Emmanuel

This is the sermon I gave on December 23, 2012.  It's short, and I think it says something important.

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 4

Emmanuel, God With Us

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 23, 2012

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-24

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 has been a dark week.  Christmas is only two days away, but it has been a dark week.  Just over one week ago a disturbed young man first killed his mother, then drove to a school where he killed twenty children and six adults; then, apparently, he killed himself.  Twenty-eight deaths, all but one of them innocent.  Some of them heroic.  Twenty children and six adults at a public school.  As of yesterday, since the tragedy in Connecticut, there had been more than 100 deaths from guns in our country and no doubt others from other kinds of violence.  It’s beyond comprehension.  I can’t speak for you, but as for me my mind can acknowledge that it happened but my soul can’t comprehend it.  My heart can’t get around it.  I can’t understand it.  I can only weep and mourn and ache for hurting humanity, ache for all of us mere humans among whom something like this can happen.  Is the human psyche really so fragile that it can snap and cause someone to do such an unspeakable thing as shoot another human being?  Apparently so.  Apparently so.  It has been a dark week indeed.

Yet somehow, some way, life goes on.  Tomorrow evening we will gather here for our annual Christmas Eve service.  Then the next day is Christmas, the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.  Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy; and for many people it will be.  It will be a time of family and gift giving, of children and parents and grandparents gathered together in love and joy.  I pray that it will be all that for you.  On Wednesday morning it will be all that for Jane and me as we gather with my son and daughter, their spouses, and our grandchildren.

It will be good,  It will be very good, yet how can we forget the events of December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut?  How can we forget all the other violence in our country and in our world?  We can’t.  We won’t, and because we can’t forget and because we won’t forget, we must ask ourselves:  In the face of such tragedy does Christmas make any sense at all?  Is it possible to celebrate at all in the face of such horror?  Can we make any sense out of it?  Or are we left only with family traditions that have had all of their religious foundation blown out from under them by countless gunshots that took twenty-seven innocent lives just a few days ago?  It would be easy to say no, Christmas makes no sense.  To say no, we cannot celebrate.  To say that there is nothing to celebrate.  To say yes, the religious foundation of our traditions has been blown away by this senseless act of violence.  By all of the senseless acts of violence that so mark human existence of which Newtown is only a recent, shocking example.

It would be easy to say all that, but here’s the thing.  Those negative things about Christmas that it is so easy for us to feel whether we say them or not aren’t true.  They just simply aren’t.  The truth is different.  The truth is different, but it isn’t easy.  The truth brings comfort, but it isn’t an easy comfort.  The truth connects us with God, but it isn’t an easy connection or an easy God.  The truth isn’t easy, but it is still true; and we see that truth in Matthew’s story of the Annunciation to Joseph of the Good News of the coming of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew that we just heard.

In that reading an angel appears to Joseph in a dream.  The angel tells Joseph that his betrothed one, Mary, will have a child by the Holy Spirit though Joseph and Mary are not yet married.  God tells Joseph that this child will save the people from their sins.  Matthew then comments that this took place to fulfill a passage from Hebrew scripture, from the book of the prophet Isaiah actually, where it says that a child will be born, “and they shall name him Emmanuel.”  Now of course they didn’t name Jesus Emmanuel.  They named him Jesus, which the angel tells Joseph to do a few lines before the Emmanuel quote, but never mind.  Matthew still tells us that this child, this Jesus who is coming, will be Emmanuel.  And that, my friends, is very Good News indeed.  It is very Good News even, or rather especially, in dark times like the ones we have lived this last week, like the ones we live every week.  It is very Good News indeed because of what Emmanuel means.  It’s a Hebrew name, and it has a precise meaning.  It means “God is with us.”  Matthew tells us as much, and he’s right.  This child, this Jesus who is coming, is Emmanuel.  He is God with us.

This is the central confession of the Christian faith, that on that first Christmas day God came to be with us as one of us in the person of the baby boy Jesus of Nazareth.  In Jesus God is with us, and God has a very specific reason for being with us in Jesus.  In Jesus God is with us to show us God’s love, God’s grace, God’s compassion for us and for all of humanity.  In Jesus as Emmanuel God is with us to bring us consolation, to bring us hope, to bring us peace.  All of those blessings we have in Jesus Christ when we see him as Emmanuel, as God with us.  In Jesus as Emmanuel, as God with us, we see God holding all of humanity in endless arms of love; and we see God doing that come what may.  We see God holding us in love in good times, yes.,  In good times too.  But much more importantly in Jesus as Emmanuel, as God with us, we see God doing that, holding us in God’s everlasting arms, in the bad times.  In Jesus as Emmanuel we see that God doesn’t flee from us when things are bad.  In Jesus we see God entering into the bad times, into the worst that humans can do to other humans.  In Jesus we see God suffer with us.  In Jesus we see God even die with us.  Then we see God bring new life out of the suffering and out of the death.  In Jesus as Emmanuel we see God enter into human suffering and into human death, bear them with us, then triumph over them.

