The Hypocrisy of American Exceptionalism

On December 9, 2011, President Obama issued a Presidential Proclamation on the occasion of the anniversary of the United Nation’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  That proclamation is an appalling example of the blatant hypocrisy of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States of America is not bound by international law, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, and that whatever the United States does is good because it is the United States that does it.  In that Proclamation Obama said:  “All people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression, and discrimination….”  I will not quarrel here with Obama’s statement that all people should live free from discrimination, but I cannot see how Obama can claim to support the proposition that all people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, and oppression with a straight face. 

There simply is no doubt that the Obama Administration has engaged in “extrajudicial killing.”  The most famous case is Osama bin Ladn.  President Obama sent a highly trained unit of Navy SEALS into Pakistan under orders to kill bin Ladn.  Not to capture him.  Not to bring him before a court where justice could be done.  To kill him.  Yes, bin Ladn was a terrorist.  Yes, the United States had legitimate claims against bin Ladn; and bin Ladn surely would have been convicted of crimes against humanity and of murder in almost any court in the world.  The point is not that bin Ladn wasn’t a criminal.  He was, of the worst sort.  The point is that President Obama chose to deal with him by using “extrajudicial killing,” a violation of internationally recognized human rights that Obama claims to condemn in his recent Proclamation.

Some might argue that bin Ladn was not a citizen of the United States, was a declared enemy of the United States, and that Obama’s action against him was therefore not “extrajudicial killing” within the meaning of Obama’s Proclamation but an act of war.  Assassination has always been distinguished from war, but we need not argue this point for our claim that Obama is a hypocrite to stand.  President Obama has also ordered executions that clearly constitute extrajudicial killing.  He has order the extrajudicial killing even of American citizens, people we have always believed were entitled to the Constitutional protection of due process of law.  He ordered the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samr Kahn, both of them American citizens.  They may both have been guilty of crimes under American and international law, but that is not the point.  The point is that they were never convicted of anything through any judicial process, American, international, or otherwise.  Their killing by forces of the United States under the command of President Obama was therefore precisely extrajudicial killing.

Then there is the question of torture.  We know that operatives of the United States government, including members of the armed forces, committed numerous acts of torture under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.  Cheney, who should be on trial in The Hague for having authorized torture but never will be because he is an American, continues to advocate and justify the use of interrogation measures that have been branded as torture and therefore banned under international law for a very long time.  Yet the use of torture by representatives of the United States has not ended under President Obama.  It seems well-established that Americans have committed acts of torture against detainees in Afghanistan.  It seems probable that they have continued to commit acts of torture against detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay.  Obama says all people should be free from torture while he presides over a government that commits acts of torture and that, even if it did not, has done nothing to bring to justice people in the prior administration who advocated, authorized, ordered, and committed such acts.

Then we come to oppression.  Oppression is a vague term, and it is not clear what Obama means by it in his Proclamation.  Yet it seems clear that the United States oppresses the people it holds in limitless detention at Guantanamo Bay, many without trial, some after they have been cleared for release.  Our illegal invasion of Iraq resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of Iraqi people, an number that easily runs to tens upon tens of thousands at least.  If our actions that led to all of those deaths don’t constitute oppression of the Iraqi people, I don’t know what does.  Yes, President Obama has now declared the Iraq war to be over, but he had been president for close to three years before that declaration.  How many Iraqis died on his watch?  We have no way of knowing, but it cannot be a small number.  Obama continued the American military oppression of Iraq for many months after he became president.
Beyond that reality it is undeniable that the United States has long supported oppressive regimes in South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere when we have thought that those regimes acted more in our interests than would their democratically-inclined opponents, opponents we usually branded as socialists or Communists and did everything we could to defeat.  We continue to support the horribly oppressive regime in Saudi Arabia.  (After all, it sits atop a lot of oil.)  We supported the brutally oppressive Mubarak regime in Egypt until it became clear that that regime would not survive the awakened indignation of the Egyptian people.  The United States government cannot claim to have opposed oppression without engaging in an transparent act of hypocrisy.

There is only one possible conclusion from these facts.  When Obama says that “all people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression…,”  he means that all people should live free from those violations of their human rights unless those violations are committed by the United States of America.  He can’t possibly mean anything else given his well-documented actions as President of the United States.  Yet of course he doesn’t issue a proclamation that expresses that meaning.  He issues one with a blanket condemnation of human rights violations.  Because he doesn’t issue a proclamation that says what he really means, that reflects the reality of American policy and actions,  he adds hypocrisy to his long list of wrongful actions. 

Obama campaigned on a promise of “change we can believe in,” but he has embraced American exceptionalism with at least as much enthusiasm as his predecessor; and every bit as much as his predecessor he is a hypocrite about it.  American exceptionalism is always hypocritical.  It has to be because the American people expect their leaders to claim to be champions of peace, justice, democracy, and human rights regardless of the reality of their actions.  That we are always champions of peace, justice, democracy, and human rights is one of the great American myths, one of the stories we tell to connect the people to the policies of the government.  Some Americans see that our actions belie our idealistic words and that they have done so for a very long time, but most do not.  Some Americans can see through the hypocrisy of things like Obama’s recent proclamation, but most cannot.  Until more of us can and do see through the hypocrisy, American exceptionalism will continue to be the controlling doctrine of American policy.  Until more of us can and do see through the hypocrisy our country will continue at every turn to violate the human rights for which we claim to stand.  

Advent Sermon Series on Mary, Part 1

In 2008 I gave an Advent sermon series on Mary, the mother of Jesus.  I think they're worth posting here, as they re-imagine Mary in some non-traditional ways.  Here's Part 1.  Parts 2 and 3 appear immediately below in this blog.

Ave Maria, Part 1

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 30, 2008

Scripture:
Matthew 1:18-25 Luke 1:26-38

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the things that strikes many of us who are life-long Protestants as odd and, frankly, unattractive about both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox versions of Christianity is their devotion to the Virgin Mary. They call it “Mariology.” They say they “venerate” Mary, they don’t worship her; but to many of us it sure looks a lot like Mariolatry, that is, it looks like they worship her as God when they should be worshipping Jesus Christ and the God we know in and through Jesus Christ. Now, I certainly don’t want to turn us into a bunch of Mary worshippers. Far from it. I do think, however, that we Protestants are in some ways spiritually impoverished by our total rejection of Mary as a figure of the faith. I think that it is appropriate for us to ask: Are there important things that we can learn from the Biblical accounts of Mary? I believe that it is appropriate in this Advent season that begins today for us to ask in particular whether there are important things that we can take from the stories about Mary in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. There aren’t very many of those stories. Only Matthew and Luke have any stories about Jesus’ birth at all, and those Gospel accounts contain only a few passages that deal with Mary. Yet Christianity is so spiritually impoverished by its one-sided maleness that I think it will do us good during Advent this year to take a look at those few passages, to look to see what the woman Mary of Nazareth has to say to us. So in my three Advent sermons this year—three not four because one of the Sundays will be devoted to our children’s Christmas play—I will consider Mary. Today we begin with the two Gospel accounts of what the Christian tradition calls “the Annunciation,” the announcement by an angel from God that Mary will bear a child who is to be the Son of God.

