Sermon Series: Responding to the Religious Right, September 10, "Frames invite worldview"

Responses to Violent Christendom 1 BFC 2017

Hosea 11:3-4; 1 Thessalonians 27b-8

September 10, 2017

          I am the area facilitator for a nascent group of progressive faith community leaders in Montana called Montana Interfaith Network.  You may or may not be surprised that one of the great participants in our local group is Uri Barnea, a retired rabbi, who, when we asked for what we should be doing in our community, pointed to Not In Our Town as the historical example.  Now if I remember correctly, Not In Our Town began with a congregational member of a historical downtown church that courageously believed something had to be done and someone had to get out and lead.  Maybe you know the place?

          I was part of a leadership team that worked on Montana Interfaith Network’s mission statement in Helena this summer: “Empowered by the wisdom of our traditions, we will name injustice, act in love, affirm the interrelatedness of all creation, and advocate for the dignity, sanctity, and equality of every human being.  We seek to be a progressive faith community in Montana.” While I bowed to the collective wisdom of the group, I strongly disagreed with the language of this mission statement believing it to carry the same old markers that have identified progressives in the same “one-off” work that has us as interlopers in a framework already provided for us.  I’ll explain what I mean by that later in the sermon but, for now, I would sum that up by saying that imperial injustice has long dictated the message to conquered nations and vulnerable populations that their rule is timeless, pre-existent, everlasting, and inevitable.  In response, the Biblical narrative referenced God as the “Ancient of Days” and pre-existing Wisdom as the architect of All Creation, saying that God had been around far longer than your puny empire and would be around long after your empire had fallen. 

In the same manner, God in Christ was referenced as the pre-existent “Wisdom” and “Word”, as the Alpha and Omega.  It was a way of saying, “You, your empire, may think you hold the upper hand, carry the day, will have us begging for your bread and circuses, inflated crowd sizes and ongoing campaign speeches.  We say, ‘Not so much.  We are not waiting around for you to come correct.  God is good.  All the time.  And God’s purposes are being worked out from below, like an ever-flowing stream, like a persistent widow, like a pervasive weed.  The Empire of God is already formed and being formed.  And it is located nowhere near your ziggurat, pyramid, palace, or tower.  God has been and will be around far longer than you.  So.  Not . . . so . . . much.”

          Travis McAdam, an expert on the Religious Right working at the Montana Human Rights Network, presented at our first local Montana Interfaith Network meeting.  Just a little advertising, Walt Gulick is working with Travis to iron out dates so that he can make his presentation here at this church during Adult Forum over the course of two separate Sundays.  In his presentation to our group, Travis’s basic conclusion was that the Religious Right considers itself a political organization.  In other words, they not only believe their faith directly informs the activities, actions, and policies of government.  The religious right also believes their faith should have something to say about the collective power involved in government.  Generally, I do not object to that and would hope that progressive faith communities seek that as well.  Where I have strong disagreement with the Religious Right, is that, to the exclusion of all others,  believe it should hold and dominate government—even to the exclusion of all others, including the most vulnerable, and even if that power means violently suppressing not only the viewpoint but the collective presence and personhood of others.  As popular evangelical pastor D. James Kennedy once said, “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost.  As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government…in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”[1]

In contrast to Biblical faith as understood through the lens of Christ, the Religious Right does not seek to learn or be transformed by others, welcome the stranger, and protect the most vulnerable.  Instead, their faith is consistently valued based on whiteness, domination, and violence.  Right not only aspires to might.  Might implies . . . you must be right.  That is an ancient story held by Pharaoh and Caesar . . . not by the God of Moses, Miriam, Mary, and Christ.

          Right not only aspires to might.  Might implies you must be right.  In the end, I think that is a shallow and empty value system that cannot possibly describe the width and breadth of God’s being and love and God’s use of power from below and with.  It certainly does not describe a Middle Eastern Jewish peasant who lived on the conquered margins of society and who formed his community with a band of ne’er-do-wells.  He was humiliated, tortured, and crucified by imperial order, and took for himself one of the strongest anti-imperial titles used in Scripture—the Human One, who Daniel from the lion’s den saw coming with the Ancient-Of-Days to oppose the everlasting rule of empires.[2]  The Religious Right seeks Caesar’s throne.  Jesus of Nazareth sought a rule and way of being that was wholly different from that of Caesar.  From an ancient Christian hymn, as recorded by the apostle Paul, “Christ, by the very nature of God, did not count equality with God as something to be grasped or exploited, but emptied and humbled himself . . .”[3]  That is the kind of thing you should worship, Paul declared.  That is where you should put your loyalty and allegiance.  Not with Caesar, who maneuvers and manipulates, dominates and exploits to collect his titles and towers, so that others might patronize and laud him. 