The power of that most basic Christian story, the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, comes precisely from the truth that Jesus Christ isn’t just another human being like us.  He is like us, but he is more than us.  He is Emmanuel, God with us.  And as God with us he experiences all of human life, the bad—indeed the very bad—as well as the good.

And so it is no surprise that Christmas comes at this time that feels so dark to us.  In Jesus God comes to us, God is with us, not because of some need God has but because of the need we have.  Friends, we all know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that human life is often a very dark place.  It is a place of fear as well as of joy.  It is a place of despair as well as of hope.  It is a place of death, including violent, unjust death, as well as of life.  God is with is in joy and in life.  More importantly, God is with us in fear, despair, and death too.  God comes to be with us in all of life, in the bad as well as in the good.

So neither the tragedy of nine days ago in Connecticut nor any of the other human tragedies that we hear of or that are part of our own lives should keep us from celebrating Christmas.  Why?  Well, just who are we waiting for at Christmas?  Who is it that comes to us at Christmas?  Jesus Christ of course, the one Matthew names Emmanuel, God with us.  In Jesus God comes to us as one of us, and in dark days like these we need God to come to us so badly.  We need to see God come to us as a human being like us.  And as more than that.  As God come to us.  As God with us.  We need to see the one named “God is with us” bring us God’s love, God’s hope, God’s peace.  And come he will.  The day after tomorrow he will come again to bring us that love, that hope, and peace.

So this year let us truly celebrate Christmas.  The good feelings of family and friends, yes; but more than that.  Let us not forget, but let us celebrate.  Let us celebrate Emmanuel, God with us, God coming to us to meet our need, to give us the gift that God wants all of us to have, in the good times but especially in the bad times, the gift that is no less than God, that is no less than Emmanuel, that is no less than God with us.  That is the truth of Christmas.  God is with us once again.  God brings light in the darkness once again.  And that more than anything else in all creation and even in times much darker than these is worth celebrating.  Christ is coming!  Let all the world rejoice!  Let us and all the world celebrate.  Amen.

Reflections on Newtown

Reflections on Newtown

It’s such a heart-wrenching tragedy.  We can’t get our heads around it.  Our hearts just break.  Twenty children murdered.  Seven adults murdered.  A disturbed gunman killed.  It’s all too much.  We reel.  We cry.  We grieve.  We explode in anger that such a thing could happen.  We can’t understand, we can only mourn the unjust death and scream our rage at the senseless, brutal, murderous thing that has happened among us.  It’s happened before, and it (or something far too much like it) will certainly happen again.  But that doesn’t help.  It doesn’t make it OK.  It doesn’t take away the tragedy of it.  It doesn’t take away our grief.  It doesn’t take away our anger.  It’s such a heart-wrenching tragedy.  We can’t get our heads around it.  Our hearts just break.

And there has been so much utter nonsense written about it.  It happened because we don’t force children in school to pray, we’re told.  It happened because we have made abortion and gay marriage legal, we’re told.  It happened because God is punishing us for not being socially reactionary enough, we’re told; and we know that that’s all totally and completely absurd.  It’s nothing but irresponsible sputtering uttered as though it came from God.  It didn’t happen because we don’t force children to pray in school.  It didn’t happen because we have made abortion and gay marriage legal, to the limited extent that we have.  God isn’t punishing us.  God doesn’t punish, God loves.  It’s a total perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to lay the Newtown unjust and premature deaths at God’s feet and say you did it.  God didn’t do it, a young man did it.  We don’t know why, but we know who; and it wasn’t God.  Yes, our society contributed to what happened.  It contributed by making guns and ammunition way too easily available to way too many people.  It contributed by making mental health services too scarce and too expensive, but our society didn’t kill those people.  God didn’t kill those people.  One young man killed those people, and he did it for reasons we probably will never know.

Which of course leaves us with one huge, burning, nearly overwhelming question:  Where was God?  Where was God when that young man shot his way into that school with murderous intent?  Where was God as that young man mowed down those innocent people, both children and adults?  Was God absent?  Had God fled from that school, or just left so that young man could do this terrible thing?  Or had God never been there in the first place?  It’s easy enough to answer all or at least some of those questions yes.  It’s easy, but it’s wrong.  It’s wrong, and the foundational story of our Christian faith tells us that it’s wrong.  What is that foundational story that tells us those things are wrong?  It is that God came to us in human form in Jesus of Nazareth, suffered unjustly, died unjustly, then rose again.  He was murdered by the imperial power of his day, Rome.  God didn't stop it.  God didn't prevent it.  God didn't intervene to save even God’s Son Jesus from unjust suffering and death.  Rather, in Jesus God entered into unjust human suffering and death, bore it, grieved it, and brought new life out of it.  Where was God when Jesus was tortured and murdered?  In Jesus.  With Jesus. Bearing it all with Jesus.  Where was God when that disturbed young man blasted his way into those classrooms and started killing children?  With the children.,  In the children.  Bearing it all with them and with us.  That’s where God was.  That’s where the story of Jesus Christ tells us God was.  That’s the only place we can really imagine God being.  It’s the only possible answer.  Where was God?  With the victims.  God is always with the victims.