We heard those two passages in our Scripture readings this morning. In the first of them, the one from Matthew, Mary is mentioned briefly, and only once. The striking thing about this passage is that although it mentions Mary, it really isn’t about Mary at all. It is about Joseph. The only thing Matthew says about Mary is that “she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.” Matthew then switches his attention immediately from Mary to Joseph and the problem his miraculously pregnant fiancée created for him.  Matthew says he was going to send her away, presumably because at first he thought she had gotten pregnant through an act of infidelity with another man, but then comes what amounts to the Annunciation in Matthew’s account. Here, however, the Annunciation, the heavenly announcement that Mary would bear a divine child, comes not to Mary but to Joseph. Here it is not Mary but Joseph who does as the Lord asks when he decides to marry Mary after all. In Matthew’s version of the story, Mary is very nearly absent. She has no voice. She is not consulted. She is given no choice. Matthew’s Mary has nothing to teach us because she is invisible. Matthew’s version of the Annunciation is a pure reflection of the sexism, the patriarchy and the male-centeredness, of both the Jewish culture and the Greek culture of the first century CE.

Compare that sexist non-image of Mary to the Mary we see in Luke’s story of the Annunciation. In Matthew Mary is invisible. In Luke she is the chief character in the story. Here the archangel Gabriel comes not to Joseph but to Mary, and he comes before Jesus’ miraculous conception, not after it as in Matthew. As Luke tells the story, Gabriel’s words to Mary sound like a declaration, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son.” Yet when we read the whole story it becomes clear that Gabriel is making a request to Mary, or perhaps better, an offer to Mary, not issuing a command to her. We know that because Luke ends his Annunciation story with Mary giving her consent: “Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’” Mary’s consent wouldn’t be required if Gabriel’s’ words were a command rather than a request.

What a contrast to Matthew’s silent, invisible Mary! Right from the beginning we see that Mary is not a passive object as in Matthew but an active character in the story. When Gabriel greets her she has a very human reaction. She was “much perplexed and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” She doesn’t run to ask Joseph about it. This Mary does her own thinking and her own discerning. This Mary has moral autonomy in her own right. She makes her own decisions. She has the autonomy, the freedom, to say no even to God. She asks questions: “How can this be?” And in the end she says yes, let it be with me as you say. This Mary is woman as fully equal, fully autonomous human being. Thanks be to God!

And that yes of Mary’s is very interesting. The Christian tradition has always used it to portray Mary as meek and mild, faithful and obedient, submissive even to the will of God—and the Christian tradition has, until very recently, seen God almost exclusively as male. So Mary becomes a symbol of the submission of women to men. To me, however, Mary’s yes to Gabriel’s proposal is at least ambiguous. The traditional understanding of it as indicating a meek and obedient spirit is certainly one way to read it. Interpreted this way Mary becomes a model of faithful obedience and compliance. But isn’t there another way to look at Mary’s yes? Consider this: Gabriel has just laid on her a whole lot of information about who this child she is being asked to bear would be. He will be great, the Son of the Most High, the ruler over Israel forever. He will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. As far as I know the Christian tradition has never seen Mary this way, but isn’t it possible that Mary thought: Wow! If this child is going to be all that, what an opportunity for me! I would really be somebody if I was the mother of someone like that! Sure, I’ll face some ridicule and scorn as an unwed mother, but what a trade off! I’m all over this! Let’s do it!

Now, that view of Mary is so different from how we’ve been taught to see her that it may be a bit hard to take. Fair enough, but the point remains. Even without that radical interpretation, in Luke’s story of the Annunciation we have a picture of a woman that was absolutely revolutionary for the time and place in and for which it was written. In his Mary Luke gives us a picture of liberated womanhood. In Luke’s Mary we see woman in her full, equal, God-given personhood. She stands in sharp contrast to Matthew’s invisible Mary, to whom something profound has happened but in which she has no voice. Luke’s Mary throws down the gauntlet to the sexism of Luke’s day, and of ours, and says I am a person, a fully equal person capable of thought and insight, fully able to do my own discernment and make my own decisions.

And so it is especially ironic and unfortunate that the Christian tradition has turned her into gentle Mary meek and mild, into the model of woman subordinate to man whose only role is to consent. In its Catholic version Christianity has further deprived her of her full humanity by making her “ever virgin,” saying that she remained a virgin throughout her life, thereby denying the God-given goodness of female sexuality. Our tradition has made her a model of what many dominant men want women to be—compliant, obedient, and non-threatening.

Today I ask you to see her differently. I ask you to see her as woman liberated, self-confident, self-assertive, and self-sufficient. Capable of her own moral decision making. That is woman as God created women to be. That Mary, the Mary of Luke’s Annunciation story freed from its patriarchal interpretation, is a Mary worthy of her son, worthy of her traditional title of Mother of God, and worthy of the God who created her. That is a Mary we can all admire and learn from. Amen.

Advent Sermon Series on Mary, Part 2

Please see the comment at the beginning of Part 1 of this series above.

Ave Maria, Part 2: The Magnificat

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 7, 2008

Scripture:
Luke 1:46-55

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week, in the first sermon of this three part Advent sermon series on Mary of Nazareth, I suggested that we see Mary, the mother of Jesus, not as the meek, mild, obedient woman Christian tradition has turned her into but as a strong, morally autonomous, independent woman who does her own thinking, her own questioning, her own discerning, and her own deciding. It’s a very different way of thinking about her than the Christian tradition has transmitted to us; but then the Christian tradition, as valuable as it is in many respects, has gotten so many things wrong one hardly knows where to start to enumerate them all. It’s distortion of who Mary was is just another example of those errors. Today I want to add another dimension to that revisionist portrait of Mary as liberated woman that I began to paint last week. This new dimension comes from the passage from Luke that we just heard. That passage is known as the Magnificat, because its first word in Latin is Magnificat. The new dimension I want to add is the dimension of Mary as prophet.

The Magnificat begins with lines that can be seen as reinforcing the image of Mary as lowly, humble, and obedient: “My soul magnifies the Lord, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” The traditional interpretation of Mary sees these words as emphasizing Mary’s “lowliness,” a status in which Christian patriarchy has always wanted to keep her. Those lines are there, of course, but it seems to me that we can see the Magnificat as a hymn to Mary’s lowliness only if we ignore everything that comes after them. Mary’s next lines are: “Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me.” These lines fit with the interpretation of the Annunciation that I suggested last week, that in saying yes to God Mary was reaching for the brass ring, claiming her chance for glory, her chance really to be somebody. It just may be that God’s doing great things for her was exactly what Mary was counting on. In any event these lines, like the Annunciation itself, are ambiguous. They don’t necessarily indicate a Mary meek and mild.

Then we come to the part of the Magnificat that really shows a Mary different from the traditional view of her, that shows her as a prophet. She says: “God has shown strength with his arm; God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Now, to understand how these lines make Mary a prophet we have to understand what a Biblical prophet actually is. The common understanding is that a prophet is someone who foresees the future. A much better understanding of the Biblical prophets is that they are people who proclaim God’s truth. In particular, they are people like the great writing prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah who proclaim God’s demand for justice, who say that what God wants from us is not empty worship but lives devoted to justice for the poor and the vulnerable among us.

That’s the kind of prophet Mary is, although the way Luke puts it may not make that fact as clear as it might be. The words he puts in Mary’s mouth are in the past tense. The verses I just quoted consist of three parallel statements each of which begins by saying “God has.” The past tense of the verbs makes it sound like Mary is talking about things God did in the past. Yet it is pretty clear to us that the things Mary mentions God has not done in the past. The proud still have pride in their hearts. The powerful still sit on their thrones, even of those thrones look more like government offices and corporate board rooms than royal palaces. The lowly are still lowly. The rich are still full and the hungry are still hungry. So how are we to understand Mary’s words?

As prophecy, that’s how. Mary here isn’t talking about things God has literally done in the past but about God’s will, God’s desire, God’s dream for the earth. It is a dream of overturned hierarchical structures and justice for the least, the last, and the lost. When we understand Mary’s words this way, we see her as a prophet in the ancient tradition of Amos, Hosea, and Micah. And of her son Jesus, whose proclamation of the Kingdom of God her words foreshadow.