          I believe Travis is on target.  The Religious Right sees itself as a political organization.  Even more so, I believe the political far right is using the mythology of the Religious Right to carry the country.  George Lakoff, professor of linguistics, made this so clear to me when I read his thin paperback, Don’t Think of an Elephant some years back.  The title of Lakoff’s book comes from his Linguistics 101 class when he begins the year by talking about how language frames work.  He starts off by asking his students, “Don’t think of an elephant.”  Of course, just by calling forward such a provocative image as an elephant, all his students can think about is floppy ears, maybe even Dumbo flying, and a large trunk lifted to trumpet.  He uses the negative within a frame that promotes just the opposite. 

          The political right has done an effective job with providing frames for the issues that confront us as communities and as a nation.  These frames invite us into a worldview such that we cannot use these frames and offer an alternative worldview because we are forever on the defensive or in retreat trying to develop ideas or encourage action that has already been decided by a worldview evoked by the frames.

Lakoff uses the example of taxes.  What person running for political office has recently lifted up the good of taxes—how they support infrastructure in roads and bridges, provide for our public schools, and make possible widespread programs to care for the most vulnerable among us—the poor and even care, protection, and relief for hurricane victims?  Frames are so well done, that the only way someone running for political office can talk about taxes, Lakoff believes, is to talk about tax relief.[4]   Taxes have been so framed as evil that we cannot possibly have someone talk about them as positive or good. 

          Stating an ancient truth, Christian feminist theologian Sallie McFague stated that all Christians are theologians who develop a theology.  We all do—consciously or unconsciously.  We develop metaphors for God and ourselves that say who we think God is and who we think we are.  “[These metaphors] control many of our decisions and actions; we rely on them as justification for what we do personally and as a nation.”[5] 

So what is that theology, those metaphors, those frames which give the Religious Right such power in the public square, metaphors or frames which help them make sense of the world, evoke a larger worldview, and entreat others to join them?  And what might progressive Christians use in response to counter?  What are those metaphors or frames we want to use to evoke a wider world view?

Lakoff believes that we make sense of our nation by using the metaphor or frame of “family” to describe who we are and how we move in the world.  We use terms like the Founding Fathers and the Daughters of the American Revolution, family terms, to make sense of who we are as a nation.  So, Lakoff asked, if there are two different understandings of nation, what might be the two different understandings of family used for our national worldview?

Lakoff believes one frame or metaphor is the strict father disciplinarian.  After consulting with colleagues who were right wing conservatives, Lakoff learned who is considered the teacher of the strict disciplinarian metaphor.  Lakoff believes it is Dr. James Dobson, the historical evangelical Christian leader out of Colorado Springs who long hosted the radio program Focus on the Family, still airing on 2,000 stations nation-wide.  Dobson’s books and pamphlets are so popular that he has his own zip code. 

Here are the assumptions found within the strict father metaphor as explained by Dr. James Dobson:

The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right.  Therefore, they have to be made good.

What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:

• Protect the family in the dangerous world,

• Support the family in the difficult world, and

• Teach his children right from wrong. [6]

Lakoff goes on to explain that what children are to learn within this frame, particularly, is obedience and that obedience leads to a self-discipline in pursuing their own self-interest.  So if your wealth and prosperity grows, you must have had the proper obedience and self-discipline in pursuing your own self-interest.  If, however, wealth and prosperity do not come your way, best bet is that you require more discipline, properly administered by a strict father figure.  There is no place for pity or emotion.  Tough love demands that you dare to discipline. 

          If you are a person who has materially prospered in wealth and power, this then is evidence of not only your discipline but your moral rectitude.  Even if you are a habitual liar or show a lack of compassion, because you prosper materially, this worldview suggests that your wealth still makes you a fundamentally moral person.  Lakoff goes on to extend the metaphor to suggest that this strict father is who we are as a nation in our relationship with other nations.  We are the moral authority.  We decide.  Other underdeveloped nations are like children who require discipline.[7]

          What Lakoff does not state in his talk about the strict father, disciplinarian metaphor is that that whether be conservative or progressive politically or spiritually, that metaphor is in all of us.  It is insidious in the way that it can sometimes unseat our confidence, making us all think that we somehow do not measure up or wonder why we are not more self-disciplined enough to be successful and inherit material wealth. 