God is always with the victims, and God has a way of bringing new life out of even senseless tragedy.  We don’t yet know what that new life will be that is to come out of the tragedy of Newtown.  Perhaps gun control.  We can pray for gun control.  Perhaps better public mental health services.  We can pray for better public mental health services.  We don’t know.  Perhaps the new life to come out of Newtown won’t come quickly.  Perhaps it won’t come for a very long time.  Perhaps it will not be all that we pray for, but in Christ Jesus we have at least the hope that new life will come.  Not for those killed of course, not in this life at least.  Yet it may still come for us.  It may still come for God’s world.  That today is our prayer.  That today is our hope.

So let’s be done with the utter nonsense.  Let’s stop blaming God for what God didn’t do.  Let’s stop blaming our society for refusing to adopt even more ignorant and discriminatory social policies than most of it already has.  Those things have nothing to do with what happened.  A human being snapped.  That’s what happened.  Pure and simple.  A human being snapped.  Where was God?  With the victims of course.  Our task isn’t to use the tragedy of Newtown for narrow political purposes that have nothing to do with what happened.  Our task is to look for new life beyond Newtown and to work for a new life beyond Newtown.  If we can do that we will be living the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a Gospel that never makes God violent or vindictive but that makes God, and we pray us, peaceful, loving citizens of God’s world.

Jesus Was Not a Sacrifice

We are approaching Advent, the Christian season of waiting and preparing for the birth of Jesus.  It is a time when it is appropriate for us to do some seriously discernment of who Jesus is for us. Yet that discernment is complicated by the dominance of one particular view of who Jesus is, one that has essentially swallowed Christianity whole.  It is the image of Jesus as a once for all sacrifice for human sin.  I, and a great many other Christian theologians today, have rejected the notion that Jesus was a sacrifice for human sin.  Jesus himself rejected the whole notion that sacrifice is what God wants.  One place where se see that Jesus himself rejected that notion, but one that most of us miss most of the time, is the passage that begins at Mark 12:38 and continues to Mark 13:2.  I preached on that passage today.  Here's the sermon I gave.  I am convinced that what I say there is worth thinking about.

Who Are We Waiting For?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 18, 2012

Scripture:  Hebrews 9:24-28 and Mark: 12-38-13:2

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 may be jumping the gun a bit here.  Actually, I am jumping the gun a bit here.  Advent, the time of waiting and preparing for the birth of Jesus, doesn’t start for two more weeks.  But some of the lectionary texts for last Sunday and today have got me thinking about just who it is that we are waiting for.  How are we to understand the one whose birth we soon will be eagerly awaiting?  The texts we read this morning from Hebrews and Mark, which come from the lectionary readings for this week and last, raise that question for me.  Or rather, they raise the reciprocal of that question, namely, who are we not waiting for.  They raise that question in the context of the concept sacrifice, and that is what I want to discuss with you this morning, even if it is a bit out of season

The text we heard from Hebrews certainly gives one answer to that question of who we are waiting for.  It says we are waiting for someone who will offer himself as a once for all sacrifice for the forgiveness of human sin.  It says that Jesus Christ “has appeared once for all…to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself;” and it refers to Jesus Christ has “having been offered once to bear the sins of many….”  “Offered” in that statement means sacrificed.  Certainly the notion that Jesus suffered and died as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of human sin is one that we’re all familiar with.  Jesus as a sacrifice became the dominant way that Christianity has understood him and what he did for us.  Jesus as a sacrifice for human sin didn’t actually become the primary way that Christians understand him until the twelfth century CE, but never mind.  It is the primary way that Christians have understood him in our time.

But here’s the thing.  You are of course free to do your own discernment about who Jesus is, and I encourage you to do so.  If the image of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin works for you, OK.  However, I am convinced that someone who will suffer and die as a sacrifice for human sin is most certainly not who we are waiting for in Advent as we wait for the birth of Jesus.  A once for all sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin is not who Jesus was and is, at least not for me.  Indeed, I believe, along with many other Christian theologians today, that when it turned Jesus into a sacrifice, which Hebrews does more clearly than any other New Testament book, Christianity did nothing less than betray Jesus.  And we can see how Christianity making Jesus into a sacrifice is a betrayal, or at least a denial, of Jesus in the passage we heard from Mark.  That probably isn’t obvious, so let me explain.

Mark 12:38 to 13:2 is a brilliantly constructed literary creation by the author of Mark.  It’s individual parts may well go back to Jesus and indeed probably do, but the author of Mark has put them together in a brilliant way to make a very specific and important point.  That construction goes like this:  First, at Mark 12:38-40, Jesus denounces the scribes.  The scribes were temple officials.  The temple was where they worked, and they worked to facilitate the operation of the temple.  In this passage the scribes stand for all of the temple officials—priests, Levites, and scribes.  They stand for the temple itself.  Jesus condemns them, and his condemnation includes the charge that they “devour widows’ houses.”  Remember that phrase, they “devour widow’s houses.”  The word “house” here isn’t just a place where a widow lives.  The word refers to everything a person has, so when Jesus says that the temple officials destroy widows’ houses he means that they take everything a widow has.

