb at the end of Al Gore’s “An
Inconvenient Truth,” “When you pray, move your feet.” That phrase is a reminder for me that my
spiritual life can never be removed from my political life and that my
political life forever informs my spiritual life. “When you pray, move your feet.”
I think coming up with a short, strong
mantra, koan, or salient question to inform our faith is important in a world
that has gone mad with information is critical to having a voice that can be
heard in the public sphere.[4] If we do not have something that we can
repeat, we end up overwhelmed with all that we are supposed to account for, remember,
and make sense of in the midst of a 24-hour news cycle content with making us
believe that there is no such thing as discernable Truth or lying or
transcendent value. We are being told
again and again that it is just really different points of view as the most
vulnerable in our world are met with exclusion, violence, and death.
I believe it is critical, particularly
in those exchanges with friends and family who are evangelical or
fundamentalist, to have something that cannot only be repeated in our brains
and through our bloodstream, but said enough times we might actually begin the
transformation of the spiritual being across from us.
It goes like this.
“Love God. Love neighbor. Doesn’t
that about sum it up? Sure, I know you think the most important part is them
breaking the law but that’s an imperial narrative, right? Love God.
Love neighbor. No, love God. Love neighbor. Everything starts and ends there, right? Well, no, love God, love neighbor.” In so doing, you become an impenetrable wall
of love, compassion, and kindness. And
there are so many of these mantras, koans, salient, Socratic questions in our
tradition. Pick one. Roll with it.
Over and over. Courage.
Some time ago, the Christian social
justice magazine, Sojourners, decided
that they needed to develop a core Christian statement as an explanation for
why they stood strongly over and against the Trump administration. For the editors, writers, and contributors of
Sojourners knew that there were
Christians who heard their faith calling them to support and advocate for
President Trump and his policies. Rose
Marie Berger, one of the editors, put together a video that used Scripture
verses from Matthew 25 in the style of the poem, “First they came” written by
German pastor Martin Niemoller to chastise the cowardice of German
intellectuals in the face of growing Naziism. Here is Berger’s video. (Show the first video) http://rosemarieberger.com/2016/11/10/im-rose-marie-berger-jp-keenan/.
Also, Sojourners itself
put together a short video that related Matthew 25 as a credo, as a reason for
action, taking a stand, and displaying solidarity such that one of our
relatives might say over holiday dinner, “Well, Charlene, why do you believe as
you do? Does it come out of some
Communist, Marxist plot?” And then you
can kindly respond, “Maybe. I use the
Bible. Matthew 25.” To make it sink in you could then show them
this minute and a half video. (Show the
second video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6uJfJycbFA
Are we just pretending?
Christianity is not about complexity.
It is about courage. And this
congregation is full of courage. And it
is time we stopped playing small and pretending as if those who can quote
chapter and verse much better are the only spiritual beings in town. I have placed out in the narthex the Matthew
25 pledge Sojourners is asking all of
us to sign. It reads thusly,
I pledge to protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus.
In
America right now, too many people are feeling very afraid because of the new
political realities in Washington, D.C., both because of the political rhetoric
of this election campaign and how they were targeted as groups of people. In
response, the message of Matthew 25 is rising up at the grassroots level and
among faith leaders — within faith communities, congregations, denominations,
seminaries, and faith-based organizations. It's the Gospel text where Jesus
says: How you treat the most vulnerable is how you treat me.
People
are feeling a need to act. Matthew 25 can lead us in what to do. And so we've
created the Matthew 25 Pledge — just one sentence which simply says: I pledge
to protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus. Clearly, many
people in America are feeling quite vulnerable right now, but the Matthew 25
Movement — a broad collection of national faith-based groups, grassroots
activists, heads of denominations and more — is focusing on three groups of
people who are especially at risk under a Trump administration. So here we
offer our starting point, pledging to:
- Support undocumented immigrants
threatened with mass deportation; and advocate on behalf of refugees who
are being banned from coming to America.
- Stand with African Americans
and other people of color threatened by racial policing.
- In line with our commitment to
religious liberty we will defend the lives and religious liberty of
Muslims, threatened with “banning,” monitoring, and even registration.[5]
This is the beginning. This is where to start now. But if and
when other groups of people are targeted by government decisions or by hateful
cultural responses, we who sign the Matthew 25 Pledge will also seek to
surround and protect them. Rather than just watching, grieving, and feeling
sorry for what is happening to the most marginalized, who are named in the 25th
chapter of Matthew, we can pledge to join together in circles of support in the
name of Jesus.
You can merely sign the pledge on the clipboard I have in
the lobby. Or you can include your email
and area code so that Sojourners may
put you on a notification list for toolkits, actions, and how the movement is
seeking to live out what it means to be Christian.
It is the 500th anniversary of the
Reformation. Christians, even Roman
Catholics, are celebrating. But the
question I leave for you all today is this: “What mantra, what koan, what
salient question will you nail on the church door to proclaim your faith in
courage and conviction? As you do so,
you give courage for others to do so as well.
The time has come for the tortoise shell to crack open and reveal the
new life and ministry seeking to be expressed.
Could it be that this church is that expression? Could it be?
Amen.
[1] Tom Roberts, “The
inevitable, necessary crisis,” National
Catholic Reporter, May 13, 2009, https://www.ncronline.org/news/parish/inevitable-necessary-crisis.
[3] Ken Sehested, “Signs of
the Times: The Protestant Reformation,” Prayer and Politiks, October 17,
2017. http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/signs-of-the-times/2017/10/18/news-views-notes-and-quotes.2882429.
[4] I think the success of the
Bernie Sanders campaign, which relied on central, identifiable messages
repeated again and again, reflected how important that can be to be heard in
the public markeptplace.
[5] http://matthew25pledge.com/
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