What we all need to hear is, as part of the progressive faith community is that almost all the sacred texts of the major faiths is that material prosperity is often viewed with suspicion and critique.  There is a tradition within Scripture that suggests that if you are wealthy in the midst of poverty and deprivation, it is assumed that you gained your wealthy through avarice, greed, and violence.[8] 

          By contrast, the other model or frame is the nurturant parent model.  Here are some of the assumptions Lakoff mentions in that model:

Both parents are equally responsible for raising the children. The assumption is that children are born good and can be made better. The

world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents ’job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others.

What does nurturance mean? It means two things: empathy and

responsibility. If you have a child, you have to know what every cry

means. You have to know when the child is hungry, when he needs a

diaper change, when he is having nightmares. And you have a responsibility—you have to take care of this child. Since you cannot take care of someone else if you are not taking care of yourself, you have to take

care of yourself enough to be able to take care of the child.

All this is not easy. Anyone who has ever raised a child knows that

this is hard. You have to be strong. You have to work hard at it. You

have to be very competent. You have to know a lot.[9]

Included in the values of the nurturant parent model are freedom, opportunity, fairness, openness, two-way communication, community building, and trust. 

          So if you have friends or family members who seem to be living in a different world when it comes to talking about faith and politics, you probably are living in very different worlds.  What too often happens, is that any discussion or debate you have with people from the Religious Right is that you end up trying to engage them within their own frames.  They have Bible verses.  They have pamphlets.  They have simple, succinct ways of explaining their faith that make it seem impossible to engage in any meaningful discussion. 

          Lakoff has many recommendations moving forward.  I want to focus on one.  Knowing that it is the Religious Right which defines the frames and metaphors and therefore often the values for the political right, we must get better to decide where we have commonalities with our sisters and brothers but then also get better about talking about our values and providing frames and metaphors for our faith.  Too often, we left more conservative faith traditions because we knew it was harmful to us, didn’t hold logic for us, or, through our intuition, knew there was something missing.  But for many of us, God is still the strict, disciplinarian Father.  We have not moved on from the God of our childhood.  Many of us refuse to process, unwilling to talk about God or do the hard work of developing a simple yet complex understanding we might articulate to those who would disagree with us.  We just know we don’t want that!  Over there! 

When we do speak only in the negative, we cede the dialog to people who hear the gospel of Dr. James Dobson blasted out to them day after day after day.  We must be the theologians Sallie McFague imagines us to be.  Those frames, that language, can create worldview and eventually world.  Over the next few weeks I hope I can push hard enough to help us all engage in difficult arguments and conversation so that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are not the only ones speaking their values into the public square.  You see, I imagined the mission statement of Montana Interfaith Network might say something like, “Nurtured by stories, traditions, and parables that are deeper and longer than any flag or nation, we will walk side by side with the most vulnerable to learn together what love looks like in public.  Nourished by the good earth, in thanksgiving we will play, celebrate, and delight and return its goodness so that creation and all of humankind might flourish.”  

That’s my feeble attempt.  I need yours.  We need ours.  We need poetic, profound, and lyrically beautiful ways to state our faith so that we invite people through our frames and metaphors to dialog, action, and community that is beyond self-interested wealth and violent action passed off as discipline.  It matters.  As Civil Rights legend, Ruby Sales said a little over a year ago, there is a problem among white churches and white folks that is creating pain for so many people right now.[10]  When the depth of your theology is rooted in whiteness, and domination, and violence, your theology is too shallow to cover your pain.  Your identity is too shallow and your God is too small.  And that shallowness and smallness is showing as people try to make believe that if they repeat that hate and fear over and over again, hold it in a vice-grip and shout down or threaten violence to whoever disagrees, it will somehow become more broad and expansive than it is.  The God who nurtures and nourishes us is lost in an attempt to gain control and dominion over everything.

  Over the next few weeks, I hope you will help us all develop frames and metaphors that reflect the incredible lives I experience in all of you.  If we have fun doing it, who could resist us?  Really.  Who could resist us?  And as we join hands to make this so, we reach out and find that God’s hand enfolds around ours to piece together the universe.  For the arc of the moral universe is long, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, but it bends toward justice.  Praise God.  Amen. 