So, is Mary humble? Yes. She attributes all that is happening to her to God not to herself. Is Mary meek and mild? Hardly. She is giving new voice to the prophetic thundering of Amos, with his “let justice roll down like waters;” of Micah, with his “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice;” and of her son Jesus, with his “insofar as you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me.” The tradition doesn’t call her a prophet. It should. In the Magnificat the humble young woman of low estate rises up and joins her voice, loud and strong, to the great prophetic tradition of Israel. With the ancient prophets, and with Jesus Christ himself, she call us to lives of justice and of peace, to work for the coming of the Kingdom and the realization of God’s dream on earth. Praise be to God! Amen.

Advent Sermon Series on Mary, Part 3

Please see the comment at the beginning of Part 1 of this sermon series above.

Ave Maria, Part 3: Mary, Woman of Sorrows

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 14, 2008

Scripture:
Luke 2:25-35

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the first two sermons in this three-part sermon series on Mary of Nazareth I have suggested ways to see Mary that are quite different from the traditional Christian view of her as meek, mild, obedient, and even submissive. I have suggested that we see her as the model of liberated womanhood and as a prophet. There is, however, another way in which the tradition has seen her that I have not yet addressed. In this way of seeing her the tradition has, at least in part, gotten it right. One of the traditional images of Mary is the woman of sorrows. In Latin she’s called the Mater Dolorosa, the Sorrowing Mother. One of the great treasures of western music is Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” set to a Latin text on the Mater Dolorosa. One of the great treasures of western art is Michelangelo’s Pieta, an emotionally wrenching sculpture of Mary cradling the lifeless body of her crucified son Jesus in her arms. Mary is in many ways a model of female humanity. Female humanity is of course full humanity, and full humanity includes the experiences of pain, loss, grief, and death. The Biblical image of Mary includes this aspect of Mary’s humanity in all its fullness and all its pain.

Right at the beginning, right after Jesus' birth, Luke’s account of Mary tells us that the fact that God has greatly blessed her and has lifted her up from her lowliness does not mean that she will be spared these human experiences of grief and loss. Luke makes this point by introducing into his story of the beginning of Jesus’ life a man named Simeon. Simeon first recognizes the infant Jesus as the Messiah. Then he addresses Mary. His words are prophetic and appropriately obscure. He says that the child Jesus is “destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel.” and that through Jesus “the inner thoughts of many will be revealed,” whatever that means. Then Simeon says to Mary “and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

The reference is clear. We know that a sword will pierce the body of Jesus, that he will die a violent and unjust death upon a cross. His violent and unjust death will be a sword through Mary’s heart too. At least some of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion have Mary present, watching the state-ordered murder of her son. We can hardly imagine her anguish, her anger, her despair. On the cross Jesus endured the worst that human sin can inflict on another human being, and I think we can be sure that if she could have Mary would gladly have traded places with him. Most mothers would, such is the depth of true motherly love for a child. Mary couldn’t trade places with him, of course, so she stood helplessly by and suffered her own unspeakable pain. Not physical pain but emotional and spiritual pain, and those of us who have experienced real grief know that such emotional pain is every bit as bad as physical pain—or worse.

Mary, so joyous at the Annunciation, is at the crucifixion indeed a woman of sorrows. In her we see the profound truth that God’s blessing in this life does not mean freedom from suffering. We are blessed in many way too, and we suffer too. So we are tempted to ask: If God’s blessing doesn’t mean that we don’t suffer, what good is it to us? Is it really blessing at all? It is a legitimate question, a serious question, a question that deserves a serious answer.

For the Christian, that answer is found in the person of the child whom Mary bore and in that horrible event that ended his earthly life, the event that was a sword the pierced Mary’s heart too, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the crucifixion we see what God’s blessing really is.

To see what’s God blessing really is we need to go back to Matthew’s story of the Annunciation. There the angel says to Joseph that the child Mary is carrying shall fulfill an ancient prophecy from Isaiah. The prophecy says that a child shall be born who shall be called Emmanuel. Mary’s child was actually called Jesus of course, but the Christian tradition also calls him Emmanuel. More importantly, we see him as Emmanuel, for the name Emmanuel in Hebrew means “God is with us.” In Jesus Christ, the child Mary bore, we Christians see God with us.

In Jesus Christ we see God with us in his life and in his teachings, but perhaps even more importantly we see God with us in Jesus on the cross. There we see God in the person of Jesus, whom we confess to be the Son of God Incarnate, entering into the worst that human life can offer. We see God entering into physical suffering. We see God entering into the human experience of betrayal and abandonment, the human experience of injustice, and even the human experience of the absence of God. In Jesus we see God entering into all of those profoundly human experiences and sharing them with us. In Jesus we see in the most real way possible God’s promise that none of these things, that nothing in all creation, can separate us from the love of God. In Jesus on the cross we see God standing in unshakable solidarity with all of humanity in everything that happens to us. Paradoxically we see God standing in unshakable solidarity with Jesus as he cries out his despair at the human experience of God-forsakenness when he cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” And we see God standing in unshakable solidarity with Mary as that sword pierces her heart, as she feels her own unfathomable despair, her own inconsolable anguish.

This, after all, is why we remember Mary at all. We remember her precisely because she was the mother of Emmanuel, of God with us. We remember her because through her God came into our world. Through her God came to us as one of us to demonstrate the nature and will of God to us in the fullest measure that we humans are capable of receiving. In early Christian centuries there was a great argument about whether it was appropriate to call Mary “Theotokos,” which means the God Bearer or, more colloquially, the Mother of God. How, you may ask as many of the ancient Christians did, can anyone be the mother of God? Yet in wisdom and through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the Christian tradition said yes, that is precisely who Mary is. She is the Mother of God, specifically the Mother of God With Us. Through the son whom she brought into the world we see and know that God is with us always, in everything, especially in our most profoundly human times, our times of pain, sorrow, and grief.

Mary felt all of those things. We will never know if she understood her son the way we understood him. Perhaps as that sword pierced her heart as she watched her son be murdered she didn’t see the full significance of what was happening. It took the Christian tradition centuries to figure out the significance of what was happening. Much of Christianity hasn’t figured it out yet. We know however that in this too, in her experience of grief and pain and loss, she is a model of humanity. Mary was indeed the woman of sorrow. We are all people of sorrow. Through the child whom she brought into the world we know, however, that we are not alone in our sorrow and that Mary was not alone in hers. God was with her. God is with us. For that we give thanks to God. And we give thanks to Mary, through whom the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Good News of God’s unshakable solidarity with all of humanity in everything that happens, came into the world.

So as we approach the blessed day of Jesus’ birth eleven days from today let us remember Jesus, but let us remember also Mary. Our Protestant tradition doesn’t pay much attention to her or give her much honor. Yet when we look at the few Biblical accounts of her with fresh eyes, we see a remarkable woman. We see a strong, liberated, free woman who reaches for the stars and says yes to God. We see a prophet proclaiming God’s word of justice just as other prophets did before her and just as her son would do after her. And we see a fully human woman as much in need of the salvation her son brought as we are. So with the angel we say Ave Maria, Hail Mary. For you and for your gift to us, the gift of the man Jesus, we give you thanks, and we praise God for all that your son means to us and to the world. Amen.

Advent Sermon Series Part 3

Here's Part 3 of my 2011 Advent sermon series.

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 3

Jesus as Savior:  Saved From What for What?

Scripture:  Luke 2:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:16-19

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen. 