Then, at Mark 12:41-44 the scene shifts to inside the temple itself, and it gives us an example of the temple taking everything a poor widow has, of it devouring her “house.”  Jesus sees a poor widow put two small coins into the temple’s collection box.  He says to his disciples that she has, our of her poverty, given “everything she had, all she had to live on.”    Remember that phrase too, “everything she had, all she had to live on.”  You may have heard that part of this passage used in stewardship sermons.  It’s used that way all the time, holding the poor widow up as an example of good stewardship.  I can assure you, however, that the story of the widow’s mite as it is often called absolutely is not about stewardship.  It’s about exploitation.  It is an example of the temple and its officials destroying a poor widow.  It may look to us like the widow is making a free will donation.  She’s doing no such thing.  She’s paying what she can of the temple tax imposed on all Jews in Jesus’ time.  Why, if she’ so poor, would she give anything to the temple?  Because the scribes and other temple authorities have told her all her life that she must pay the temple tax in order to be right with God.  She has so very little left, but she gives it to the temple though it means she will soon die.  We must take Jesus’ words “everything she had, all she had to live on” quite literally here if we are going to understand what Mark is saying about Jesus.  This poor woman is now going to die because she has given all she had to live on to the temple.

Then comes the third part of this construction, at Mark 13:1-2.  Keep in mind that the chapter and verse numbers in the Bible are not in the original texts and have no significance for biblical interpretation, so the fact that this passage includes the first two verses of a new chapter has no meaning.  The temple officials devour widow’s houses, so Jesus says, correctly as it turned out, that their house, the temple, will itself be destroyed.  So to recap:  This three-part construct goes 1) the temple officials devours widows’ houses; 2) we see that happening to the poor widow in the temple; 3) the house of the temple officials, the temple itself, will be destroyed.

And it probably still isn’t clear what this has to do with sacrifice, the subject we began with.  Well, here’s what it has to do with sacrifice:  Animal sacrifice was the primary work of the temple.  Jewish worship in Jesus’ day included a lot of animal sacrifice.  Some of that sacrifice was for the forgiveness of sin, and the temple was the only place where effective sacrifice could be done.  Jews didn’t do it anywhere else but came to the temple in Jerusalem when they wanted or needed to perform a sacrifice.

In our verses from Mark Jesus rejects and condemns the temple and its officials.  In doing so he rejects what the temple does.  He rejects sacrifice as proper worship.  He says that what the temple does, sacrifice, is not what God wants from us.  What the temple doesn’t do, justice for the poor, is what God wants from us.  Jesus actually says that in other ways in other passages in the Gospels too, but he surely says it here.  God doesn’t want sacrifice, God wants justice.  In saying that Jesus was picking up a voice of ancient Israel that had gotten lost in his day, the voice of the prophets.  Just like the great prophets of the eighty century BCE—Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah—Jesus rejected sacrifice as what God wants and replaced it with justice.

Yet at least one Christian began to speak of Jesus as a sacrifice already in the New Testament.  We heard that voice in our passage from Hebrews, a book of the New Testament written at least a couple of decades after the Gospel of Mark.  The notion of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin eventually became dominant in western Christianity, so dominant that today if you ask people both in most churches and outside of Christianity what Christianity is they will probably say that it is the belief that God became human in Jesus for the purpose of dying as an atoning sacrifice for human sin.  And I believe that that view of Jesus Christ is at least a denial of who Jesus really was and for me is nothing less than a betrayal of Jesus.  He rejected the whole notion of sacrifice as what God wants and requires.  He called the people of his day, and ours, away from sacrifice and toward justice.

If the question that Advent raises for us is just who it is that we are waiting for (and I believe that is it) then we have to begin to find an answer to that question by setting aside answers to the question that are simply wrong, no matter how much most of Christianity might insist on them being right.  There are all kinds of theological problems with the answer that Jesus was an atoning sacrifice for sin.  If you want to read more about that read the chapter titled “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in my book Liberating Christianity.  or now suffice it to say that Mark’s brilliant literary construct around the temple and the widow’s houses tells us unequivocally that Jesus rejected the whole notion of sacrifice.  Yet his followers turned him into a sacrifice.

We have all had the idea that Jesus is an atoning sacrifice tor sin so drummed into us that it may be difficult for us to understand him as anything else.  Yet I am convinced that Jesus simply wasn’t a sacrifice.  So as we discern who we are waiting for, let us clear the field for our discernment by disposing of this one idea that surely is not who Jesus is.  Jesus rejected the notion of sacrifice.  I invite you to reject the notion of Jesus as sacrifice too.  Maybe then we can move forward together as we seek to know who he really was.  I plan to have more to say about that in the sermons I will give in the upcoming Advent season. Stay tuned.  Amen.