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[1] Travis McAdam, “Fusing Faith and Politics:  The Origins of the Religious Right,” Slide 9. 

[2] Daniel 7:13ff

[3] Philippians 2:6ff

[4] George Lakoff, Don’t Think of An Elephant:  Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—the Essential Guide for Progressives (White River Green, Vermont:  Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), p. 4.

[5] Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology:  God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2008), p. 5.

[6] Lakoff, “Don’t Think,” pp. 7-8. 

[7] Ibid, p. 11.

[8] Jeremiah 5:27-29.  The prophet Jeremiah’s critique makes it clear throughout that he sees the accumulation of wealth resulting in injustice to the poor.

[9] Lakoff, “Don’t think,” p. 12.

[10] “Where does it hurt?:  Ruby Sales conversation with Krista Tippett,” OnBeing, September 15, 2016.  https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/.  

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 23, 2017, "What if we're the weeds?"

A Proper 11 16 Ord BFC 2017

Matthew 13:24-30

July 23, 2017

          Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie comes from 39 generations of rabbis and leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City, in keeping with the Wilderness Story in the Jewish tradition. Pop-up and Wilderness convey faith as a transient journey—with evolving understandings and truths. The identity statement of this pop-up synagogue is:  “everybody-friendly,  artist-driven, God optional.”  Rabbi Lau-Lavie arrived at this identity statement, coming back to his Jewish tradition, after having moved away from it in his teens.  During those teen years, Rabbi Lau-Lavie believed that enjoying storytelling, theater, and drag, places where he found meaning as a gay man, were somehow not a part of what it meant to be a Jew.    As he struggled with Jewish teaching during his early 20s, he began to ask himself questions about “what if?.”  What if there’s something else here?  What if he, as a gay man who loved to dress in drag was not an abomination?  What if it’s not either/or, good/bad, abomination/sanctity.  He went on to say,

What I’m feeling doesn’t feel unholy, it doesn’t feel messy, and so maybe the Torah is not right. And I remember feeling, at some point, like there was this thing — thinking, “OK, one day I’m going to die and I’m going to stand before the Throne of Glory, and there’s this one option where God’s going to look at me and say, ‘Why didn’t you follow all the rules that all the rabbis told you? Eh. You go to hell.’ Or the other option was that God’s going to look at me and burst out laughing and say, ‘Wow, why didn’t you follow your heart?'” And I thought that that latter option is much worse.[1]

What if?  What if following our heart, charting an authentic path, however strange is the desired will of God?  What if God doesn’t think in these dualities?  What if God’s dream for communities is much more expansive than our own?  That “we” is more expansive than what the culture tells us?  Rabbi Lau-Lavie believes his holy work is about reinventing the meaning of “we.”  As in you and I.  In this together.  We. 

Last week I dared to suggest that we might critique Scripture in its final form, that the writer of Matthew added a moral to the interpretation of a wisdom saying of Jesus that was never the intent of the original saying.  As Jesus moved from community to community to teach his wisdom, share his stories, and present his parables, we can imagine that he refined and shaped them in such a way that sharpened their point and had meaning for a particular location.  Part of the oral tradition is the continuing development of presentation, wording, and pattern with each new opportunity.  How do people react?  What do people remember?  Is the truth told yesterday one that needs to be pushed today?  Jesus would have been about this task.

            Though the written tradition can have its own development and direction as people interpret and re-interpret, the written tradition also locks in words, phrases, and patterns.  For example, the author of Matthew very often includes a phrase used also by the author of Luke and included in the book of Revelation, “For those who have ears, let them hear.”  That little phrase, used by Matthew as a moralizer, asks the reader to pay attention and can be seen as a little slight to the reader or listener who just doesn’t get it.  Don’t get it? (said with snarky tone) Well, I guess you just don’t have ears to hear?

            Today, we once again have before us a parable that the author of Matthew interprets to be one of strong judgment and vindictiveness.  That strong judgment and vindictiveness might not be found in the parable itself, but Matthew has bracketed this parable with the telling of the sower of the seed parable and the interpretation of the sower of the seed parable, which, as I stated last week, comes with a strong statement of judgment against seeds which are strewn in various kinds of soil.  Though the Gospel of Thomas parable is much more similar to Matthew’s this time around, it does not come with the sower of the seed and its meaning bracketed around it. 