In this Advent sermon series so far we have considered the importance of Jesus of Nazareth having truly been a human being like us and what it means for us to confess him as God Incarnate.  Those topics are vitally important for Christians, yet there is at least one more thing that we need to consider for our answer to our theme question of who we are waiting for to be anywhere near complete—not that it can be complete in three short sermons of course.  Almost from the very beginning Christians have called Jesus “Savior.”  We heard them doing that in our reading from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth just now.  Many of us can recite those lines by heart, probably in the King James version.  They are the angel’s announcement of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds.  The angel says “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  Clearly Luke sees Jesus as a Savior, and so has the Christian tradition nearly from the very beginning.

Who are we waiting for?  A savior.  OK.  Jesus is a savior, but what exactly does it mean for us to call him Savior?  To answer that question we have to start, I think, with exposing an assumption that lies behind the title of Savior that we give to Jesus.  If Jesus is our Savior, then we must need saving from something.  Now, I would be surprised if the answer that comes immediately to your mind when you hear the question “what do we need to be saved from” were anything other than “sin.”  After all, Christianity has been saying for nearly 2,000 years that what Jesus saves us from is sin.  Put a bit more precisely, Christianity has said that Jesus saves us from the consequences of our sin.  That is, he saves us from the damnation that, the church has said for so long, is the just and inevitable consequence of our sin unless Jesus saves us from it.  Sin is the traditional Christian answer to the question of what we need to be saved from.

Unlike some of my more humanistic colleagues I believe that sin is very much a reality in human existence.  It is very much something from which we need to be saved.  Sin and its feared consequences are very real existential issues for people today.  Yet with many other Christian theologians today I also believe that there are other basic existential issues that are, if anything, bigger, more real, and more immediate concerns for many people today than sin is.  Two that are commonly identified in discussions like this one , and two that I know are very real to many people and to me, are meaninglessness and the fear of nothingness.  That is, we have a sense that life has no real meaning, and we fear that nothingness, non-being, simply an empty end of us, is our ultimate destiny.  I believe that all three of these things—sin, meaninglessness, and the fear of nothingness—are existential dilemmas from which we need to be saved.  But wait!  There’s more!  The whole world has things from which it needs to be saved too.  Two things that come immediately to my mind are injustice and our ways of violence, including war.  So it turns out that there are lots of things that we and the whole world need to be saved from.  Which of course leads immediately to the question:  Does Jesus save us from all of these things, and if so, how?

Now, pretty clearly I can’t talk about each of these things from which we need to be saved in one sermon; but I think I can say something meaningful that at least applies to all of them by asking one fundamental question:  Do all of these things from which we need to be saved have something in common?  I think that they do, and it is that common something that I want to address here. 

What all of these existential dilemmas that we humans face have in common is that they are all grounded in a real or a perceived separation from God.  They are all manifestations of an alienation from God.  We sin and fear the consequences of sin because we do not live in an intimate communion with God.  Because we don’t, we lose touch with God’s forgiving grace.  We feel meaningless and we fear an ultimate nothingness for the same reason.  We lose touch with God the source of all meaning.  We lose the assurance that, while we may not know just what form our being takes after our death, nothingness is not our fate because we know that God’s love for us never ends.  We oppress others, and we engage in and support acts of violence against our fellow human beings, because we live according to human values and are alienated from God’s values.  All of these existential dilemmas, all of these things that trouble our souls, are symptoms of a more basic existential dilemma, separation or alienation from God.

If our most basic problem is alienation from God, that is, if all of the more specific things from which we need to be saved are manifestations of that more fundamental human problem, as I believe they are, then what do we need a savior to do for us?  Why to reconcile us with God of course.  To overcome our sense of separation from God.  To restore us to intimate communion with God and thus to overcome our alienation from God.  St. Paul knew that reconciliation is the salvation that we need.  We heard him say it in our reading from 2 Corinthians this morning.  Paul says that we have new life “from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself….”  In another place that is my favorite Bible passage Paul says the same thing by saying that nothing in all creation will be able to “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Romans 8:38-39, emphasis added  Paul was convinced, and so am I, that in Jesus Christ any separation from God that we feel, any alienation from God that we perceive, is overcome.  That is how Jesus is our Savior.

And you’re probably saying to yourself something like “OK, that’s nice, but how does that work exactly?  How is our separation from God overcome in Jesus?”  At least, I hope you’re asking yourself something like that, for something like that is the necessary next question.  And this is where the subjects we considered in the first two sermons in this series come in.  Jesus does it by demonstrating in his human nature what human life looks like when it is lived according to the will of God and by teaching with his words and more importantly with his life God’s values of justice, compassion, and nonviolence.  And he does it by demonstrating in his divine nature just how God actually relates to creation.  In him we see God relating to creation by being present with us in it.  In him we see God entering into and experiencing in God’s own person the life and the death of a creature, of a mortal human being.  People wanted, and many still want, God to break into creation with power to change things for the better.  In Jesus we see that that is not how God relates to the world.  God’s relationship to the world is precisely one of presence and solidarity with God’s people and with all of God’s creation.  That’s how Jesus overcomes the separation from God that we so often feel and that is the root of so many evils, by showing us that any separation we feel between ourselves and God is entirely of our own making.  As far as God is concerned there simply is no separation, there simply is no alienation of creation from its Creator. 

Because as far as God is concerned we simply are not separated or alienated from God, we can overcome all of those things from which we need to be saved.  We know that sin does not separate us from God.  We find meaning in a life lived in intimate communion with God.  We know God’s love, and we know that that love will not end when we die.  We learn how to live, and we know that, because Jesus was a human being, living that way is a real possibility for us humans.  Our basic existential dilemma is alienation, and Jesus overcomes our alienation by showing us that it as far as God is concerned the alienation we perceive just isn’t real.

In Jesus we are saved from everything that we think we need saving from because we know in him that we are never truly separated from God, and in Jesus we are saved to the kind of life God wants us to have.  We are freed to live the spiritually abundant life Jesus came to give us.  We are freed to live lives of service without limitation.  We are freed to be prophets of peace and justice without fear.  We are saved from life the way we humans have made it for life the way God created it.  We are freed to life with and for God because we are freed from all of the fear, all of the doubt, all of the misplaced values that keep us from living life with and for God. 

Jesus isn’t our Savior through some act of cosmic magic in which we have no part.  Rather, Jesus is our Savior when we turn to him in faith and see in him how we humans are meant to relate to God and how God relates to us.  The salvation that Jesus brings isn’t something that we have to wait until we die to realize.  It is salvation first in this life, salvation that comes from the reconciliation between God and creation that Jesus demonstrates.  God never was distant from creation, but we humans are so good at creating our own distance from God.  That is the distance that Jesus overcomes.  That is the reconciliation that Jesus effects.  That is Jesus as Savior.  In Jesus God reconciled the world to Godself, and nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in him.  In Jesus Christ, we are saved.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Advent Sermon Series Part 2

Here's the second part of my Advent sermon series

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 2

Jesus as Divine:  What Are We to Make of the Incarnation?

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-24; John 1:1-5, 14

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Last Sunday afternoon my son Matt asked me what I had preached on that morning.  I said it was the first part of a sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?”  He replied “How can you stretch an answer that is one word into three sermons?”  I replied:  “Experience.”  Then I explained that while “Jesus” is the answer to this series’ title question, that answer is actually quite complex.  Today we get into some of that complexity.  In Part 1 of this sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?” I insisted at considerable length that before Jesus was anything else he was a real human being.  That is true, and it is important; but for the Christian tradition it is not a complete answer to the question of who Jesus is for us.  It is not a complete answer to the question “Who are we waiting for?”  Jesus was a human being, yes; but the Christian tradition  has said almost from the very beginning that, while not ceasing to be a human being, Jesus was also much more than a mere human being.  Almost from the very beginning the Christian tradition has said that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate, God become human.  What are we to make of that contention?  Does it have any meaning for us?  To those questions we now turn in this second part of our Advent sermon series.