Whither Thou Goest: On Our Church's Ninth ONA Anniversary

   Today, Nov. 4, 2012, Monroe Congregational Church in Monroe, Washington, USA celebrated the ninth anniversary of it officially becoming an Open and Affirming Church.  Below is the sermon I gave on that occasion this morning.

Whither Thou Goest

An ONA Anniversary Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 4, 2012

Scripture:  Ruth 1:1-18

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.

Nine years ago this week our church became officially Open and Affirming.  I’m sure all of you know what that means (except perhaps for visitors), but it is good to remind ourselves of it.  To be Open and Affirming means first of all that we accept all people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.  But it means more than we accept.  It means that we affirm all people in their God-given humanity even—or rather especially—when some aspect of their humanity is different from the majority of humans and even—or rather especially—when that aspect of their humanity has led the larger Christian church to reject and condemn them and their loving relationships.  Our being Open and Affirming says to God’s people who thought that they could never find a spiritual home in Christianity because of their God-given sexual orientation or gender identity “Yes you can.”  You are welcome here in this Christian church.  You and your committed intimate relationships are affirmed here in this Christian church.  You are loved here in this Christian church just as you are, and we welcome you into our fellowship to share in our ministry.  More than that, we invite you to become part of us so that we will no longer make any distinction between you and us; for we are not who we are without you.

It might not be immediately apparent that the story of Naomi and Ruth, the first part of which we heard this morning, is a biblical foundation for the Open and Affirming movement in the United Church of Christ, but I think that it is.  In that story the Hebrew woman Naomi has two daughters-in-law who are not Hebrew.  They are Moabite, that is, they belong to a neighboring people of whom many Hebrews had a very low opinion.  When the husbands of all three women—Naomi and her daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth—die, Naomi begins to return to her Hebrew homeland, to Bethlehem whence she had come to Moab.  She tells Orpah and Ruth to return to their families’ homes and not to come with her to Bethlehem.  That’s what Orpah does, making a choice that made perfect sense and for which we should not condemn her.  Ruth, on the other hand, stays with Naomi, and as she does she delivers one of the Bible’s most beautiful and moving statements of loyalty and devotion.  We just heard it in the New Revised Standard Version, but I’ll recite it here in the King James Version, for many of you have probably heard its first line in that version, perhaps without knowing where it came from.  Ruth says to Naomi:  “Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge;  thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.  Where thou diest will I die, and there I will be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”

And you’re probably asking what does that have to do with Open and Affirming.  Perhaps this true story will help clarify the matter.  There used to be a flower and gift shop on the corner of Lewis and Main here in Monroe.  Several years ago Jane, as most of you know, was serving Sunnyslope church in Wenatchee while I was serving as pastor here.  We went into that shop one day and got talking with the owner.  When she heard that we were married to each other but were living most of the time on opposite sides of the Cascades she said:  “Isn’t it supposed to be ‘whither thou goest I will go?’”  She was, as nearly as we would tell, innocent of any knowledge that in the Bible that line is delivered not by one spouse to the other but by one woman to another, by Ruth to Naomi.

I don’t mean to suggest that the relationship between Ruth and Naomi was romantic or sexual.  There is no reason to think that it was.  Nonetheless, in Ruth the Bible lifts up a relationship of devotion, loyalty, and love between two women as something sacred, something of great value, something to emulate.  We didn’t tell the woman with whom we were speaking that the line that she apparently took to express the heart of a marital relationship was spoken by one woman to another.  For all I know, the shock of learning that truth might have done her in.  Be that as it may, the story of Ruth and Naomi tells us that what matters in a human relationship isn’t gender but loyalty, devotion, and love.

 It’s less apparent, but Ruth is relevant to our identity as an Open and Affirming church in another way as well.  Some scholars believe that Ruth was written after the Israelites had returned to their homeland after their time of exile in Babylon.  At that time their leaders were placing great emphasis on ethnic purity and on maintaining the Israelites as distinctly different from the non-Hebrew people near and among whom they lived.  As part of that effort they forbid Hebrew men from marrying non-Hebrew women and even made them divorce non-Hebrew wives and send them and their children away.  Thus at Ezra 10:10-11 the priest Ezra says to the people “You have trespassed and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel.  Now make confession to the Lord the God of your ancestors, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land [that is, from Gentiles] and from foreign wives.”  Ezra was trying to restrict marriage.  He was trying to enforce a strict and narrow definition of marriage.  He was like a prior day American racist of the kind that passed laws in many states against mixed race marriages, laws that the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 1967.