            From its context, I believe Matthew interprets this parable to mean, “We are the good seed and the children of the Reign of God.  They are the weeds and the children of the Evil One.”  Within this context, the parable is no longer a parable.  Parables are meant to take what we know, invite us into conventional understandings, and then totally flip or change our perspective, to open up new ways of thinking or acting in the world.  Telling you and me that we are good and those people who are not like us are bad is not a unique way of seeing the world.  Using an “us” and “them” perspective, as Matthew does to put this parable in context, does not flip, change, or transform the perspective.  It is very human nature to suggest that we are the “in crowd”, and you, and your people, well, you are not only the “out crowd” but probably the people who will be gathered and burned.  

            “We are the children of God” and “they are the children of the devil.”  I believe Matthew wants us to use this teaching as an insider game that becomes a weapon against others.  Matthew suggests, “Jesus is on our side.  We root for Jesus.”

            So this is a scary theology for me, scary because it sure seems like the theology I also hear coming from many pulpits and churches today.  We are the good people, and everything else outside the church is evil.  We don’t want to be the weeds.  All we have to do is round up the bad people, institute morality, and all will be right in the old barnyard once again.  Reading this text, remembering the text we had for last week, we can certainly see how the tradition of God as judge was based in holy text. 

There is something that tells us that God as judge is a little off here though.  The one who burns the weeds in the end is the person who owns the land, runs the farm, the plantation owner.  That is not somebody that rural peasants would have identified as good, right, or just—certainly would not see the plantation owner as Divine. 

So I would suggest that there is a wider context that follows this parable, might follow a natural pairing Jesus used as he was teaching along the sea, speaking to these rural folk.  In this parable, we get a clue that this is Matthew’s interpretation because Jesus has the plantation owner talking about burning the weeds.  Jesus’s community and following would not have been sympathetic to plantation owners.  They would have been seen as the very people who had created suffering and pain for a great many people, leveraging debt to buy up land and drive the poor and very poor into suffering.

Further in Matthew, Jesus continues with his Empire parables to say that the Empire of Heaven is like a mustard seed added to the garden or leaven added to the loaf.  We have long heard those passages understood as something small that grows into something large.  But hear this, mustard was a weed that would take over the whole garden.  The Kingdom of God is like a weed?  Unlike today, leaven was considered unclean[2] and unleavened was a strong metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for all that was sacred and holy.[3]   Leaven was kept separate in a kosher kitchen for it could change the dynamics of bread and make all that was sacred profane.[4]  The Kingdom of God is unclean? 

Now remember to whom Jesus is offering these metaphors that turn the world upside down, that open up another world view, these parables.  These people are the poor and destitute, thought of as the lazy, good-for-nothing, corrupt masses.  They are the leeches who drain Rome of its riches.   These are people who have heard time after time that they are the weeds and they are unclean.  And now these people hear that the very home of God, the Empire of Heaven, is among the weeds and the unclean.  One of the most widely known scholars on the parables, Bernard Brandon Scott, suggests that the association Jesus is making is so strong that Jesus is effectively saying that God cavorts among weeds and the unclean or the very self of God is unclean and weed-like.[5]  God is a weed?  God is unclean?

Can we even imagine what good news this was to people who had heard the world, call them unclean and weeds time after time?  Can we hear this good news for our world?

Jesus knew how he and his community were perceived by others.  He offered real life lessons of the width and breadth of God’s arms and how far they extended that might scare off any well-meaning church.  For Jesus suggested that once weeds are welcome in the garden, the very nature of harvesting is changed. 

Merriam-Webster defines a weed as “a plant that is not valued where it is growing”[6] and Dictionary.com defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild.”[7]  As I related in the worship service that began Billings Sanctuary Rising, a weed is a weed because we call it such.  Is a dandelion a weed or a burst of sunshine which can be used for medicinal and culinary purposes?

In 21^st Century North America, these parables can really get under our skin.  So much of our culture preaches success, working to identify ourselves as good seed from good stock. 

Jesus lived in a time when the political, religious, and economic morality codes were being clearly defined by those in power to stay in power.  If someone came along to blur those codes, to call the legitimacy of claims as to what brought life and who was an insider into question, that person would be considered mighty dangerous by the authorities.  And what if Jesus came from a community and created a community which blurred those lines, which called people’s claims to being the good seed into question. 

What if, what if Jesus comes at night to plant weed seed?  Maybe he knows that he and the people gathered round him are the enemy?  Better yet, what if God is our secret planter of weed seed? 