Although many progressive Christians today see Jesus as merely a man (trust me, I see them all the time in my work on our Conference Committee on Ministry), I remained convinced that the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is indispensible to true Christianity.  Although its classic theological formulation didn’t come until the fourth century CE, the doctrine of the Incarnation has its roots in the New Testament.  We heard some of those roots in our readings this morning.  In Matthew’s birth story Jesus is called Emmanuel, which means God with us.  The prologue to the Gospel of John that we also heard says that something it calls “the Word” was actually God and that the Word then became flesh, that is became a human being in Jesus.  However it is stated, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine.  That he was God but that he was also fully and completely human.  Human and divine, not human or divine. 

How in heaven’s name are we to understand that contention, that someone who was human like us was also God Incarnate?  To get at how we are to understand the Incarnation we have to start, I think, with understanding the experience that the first Christians had of Jesus.  Clearly both during his lifetime when he was physically present with them and after his death when he was spiritually present with them, the earliest Christians experienced the presence of God in Jesus in some unique way.  In him they saw a revelation of the nature and will of God unlike anything they had experienced before.  They felt the very presence of God in him in a way they had never felt before.  They somehow knew that he communicated truth about God in a unique way, and they felt that he not only taught that truth, he somehow was that truth. 

This experience came first, then the earliest Christians struggled to find language with which to express that experience of the presence of God in Jesus.  We see them doing that in our Gospel readings this morning.  Matthew turned to the prophet Isaiah and found the term Emmanuel, God with us.  The author of the Gospel of John turned to the wisdom tradition of Israel and found the Word, John’s term for a concept that in earlier Jewish literature was called Wisdom.  Later, the bishops gathered at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE would use more philosophical language, the language we know from the Nicene Creed, primarily that he was “of one substance” with God the Father.  Whatever language Jesus’ followers found to express their experience of the human being Jesus being somehow also God, their language for him was always grounded in an experience of him that precedes the language.  The language is symbolic, that is, it points beyond itself to a truth that can never really be captured in human language.  That truth is found first of all not in language but in an experience, the experience of Jesus’ followers then and now that in him and precisely in his humanity we meet God in a unique way.  As is the case with all human truth, experience comes first.  The experience of Jesus as manifesting the presence of God comes first.  Then we try to find language to express that experience.

That really is what the Incarnation, what the understanding of Jesus as divine, is all about.  We aren’t to understand it literally.  We aren’t to think literally that somehow there was a human Jesus and a divine Jesus both living in the same body.  Rather, we are to understand that in the human being Jesus we see and come to know God.  My favorite way of putting it is to say “if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.”  Jesus is divine because in him we see God, we see what God is like.

And just as Jesus being truly human really matters, so does Jesus being truly divine in this symbolic sense also matter.  To understand how it matters, think of Jesus as being all about relationship.  As a human being he shows us how we are to relate to God.  We see the human Jesus relating to God in faithfulness to God’s calling to him, in faithfulness in proclaiming and living out the Kingdom of God, in a life of prayer, and in a life of compassion for all of God’s people.  As human Jesus shows us how we are to relate to God.

As divine Jesus shows us how God relates to us.  A mere human being can reveal to us a lot about being human, but a mere human being can’t really reveal anything to us about God.  It is in his divine nature that Jesus shows us who God is.  Because we confess him as God Incarnate we see in him not only ideal humanity.  We see also as much of the nature and will of God as we humans are capable of comprehending, we see how God relates to us humans and to all of creation.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we can understand his teaching as coming not just from another human being but from God.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we come through him to know God as compassionate, nonviolent, passionate about justice, and always forgiving of our human failings.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we see the way in which he turned the wisdom of the world on its head not just as the teaching of a fellow human being (however wise and prophetic a human being we may think him to be) but as the teaching of God. 

And here’s the main thing for me:  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in him how God relates to human life and more importantly to human suffering and to human death.  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in his death not merely the death of a martyr, although surely it was that.  We see how God relates to us when we suffer and when we die.  We see God not preventing human suffering and death but entering into them, sanctifying them, and being always present with us in them.  We see all of that in Jesus on the cross, and we couldn’t see any of it without our confession that Jesus is God Incarnate.  When we reduce Jesus to a mere human being his death loses all of its meaning for us; and for me, that is a loss of immense magnitude that takes much of the meaning out of Christianity.  We lose our hope in the face of our mortality.  We lose the comfort that God’s presence can bring when we suffer and when we die, as we all surely do.  In times of grief and pain I have looked to Jesus on the cross and known that God feels my grief and my pain and is present with me in them, and that knowledge has brought me great comfort.  But that knowledge has brought me that comfort because when I see Jesus on the cross I see so much more than a fellow human being.  I see God in human form entering into human suffering and death and demonstrating in fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in those unavoidable human conditions. 

So I say to all of my progressive Christian colleagues who want to make Jesus only a man:  I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t work.  It takes most of the meaning out of our ancient and sacred faith.  Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, yes; and that matters.  It matters a great deal.  But for us Christians he was also God Incarnate, and that matters as well.  It too matters a great deal.  For us Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God with us.  He is the Word of God made flesh.  That isn’t just good news.  It is the best news that there ever was or ever could be.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Advent Sermon Series Part 1

I'll go ahead and post the sermons that I'm doing for the first three weeks of Advent on this blog.  It's a sermon series on the question "Who are we waiting for?"  Here's the first sermon in the series.  I'll post the others as I give them.

Who Are We Waiting For?

Part One:  Jesus as Human:  The Galilean Sage

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 27, 2011

Scripture:  Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s Advent, that season of the church year in which we anticipate and prepare for the birth of Christ.  Recently one of our number said something at our Sunday morning adult education forum that suggested to me something that it might well be worth spending some time on this Advent season.  He said that he had been struggling recently with the question of just who this Jesus is.  That is, after all, one of the central questions—perhaps the central question—of the Christian life.  Jesus himself put it to his disciples.  Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying that he is.  They gave various answers.  Then he asked them:  “But who do you say that I am?”  Mark 8:29  We are anticipating and preparing for his birth, but who is he anyway that we should make such a big deal out his getting himself born?  Who do we say that he is?  That question is so important for Christians that I decided that I would do a three part Advent sermon series on the question “Who are we waiting for?”

That question arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being.   Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us.  So today you get part one of this sermon series,  Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child.  A human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on.  We’re talking about a human baby here.  A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world.  It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you:  Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that?  I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are.  I think there’s a good reason for that shock.  The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man.  Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up.  Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters.  It really matters because his call to us is to follow him.  His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him.  I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him if he were only God.  None of us humans could.  We aren’t God, or even gods.  In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans.  Jesus is truly human, and that really matters.  We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods.  The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human.  God actually became human in the person of Jesus.  In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human.  He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.  Robin Meyers, the author of the book we’ve been reading in the Sunday morning group, put it this way in a response he sent me to some questions I had sent to him:  “One cannot emulate…that which is categorically different from oneself.  Whether it is a sports hero, or a comic book character, we admire as a fan what we cannot possibly be expected to imitate.  A human Jesus, on the other hand, takes away our excuses.”