The author of the story of Ruth and Naomi didn’t have the power to strike down Ezra’s decree against mixed ethnicity marriages, but he could and did lift up a powerful cry against it.  In the story, Ruth is one of those foreign women.  She is a Moabite not a Hebrew.  As the story goes on she marries a Hebrew man named Boaz.  She has a son with him, and through that son and that son’s offspring she becomes the great-grandmother of no less a personage than the exalted King David.  King David, for many the greatest Hebrew man who ever lived, had a non-Jewish ancestor.  So much for the evil of foreign wives.  So much for restrictive definitions of marriage.  So much for discrimination against any of God’s people.

Any time people try to restrict God’s love, they misunderstand God’s love.  Every time people point to others and say you are less because you are different, they misunderstand God’s people.  That is the principle behind the Open and Affirming movement.  That is the principle that this church affirmed in 2001 when you adopted our mission statement, with its Open and Affirming commitment.  That is the principle that we affirmed in 2003 when we became officially Open and Affirming.  Since then our Open and Affirming commitment has renewed our church.  It has given us our core identity.  It has created a spiritual home for people who thought that a Christian church could never be a spiritual home for them.  It has supported and given hope and strength to people with gay or lesbian family members who some in the family struggle to accept or even cannot accept.

In 2003 we became pioneers in Sky Valley.  We led the way.  We took a risk for justice, for what is right.  That’s worth celebrating.  That’s worth lifting up and proclaiming anew.  So let us celebrate today, but let us not wallow in self-congratulation or become complacent.  There is always more to do.  There are always more of God’s people to welcome and to affirm.  Our work didn’t end in 2003 when we became Open and Affirming.  It had only just begun.  So let us continue that work, confident that as we do so we are truly and rightly witnessing to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to God’s love for all people.  Amen.

On Marriage Equality

This morning I gave a sermon on marriage equality in connection with Referendum 74, the ballot measure in Washington state that seeks to repeal the law enacted earlier this year removing discrimination against gay and lesbian couples from the law of the state.  It's worth posting here.

On Marriage Equality

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 14, 2012

Scripture:  Mark 10:1-9; Luke 10:25-37

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.

At its August meeting the Cabinet of this church adopted a resolution in support of marriage equality and urged the friends and members of the church to vote “Yes” on Referendum 74 to preserve the right of all couples in Washington to marry.  The actual vote for marriage equality of “Approved.”  Please read your ballot very carefully.  Now, I don’t know what position each of you holds on that issue, although I suspect, or maybe just hope, that most of you support marriage equality and intend to vote “Approved” on Ref. 74.  I also know, however, that the forces seeking to preserve discrimination in the marriage laws of our state will spend a huge amount of money trying to convince people to vote “No” (actually “Rejected”) on Ref. 74, that some of their material will try to convince people that there is a biblical view of marriage, that that supposed biblical view is the only moral view, and that that supposed biblical view should continue to be enshrined in the secular laws of our society.  You may even hear the ludicrous claim that the purpose of marriage is only to have children, a claim that makes my marriage to Jane and several of your marriages illegitimate, a claim I bother with further here.  If you haven’t heard those things already, you will.  You will hear them in broadcast ads, and you may hear them from some of your friends and family.  So I want to address those assertions (other than the absurd one about children that doesn’t deserve further comment) this morning in a way that may give you tools for responding to them when you hear them.

So let’s start with the basic premise of those who seek to have their personal moral views preserved in the law, namely, that traditional marriage between a man and a woman is “the biblical view of marriage”.  To put the matter quite simply, there is no single view of marriage in the Bible.  Nowhere does the Bible say in so many words that only a marriage between one man and one women is sanctioned by God, as the anti-marriage equality forces contend.  The Bible accepts without criticism many types of marital arrangements.  I’ll cite just one example, the story of Jacob, one of the great Hebrew patriarchs.  He wanted to marry Rachel.  He essentially bought her from her father by working for him for seven years, the Bible there viewing the man’s daughters as his property that he could sell as he might sell a mule.  The father tricked Jacob into marrying his other daughter Leah instead, so Jacob worked for the father another seven years so he could buy Rachel.  Then he stayed married to both of them at the same time, fathering children by both of them.  In this story, and in others, the Bible approves of men having multiple wives and even at the same time having concubines, that is, women with whom they have sexual relations to whom they are not married while the men are married to someone else.. 

We can quite easily see the Bible’s approving of those marital relationships as expressions of ancient cultural norms that we do not accept and that we consider to be immoral today.  But what about the passage we heard from Mark this morning?  There Jesus cites Genesis, saying:  “God made them male and female.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  Isn’t that a biblical mandate for one man one woman marriage, and only that kind of marriage?  The anti-marriage equality forces say that it is.  But if the Bible approving of Jacob being married to two sisters at the same time, and for that matter of their father essentially selling his daughters to him, is an expression of ancient cultural norms that we no longer accept, why isn’t this passage the same thing?  I am convinced that that is precisely what it is.  It states an obvious biological reality—humans come in two main varieties, male and female.  (We know today that that is an oversimplification of human biological reality, but we need not go into that issue this morning.)  Some people then draw a cultural conclusion from that statement of biological reality, namely, that marriage is only between a man and a woman.  The passage, however, doesn’t expressly rule out other marriage possibilities.  It just describes what the ancient world took to be the human norm.  Yes, we are (mostly) male and female.  That is biological reality, but must we really accept as the will and word of God the cultural conclusion that the ancient world drew from that reality? 