For that reason, I think this parable says, at the very least, that those who have made it their job, their vocation in the world, to determine who is good seed and weed to exclude and diminish, these people have not chosen a holy vocation.  To say, “I know who is seed and who is weed,” is to say, in effect: “I know how God sees you.  More than that, I know who is favored by God and who is not.”  The parable says that we cannot claim to know the heart and mind of God when we declare others a wicked part of the garden.

The Jesus community embraced the least and the last, the poor and outcast, and recognized that the world changed when they did so.  The garden could not grow as before because a small mustard seed grew as a weed to become the biggest plant in the garden.  A woman has secretly placed leaven in the bread and changed and transformed its very nature.  The Jesus community took people who were defined as an abomination, unholy, shameful, impure, unclean, and morally corrupt and called them the Children of God.  Distinctions were blurred such that the old categories did not work. 

So the good news I have for you all today is that you do not have to believe what the world calls you.  If you are called weed, mustard seed, or leaven, you can find a place in the Empire of Heaven.  Remember that the character of weeds is not so much that they are dominant as pervasive and persistent.  Remember that our God and our God’s activity are defined by such unholy, unclean, and profane metaphors. 

Rabbi Lau-Lavie came back to find storytelling and theater deep within the Jewish tradition and his drag character, Hadassah Gross, widow of a Jewish rabbi, opened up a point of humor for his rabbi father to come to terms with his son coming out.  When asked what he thought of Hadassah Gross, Amichai’s father replied, “She has nice legs.”  I think some of what the parable is teaching, as Rabbi Lau-Lavie is that people and concepts evolve, that we must be patient, that we aren’t there, and we should not be out pretending like we know who is truly a weed and who is just not evolved.  Or, maybe it is we who need to evolve.  He counsels:

So we need to read some of those sacred words as metaphor, as bygone models, as invitations for creativity, and for sort of the second meaning and the second naïveté here that still retrieves this text as useful and these narratives as holy, not as literal.  I think that is, of course, the conversation between so many of us of different religions who are struggling with our brothers and sisters who choose to read things literally and speak for a Biblical truth that is unalterable, where we — some of us think that there is room here for creativity, for sacred metaphor and change. And we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet for those days of dignity and equality and radical justice . . .[8]

Parables open us up to a new way of thinking and being in the world.  In God’s garden, those emerging as seed and weed from the earth do so alongside each other.  And whose to say which is which?  Whose to say?  What if those considered to be an abomination are just evolving?  Or maybe we need to evolve? So that we can move to a more profound “we.”  What if God’s idea of community is that much more expansive?  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[1] Krista Tippett, “First Aid for Spiritual Seekers:  Conversation with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie,” OnBeing, July 13, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/amichai-lau-lavie-first-aid-for-spiritual-seekers/.  Rabbi Lau-Lavie tells the great Talmudic parable as a way of recognizing that we are all in this together: “[A] ship that is sailing, and there are many cabins. And one of the people in the cabins on the lower floor decides to dig a hole in the floor of his cabin, and does so, and sure enough, the ship begins to sink. And the other passengers suddenly discover what’s going on and see this guy with a hole in the floor. And they say, ‘What are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s my cabin. I paid for it.’ And down goes the ship.”  We’re all on the ship together.

[2]“[T]he process of leavening  frequently stood as a metaphor for moral corruption.”  Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, CA:  Polebridge Press, 2001), p.25. “In the Hebrew Bible, unleavened bread is a powerful symbol of the holy.” 

[3] Ibid, p. 26.

[4] Pliny the Elder (23 CE to 29 CE), a chronicler of history and nature was the author of thirty-seven books of Natural History.  He wrote, “It [mustard] grows entirely wild, thought it is improved by being transplanted:  but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” (Natural History, 29:54.170 [LOEB]) quoted from Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, CA:  Polebridge Press, 2001), p. 37.

[5] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable:  A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus  (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1989), p. 308.  Since Brandon was Rev. Tracy Heilman’s New Testament Professor, I have heard him elaborate on this in lectures and informal conversations. 

[6] www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weed

[7] dictionary.reference.com/browse/weed    

[8] Tippett, OnBeing.

Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, June 4, 2017, "The politics of pluralism"

A Pentecost OL BFC 2017

Genesis 11:1-10; Acts 2:1-21

June 4, 2017

            The 31^st 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 32^nd 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 19^th 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 19^th 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. 

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[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.