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being.  What sort of human being was he?  What does it mean for us to follow him?  Follow him how?  Follow him in what?  In that book we read in the Sunday morning group in November I found a phrase that I think might be helpful in answering those questions.  Robin Meyers, that author I mentioned above who is also the pastor of a large, progressive UCC church in Oklahoma City, has a term for Jesus that he uses more than any other.  He calls Jesus “the Galilean sage.”  Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing.  It means a wise person.  As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), and quite apart from whether or not he did things mere humans can’t do (walk on water, raise people from the dead, and so on), Jesus was a wisdom person.  He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom.  He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God.  Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK.  Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught?  There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book.  So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are.  We all know something about worldly wisdom.  We know how the world works.  We know what the world values.  The world values power.  The world values wealth.  The world values success, prestige, and status.  The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way.  The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens.  They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them.  They use violence against their own citizens.  They execute people they believe are criminals.  They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like.  All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject.  You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite.  He taught nonviolence.  About that there is no doubt whatsoever.  He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  He meant inclusion of the outcast.  He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores.  He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.”  We saw some of that teaching in our reading from the Sermon on the Mount this morning.  Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity.  In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world.  Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God.  Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work.  It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important.  It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one.  His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being.  His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life.  Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

Yet at least since the fourth century CE the Christian church has focused much more on Jesus’ divinity than on his humanity.  It has so emphasized his divine nature that his human nature has often been ignored.  The church often makes him a God-Man to be worshipped rather than a God-filled human being to be followed.  The church has so often made him the magic key to heaven’s gate rather than a model and guide for human life on earth.  Yet what we prepare to celebrate is the birth of a real human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  And that, my friends, is very good news indeed; for we await the birth of one who is one of us, one from whom we can truly learn, one whom we can truly follow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

If You Can't Win Telling the Truth You Deserve to Lose

So it has begun.  We all know that American presidential campaigns always feature dirty trucks and misleading campaign ads.  At least since the days of Richard Nixon that has been more true of Republican campaigns than of Democratic ones, but it goes on all the time in most presidential campaigns.  Yet Republican candidate Mitt Romney has gotten his presidential campaign off to a start that crosses even the very broad and fuzzy lines of American presidential politics.  His campaign has put out a television ad in New Hampshire that contains a flat out and very significant lie.  There's no other word for it.  It's a lie.  The ad features Barack Obama in 2008, then a candidate for the presidency, saying "if we keep talking about the economy we're going to lose."  The ad makes it appear that that is something Obama said about himself and his own presidential campaign.  It isn't.  Those lines were spoken by someone in the John McCain campaign.  Obama is merely quoting them.  When the full clip of what Obama said played it is clear that he was quoting a statement by the McCain campaign and hurling it back at them to show McCain's ineptitude on economic issues.  Romney's campaign has deceptively edited Obama's statement to make it look like he was talking about himself.  Romney's ad is a bald-faced, flat out lie.  There is no other word for it.

Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Barack Obama's.  Elsewhere on this blog I have stated the reasons why I probably will not vote for him again.  I gave him a little bit of money in 2008.  I have no intention of doing so again.  He is a massive disappointment at best, and his values, which are a version of the basic values of empire, are not my values.  How one feels about Obama, however, should not affect one's reaction to this particular bit of deception and mendacity by the Romney campaign.  Even Romney supporters, if they have integrity (although frankly it is hard for me to see how any Romney supporter can have integrity since Romney himself has none), will condemn this ad as transgressing even the nearly nonexistent boundaries of American political polemics.

I once sent an email to the congressional campaign of Republican John Koster here in Washington state after I received a push polling call from his campaign that contained a flat out lie about Obama's health care reform.  I said that if you can't win by telling the truth, and I sincerely hope you can't, you don't deserve to win.  I now say the same thing to Mr. Romney and to all American political candidates.  Our politics are rotten to the core with the influence of money.  That much is obvious; but our politics are also rotten to the core with lying, with deception, with spin that has no interest in truth but only in manipulating uninformed and gullible voters.  Someone once said that the best thing you can say about democracy is that every other possible political system is worse.  That may be true, but our supposedly democratic system has so decayed, is so rotten with money and unethical campaigning, that sometimes I wonder.  It is becoming more and more a system in which I have no confidence.  The presidential campaign that is now beginning gives no sign that things will get better. They seem only to be getting worse.

Violence Is Now Our Norm

There's a commercial that has been running on American television lately.  It is an ad for a HTC cell phone.  As a young man walks through a city scene listening to music through headphones plugged into this cell phone all kind of things blow up behind him.  Several cars, including a police car, are flipped onto their roofs, which then collapse, presumably killing everyone inside.  It is a scene of violent mayhem breaking out in an American city; and the young man plugged into the cell phone walks through it completely oblivious to what is happening behind him.  Also running on American television are ads for several different video games, all of them depicting some kind of combat.  Sometimes the combat looks contemporary.  Sometimes it looks medieval, but it is always violent with lots of death and destruction.  Many, albeit not quite all, of our popular movies are immensely violent too.  The supposed sport of boxing, which is simply violence for the sake of entertainment, is making a comeback; and the even more violent extreme cage fighting is becoming mainstream.

The conclusion is inescapable:  Violence is now the norm of our popular culture.  The acceptability of violence is taken for granted.  We don't just accept it, we expect it.  We don't just tolerate it, we find it entertaining.  Our advertising agencies use it to sell even products that in themselves have nothing to do with violence, and advertising agencies succeed when they have their finger securely on the pulse of popular culture.  Violence is now our cultural norm.

Violence is our norm in more ways than in our popular culture.  It is our norm in foreign affairs as well.  When something happens that we don't like we find someone to invade, Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent examples.  More recently we have taken to targeting for death specific individuals whom we have identified as terrorists, never mind that they have never been convicted of anything through any kind of legal process.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about the evil of the glorification of the military and our calling everyone in uniform a hero.  Those dynamics too are part of the way in which violence is now our norm.

Of course violence has always been a big part of American culture.  Like every empire before us our country was founded in violence, expanded through violence, and preserved through violence.  Violence has always been part of our entertainment.  Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived on movie and TV westerns in which the good guys always defeated the bad guys (and the Indians, who were mostly identified as bad guys) through violence and on World War II movies in which the horror of war was sanitized and violence was heroic when it was our side that applied it.  Still, it seems to be getting worse.  The violence of our popular entertainment is more graphic and, I think, more pervasive than it has ever been before.

Jesus Christ's teaching of nonviolence has always been counter-cultural.  It was counter-cultural when Jesus preached and lived it in Roman-occupied Galilee.  It was counter-cultural when Gandhi taught and lived it in British-occupied India.  It was counter-cultural when Martin Luther King taught and lived it against American racism and unjust economic and foreign policies.  It is counter-cultural today.  Convincing Americans that violence is always immoral and that there are nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems we face is a very tough sell.  Trust me on that one.  I try to do it all the time.

The response from the defenders of violence is predictable.  They say:  Nonviolence doesn't work.  Violence is necessary to protect people.  Violence is necessary to defeat the bad guys.  Even those of us who advocate nonviolence might, in the right situation, resort to violence to protect loved ones.  Most of those objections simply are not factually true, and even when they may have some truth in them that modicum of truth doesn't make the use of violence moral.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler because he thought assassinating Hitler was the only way to end the war, but he never maintained that his doing so was moral.  He always said that it was something for which he had to ask God's forgiveness.

For all the arguments in favor of the use of violence, there are two undeniable truths for us Christians.  One, which applies to everyone not just to Christians, is that if humanity will not learn the ethic of nonviolence we almost surely will destroy ourselves and most of life on earth.  We have the means to do it.  We have have created nuclear weapons that are able to destroy the earth many times over, and humanity has never developed a weapons system that it hasn't used.