I am convinced that we need not accept that ancient cultural conclusion.  We know, as the ancient world did not, that human sexuality comes in many different forms.  For some, sexual attraction to a person of the same gender is natural.  But there’s an even more important consideration.  What is marriage really about?  Is it about sex?  Well, to some extent, yes.  Sexual intimacy can be and often is an important and wonderful part of the intimacy between two people.  But surely marriage is about more than sex.  Marriage is about a much broader intimacy than mere sexual intimacy.  Marriage is about mutual commitment, loyalty, care, and support.  In other words, it is about love.  Love the way Paul described it in 1 Corinthians 13, part of which was the text for our choir’s anthem this morning, love that is giving of the self to the other and considering the other as much as one considers oneself.  Love as sharing your life with another and the other sharing her or his life with you.  Love as being there for each other in the good times and in the bad times.  Marriage is an institution that solemnizes that relationship, that celebrates it, and that seeks to protect it.  And the gender of the people involved has nothing to do with that kind of intimacy.  That relationship can exist equally well between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.  The ancient world that produced the Bible may not have known that truth, but we do. 

The New Testament contains that passage that we heard about a man leaving father and mother and becoming one with his wife that merely reflects ancient cultural norms, but it also has another passage that expresses what is for me an actual divine truth.  That truth appears, among other places, at the beginning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we also heard this morning.  We know it as the Great Commandment.  It reads:  “You shall love the Lord  your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  In Luke, after he approves of that saying, Jesus immediately tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan to make the point that all people are our neighbors, including especially the ones our culture despises and rejects as Jesus’ culture despised and rejected Samaritans.  How can we who belong to the heterosexual majority, for whom marriage to a member of the other sex is life-giving and makes us whole, say that we love our neighbor as ourselves when we deny marriage to our neighbors for whom it is an intimate relationship with a person of the same sex that is life-giving and makes them whole?  We can’t.  If we truly love our gay and lesbian neighbors, we can no longer deny to them the rights, the obligations, and the public recognition that marriage confers.

There are a couple other things that I want to mention that you might find helpful in discussing this issue with friends and family on the other side.  The first is that in our culture there really are two aspects of marriage that we tend to lump together but that can easily be, and sometimes are, separated.  First, marriage has a civil, legal significance.  State and federal laws contain dozens upon dozens of provisions that mention and depend on marriage.  We find them in tax law, estate law, domestic relations law, and in regulations about who can visit a patient in an intensive care unit among many, many other legal provisions.  Marriage in this legal sense involves getting a license from the state, doing some kind of ceremony that can be either before a minister or before a judge, and filing the completed certificate of marriage with the state.  It can be a purely secular matter, as it is when the couple is married by a judge.  Then, for some people but not for all, marriage also has a spiritual or religious dimension.  This is the dimension that we recognize and celebrate when we do a wedding in the church.  There the couple pledges their love and commitment to each other not only before a representative of the law and human witnesses but before God.  We ask God to bless the union of the two people, and then see God as a participant in their relationship, sanctifying it and blessing it.  These two aspects of marriage are separated when people get married before a judge but not by a minister in a church.  Religious objections, misguided as they may be, may apply to the spiritual, religious aspect of marriage.  But in a nation that supposedly is committed to separation of church and state, there is no reason why those objections, misguided as they may be, should apply to the secular, legal aspect of marriage.  If a church doesn’t want to bless those unions, OK.  It’s their loss, but they are free not to marry same gender couples.  It is however wholly inappropriate for that church to try to force its religious beliefs about marriage onto secular society and its law.  Ref. 74 will not force any church to perform a marriage to which it objects and specifically preserves their right not to, so there is no reason why religious objections, misguided as they may be, should be imposed on the secular law, and it is inappropriate for them to be.

Finally, one more argument that anti forces raise that we need to dispose of.  It is the argument that same gender couples in Washington already have most of the rights provided by marriage under our law of civil unions, so there is no need to extend marriage to include them.  The anti-marriage forces are actually running a television ad these days that says that  Ref. 74 is not about equality.  That’s a lie.  Here’s why.  It is true that most if not quite all of the rights and responsibilities of marriage are provided by the civil union law; but what we have is separate legal provisions based on the gender of the people in a relationship.  Much of our country used to have separate school systems based on the race of the people in the school.  In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled those separate systems unconstitutional because, as the Court said, separate is not equal.  Separate is inherently unequal.  Separate says you’re different.  Separate says you’re less.  Marriage, and not something less than marriage or even something with just a different name than marriage, is how our culture says that it values a committed relationship between two people.  Not civil unions.  Marriage.  If we call the committed relationship between two people of the same gender a civil union but not a marriage we are necessarily and unavoidably saying that that relationship is less and is valued less than the identical relationship between a man and a woman.  Civil union is better than nothing, but it isn’t equal to marriage.  It is separate, and it is inherently unequal.  That’s why the existence of the civil union law does not make extending marriage to same gender couples unnecessary.  And yes, Ref. 74 is about equality.

