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.