The other undeniable truth for Christians in that Jesus taught and lived an ethic of nonviolence.  Nonviolence wasn't incidental to Jesus' teaching.  It isn't something that we can say applied only to particular social conditions of his time and place.  For Jesus nonviolence was nothing less than the way of God.  We must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent.  Nonviolence was the way of God that Jesus taught with his words and lived with his life.  To follow Jesus is to follow the way of nonviolence.  Christians can and do reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence all the time, but no Christian can reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence and truly claim to be following Jesus in that rejection.  To resort to violence is to turn one's back on Jesus.  I simply can see no way to avoid that truth.

Violence is now our norm here in the United States of America, but it can never be the norm for a Christian.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to the way of nonviolence.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to an ethic and to a life that is counter-cultural.  The faith of Jesus Christ puts us at odds with our culture in many ways, but one of the most fundamental of those ways is how it puts us at odds with our culture of violence.  Being at odds with one's culture isn't easy.  I often think that it would be a whole lot easier, and life might be a lot more fun,  if I could just go along with the ways of my culture, the ways of violence, the ways of consumerism, the ways of economic injustice.  The problem is, I'm a Christian.  Violence is the American cultural norm, but it is not and will not be mine.  Am I sure that I can live according to the ethic of nonviolence in every hypothetical situation I or some proponent of violence can dream up?  No.  I am not Jesus Christ, and I know that I am his fallible follower.  Still, nonviolence is the ethic of Jesus, and I will be true to it to the best of my limited human ability.  As a Christian I can do no other.

The Empire Strikes Back

I don't often post my sermons on this blog.  You can find them at the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org if you want to see them.  This one, which I gave on Nov. 20, 2011, is, I think, so timely and so important that I am putting it up here on my blog.

The Empire Strikes Back

A Meditation for Christ the King Sunday

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 20, 2011

Scripture:  Matthew 25:31-46

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I imagine that most of you are familiar with the Star Wars movies.  In the first of those movies to be made (which turned out to be the fourth movie in the series—go figure) the rebels who are fighting the evil empire have some success in defeating the military forces of the empire, destroying its “Death Star,” a fearful weapon that had destroyed the home planet of some of the rebels.  The title of the second movie to be made (which turned out to be the fifth movie in the series—go figure) is “Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes Back.”  The demonic empire doesn’t back down and roll over in the face of the threat from the forces of liberation.  It fights back—hard.  The rebels pay a steep price for their resistance to the forces of empire.

Now, I wouldn’t be talking about the Star Wars movies in a sermon if I thought that they were merely sci-fi adventure stories, but pretty clearly they are not merely sci-fi adventure stories.  They are true myths, that is, they are stories that speak a truth about the spiritual forces, good and evil, that are at work in the world.  They speak specifically about the spiritual force of empire. 

As the theologian Walter wink has reminded us, all human institutions have a spiritual dimension to them.  The technical term for the spiritual dimension of an institution is its “power.”  Human institutions are somehow more than the sum of their parts.  They behave in ways that aren’t dependent solely on the will of the individuals who make them up.  They have a spiritual essence of their own, that is, they have their “power,” which is the spiritual side of their existence.  Power here doesn’t mean force or even the ability to do things or make others do things.  It refers to an autonomous being that is spiritual rather than physical.  Everything in creation has its power.  An institution’s power is its spirit, it is the way in which the character of an institution is maintained over time even though the people in the institution change.  All human organizations—governments, corporations, universities, service clubs, churches, every human organization—has its power.  Ideas and concepts have their powers too.  In our country the powers of nationalism and consumerism are particularly strong and active.  The powers are invisible, but they are the strongest forces at work in the world other than, we hope, God.  Every human institution acts according to its power.  That’s why groups of humans will do things that the individual humans in them would never do on their own, as when people who in civilian life would never think of taking another human life have no compunction about doing it when they are part of a nation’s military engaged in warfare.  They act not according to their own character but according to the power, the spiritual essence, of the military of which they are a part.

The powers are often demonic, which means that, like individual humans, they often act in ways other than the ways that God their creator intends and desires that they act.  Under the influence of their power, institutions act for their own self-preservation rather than for the good of God’s people.  They use violence to perpetuate their own might, caring more for status and influence than for justice.  Lucas’ empire of the Star Wars movies is a brilliant depiction of the spiritual power of empire, not only as it exists in a galaxy far, far away but as it exists in this world here and now.  That’s what makes the Star Wars movies so compelling.  They are mythic stories about, among other things, the power of a very real worldly institution, empire.

There have been empires in the world for as long as there have been written records of human institutions.  One very appropriate way to look at human history is to see it as a succession of empires—Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, the Arab Empire the Turkish Empire, the British Empire.  Each has risen, had a period of domination, and fallen again, and despite significant differences between them all of these empires have acted in some similar fundamental ways.  They have all established, defended, and tried to perpetuate themselves through the use of violence.  They have all been ruled, through one mechanism or another, by an elite of the wealthy.  They have all put their own power and survival ahead of all other concerns, and they have all claimed to bring peace, security, and prosperity to their people through the liberal application of force.  Those similarities reveal the power of empire in the technical sense of that word.

           Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, what we used to call Christ the King Sunday.  The parable of the Judgment of the Nations that we just heard calls Jesus “king.”  In the first three Gospels Jesus proclaims not himself (as he does in John) but something he calls “the Kingdom of God.”  The original Greek word in the Gospels that gets translated as “kingdom” is basilea, a word that in other contexts gets translated as “empire.”  We could very appropriately say not the Kingdom of God but the Empire of God. 

What Jesus taught and showed with his life is what we could call counter-empire, that is, empire the way God intends and wants it to be, in sharp contrast to empire the way it actually is in the world.  He showed us what empire is like when it is not fallen, when it is not demonic.  We see a little bit of that teaching in Matthew’s judgment of the nations scene.  That parable, like virtually everything else Jesus said and did, turns the world upside down.  It raises “the least” to the level of Jesus Christ himself.  “The least” here clearly means the ones the world thinks of as the least—the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  This parable puts them on top, making them of equal value with Jesus Christ himself.  In the empire of God, the least are the most.

           Empire isn’t a concept that applies only to other people and other times.  Many of us Americans today have come to understand our country in terms of empire.  The United States may not have anyone we call the emperor or even the king, but we are nonetheless the dominant world empire of our time.  We see our imperial status in the way the country was formed by expanding and taking over land that had belonged to others, to the native nations, to Mexico, and others.  We see it in the way we use our military power today to project and to protect our supposed economic and political interests around the world.  Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11 are perfect examples of the working of the power of empire.  Empire uses military force to project itself in the world, and the United States has done that more times than we can keep track of.  President Obama, our current emperor, just last week announced a new deal with Australia that will have us creating a new military presence on the north coast of that country, a move in pure imperial style to protect our supposed interests from a supposed threat from a competing empire, China.  We have some sort of military presence in over 150 countries around the world.  We spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined spends on theirs.  We are indeed today’s world empire. 

          We see our imperial nature at home too.  Just one quick statistic:  In 2007 the top 1% of our population owned one half of all of our country’s wealth, and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few that we have observed since the 1980s has only accelerated in the years since 2007.  We think we’re a democracy, but those are the wealth distribution figures of empire; and empire can never coexist with democracy for long. 

          We are empire, and the empire strikes back.  It strikes back against anything that it perceives as a threat.  Last week it struck back across the country against the Occupy movement, a movement that names the radical income and wealth disparity in our country and calls it undemocratic.  The power of empire acts in ways blunt and in ways subtle to perpetuate empire.  The various police agencies who dispersed Occupy groups across the country recently may not have consciously coordinated their efforts, but in the combined assaults on Occupy groups across the country we see the power of empire, that is, the spiritual dimension of empire, asserting itself through those various police agencies. 

          We also see it in the way the so-called “mainstream media” reported the assault on the Occupy movement.  NPR, for example, reported the authorities in New York justifying that assault by pointing to the First Amendment, saying it guarantees the right to gather but not the right to encamp, that is, it’s ok if you gather in protest as long as you don’t do it for too long or too effectively.  Sources less beholden to the empire for their financing reported a real attack, with police destroying property and assaulting protesters.  In Seattle King 5, a mainstream media outlet, reported the attack on Occupy demonstrators in downtown Seattle with pepper spray as a reasonable response to provocation from the demonstrators.  On the other hand, the Rev. Rich Lang, a local United Methodist pastor and activist, reports how he was temporarily blinded by pepper spray as, dressed in clerical garb and wearing a cross, he tried to separate police and protestors.  He was not threat to anyone.  An 84 year old woman was also attacked with pepper spray.  Are we supposed to believe that she was a threat to the police?  Lang speaks not of a reasonable police response to provocation but of the reality of police brutality and a breakdown in discipline among the police, who continued attacking protestors well after any conceivable reason for doing so had ended, not that there ever really was one to begin with.  The spirit of empire affects every aspect of American life.  Some Americans are finally starting to wake up to that reality.

          Today we celebrate Reign of Christ, or Christ the King, Sunday.  We could call it Christ the Emperor Sunday, but Christ’s empire is radically different from the empires of the world.  It is an empire in which the last are first and the first are last.  It is an empire in which peace is attained through nonviolence and justice rather than through violence and oppression.  Unlike in the world’s empires, in Christ’s empire people are more important than profit; and all have enough because no one has too much.

          Christ the King calls us to the task of building God’s empire of peace and justice. To do that we must dismantle the structures of worldly empire.  We must renounce militarism and the use of violence as a tool of national policy.  We must overturn structures that create and perpetuate the power of the wealthy at the cost of the welfare of God’s people and of God’s good creation.  If we do, the empire will strike back.  Of that there is no doubt.  It struck back against Jesus, crushing him like an annoying gnat and thinking that that act of violence destroyed his word of the Kingdom of God.  It didn’t.  It didn’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God then, and the violence of empire can’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God today. 

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  We know what Christ calls us to do.  Are we ready really to accept Christ as our king?  Are we ready to renounce the power of empire and really work for the building of the Kingdom of God?  It isn’t easy.  The empire strikes back.  Jesus knew that the empire strikes back, but that threat didn’t stop him.  Will it stop us?  Amen.

A Veterans Day Meditation on American Heroes

It’s Veterans Day here in the United States of America.  Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal this year that it usually is.  Maybe that’s because it falls on a Friday this year, thereby creating an uncommon three day weekend for some.  Or maybe it’s because today is 11/11/11, a once a century date that some think has some sort of mystic or magic significance.  (Earlier today I saw the time of 11:11 on a digital clock, making it 11:11 on 11/11/11, yet nothing mystic or magic happened. Go figure.)  Maybe those things explain why Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal than usual today, but I suspect that there is a less benign reason why we now make such a big deal out of Veterans Day.  I suspect that we make such a big deal out of Veterans Day because the demonic myth is growing and spreading among us that everyone who serves or who has ever served in the American military is a “hero.”  For example, as I write this I have on the television the “Carrier Classic,” a college basketball game being played on the USS Carl Vinson, a huge American aircraft carrier.  The ESPN crew sits behind a desk with a big banner in front that reads “America’s Heroes.”  QED.  I have written on American militarism before.  See in particular the post on this blog titled “Christianity and American Militarism:  Comments Prompted By President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech,” posted on January 26, 2011.  I will not repeat here what I said there, but I reaffirm here everything that I said there.  Here I want to reflect more on the way that we call everyone in the American military a hero and to ask:  As it relates to the question of the military, who are the real heroes in American life?  Who should we, as Christians, really be celebrating?

The way in which we call everyone in the American military today a hero is tremendously destructive.  It is destructive first of all because it isn't factually true.  It’s not that some, perhaps many, American military men and women don’t commit acts of heroism.  They do.  They commit acts of bravery and self-sacrifice under the horrific conditions of war.  They engage in acts of service to people at home and around the world in times of natural disaster.  It is not my intent here to deny those facts or to minimize them.  Yet it is also undeniably true that most people in the military lead ordinary, routine lives, going to work each day, raising families, living lives no more heroic than the lives the rest of us live.  It simply is not factually true that everyone in the American military is, in any meaningful sense, a hero.

That, however, is not my main point here.  Rather, what I most want to say is that calling everyone in the military a hero is profoundly destructive in a more fundamental way.  Calling everyone in the American military a hero is destructive because it makes it more difficult than ever to criticize American militarism and to oppose the way in which we use the armed forces to project aggressive American imperial power around the world.  After all, if the American military is made up entirely of heroes, then whatever they do must, by definition, be heroic.  It must be honorable.  It must be something we all should, indeed we all must, support.  Criticizing any use of the military becomes an attack on heroes, and what decent person would attack heroes?  The myth of the American military as made up entirely of heroes is one of the primary tools that the powers use today to perpetuate empire, to perpetuate a culture of violence and the lie of American superiority over other people in the world.

Let me suggest that there is another group of Americans, much less well-known and totally uncelebrated in our public life, who are indeed heroes whom we should be honoring today.  They are the men (mostly) who, in a time when service in the military was mandatory for those who were drafted (i.e., forced involuntarily into service in the imperial war machine), refused to serve in the military out of convictions of faith and conviction of conscience.  Some of these men were Christians from the historic peace churches—Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and some others.  These men could sometimes get conscientious objector status.  Others were Christians or not Christians at all who for whatever reason were not able to obtain that status.  Some went to jail.  Some fled the country.  All of them are heroes.  They are heroes because they took great personal risk in order to be true to the teachings of their faith or true to the dictates of their conscience.  They took a risk, and many of them suffered, to be true to the ethic of nonviolence.  Christian or not they all were witnessing to the truth of the way of nonviolence..  They took a stand for the way that truly makes for peace, for nonviolence, which Jesus taught was the way of God.

What is a hero?  A hero is someone who risks much to save others.  A hero is one who risks much to take a stand for conscience, to stand for what is right when doing so isn’t popular, won’t be understood, and can have significant negative consequences for the person taking the stand.  Americans who have said no to the war machine have risked much to save the world from violence.  They have taken a stand for conscience, stood for what is right, when what they have done has not been popular, has been misunderstood, and has often had significant negative consequences for them.  They are heroes.  The world may not see them as heroes, but Jesus said “my kingdom is not from this world.”  John 18:36  They may not be heroes by the standards of the kingdoms of the world, grounded in violence, but they are heroes by the standards of the Kingdom of God, grounded in nonviolence. 

So today I celebrate the heroes.  I celebrate the heroes of the Kingdom of God, the heroes not of the world’s way of violence but of God’s way of nonviolence.  Those who have refused to fight and all who have devoted their lives to ending war, to working toward a world in which no one would ever fight again.  They are not “veterans.”  No one plays basketball games on aircraft carriers, or anywhere else, to honor them.  The world does not celebrate them.  The world mostly condemns them, but then the world condemned Jesus too.  Our call as Christians is to be true to the Kingdom of God, not to the empires of the world.  So today let us celebrate some real heroes, heroes of the Kingdom, heroes of faith, heroes of conscience.