We are an Open and Affirming church.  Our Cabinet has endorsed marriage equality and urged us to vote Approved on Ref. 74.  You are of course free to make your own decision on the issue, but I urge you to vote Approved on Ref. 74.  (“Approved” on Ref. 74 is the vote for marriage equality.  Please read your ballot carefully, as it can be a bit confusing which vote is for the marriage equality law and which vote is against it.)  I hope some of the things I have mentioned here will help you make up your mind if you haven’t already done so and will help you respond to the claims of the anti-marriage equality forces in our state.  God blesses all of God’s children regardless of sexual orientation.  My prayer this morning is that the marriage law of our state will at last recognize the equality of all people that God already knows.  Amen.

Stop the Madness!

     Friday, September 21, two days ago as I write this, was International Day of Peace.  Today at my church in Monroe, Washington, USA, we had a worship service devoted to the theme of peace.  We dedicated a peace pole our children and some adult volunteers made last summer.  I gave a sermon with the title "Stop the Madness!"  It begins with a story that I have already told in this blog, in a post near the beginning of the blog back in 2010 with the title "A Day at Gettysburg."  That story is worth telling again.  The message of that story and of my sermon today, that war is madness that we simply must stop, is worth posting here.  So here is that sermon.  May it inspire at least a few to undertake the hard and necessary work of peace.

Stop the Madness!

Rev. Tom Sorenson

September 23, 2012

Scripture:  James 3:13-4:2c

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 may have told this story here before, but on this Sunday when we mark International Day of Peace and dedicate the peace pole the children made last summer it is worth telling it again.  It was February 1991, or maybe 1992.  It doesn’t matter.  I was practicing law, and I had gone to central Pennsylvania to take some depositions in a case I was working on.  I had a free afternoon, so I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, one of our country’s first national cemeteries, and the place where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address.  It was a beautiful winter afternoon, clear, still, and cold.  Because it was a weekday in winter I had the place almost to myself.  I walked the grounds alone, in silence.  I read the Gettysburg Address inscribed on the monument erected on the spot where Lincoln gave it.  I learned the story of the battle, how over the course of three days more than seven thousand Americans died and many times that number were wounded.  I read about Pickett’s Charge, when Confederate soldiers ran headlong into the Union guns and were mowed down in their hundreds.  I saw the place where it happened, now lovely, peaceful Pennsylvania countryside; and I tried to imagine the horror that had turned those peaceful fields into an earthly hell.  I saw the graves, row upon row upon row of the graves of the Union soldiers who died there.  They didn’t bury the Confederate dead there, but I knew that even more of them died in that place. 

I was stunned.  I was overwhelmed.   I was heartsick, and one thought came to me again and again.  It wasn’t a thought about the heroism of those days, though heroism there surely was.  It wasn’t a thought about honor, for I could see no honor in what had happened there.  It wasn’t about the rightness of the Union cause and the wrongness of the Confederate cause, though surely the Confederate cause of preserving slavery was wrong—very,  very wrong.  The thought that I couldn’t get out of my head was “madness.”  The madness of what had happened there.  The madness of that battle and of that war in which more Americans died than died in all our other wars combined (World War II included), for everyone who died on both sides of the Civil War was an American.  The madness of all war, the madness of nations sending people, mostly young men, to kill and to die; and the madness of people being willing to do it.  The madness of thinking that war is a normal and acceptable human activity.  The madness of thinking that the slaughter of other human beings can be honorable and noble.  In the still, cold air of a sunny winter day in Pennsylvania I felt the madness of war in a way I never had before.  I felt it in my bones, in my heart, in my soul.  It is a feeling I have never really forgotten. 

It is a feeling that came rushing back upon me last Tuesday evening as Jane and I watched the PBS special “Death and the Civil War.”  So much death.  So much misery.  So much loss.  So much grief.  The madness of it all.  Last Tuesday, as we watched that PBS special, I had already written most of a sermon for today based on the passage we heard from James about the causes of violence.  It was a very heady sermon, analyzing how disorder in our souls produces violence in the world.  It parsed the verses where James says what the sages of other spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism, have been saying for a long time.  Our text says “For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”  And:  “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.”  And:  “You covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.”  The Buddhists say the same thing more simply:  If you want peace in the world, begin by creating peace in your soul.  External violence comes from internal violence. 

And that is true.  It is very true.  It is profoundly true.  James was speaking on the personal level, but his truth also applies to nations.  Internal disorder leads to actions that disorder the world.  We want oil, and we don’t have it.  So we invade Iraq, lose several thousand American lives, and kill many, many times that number of Iraqis.  We are attacked.  We are angry and afraid; and in our rage we invade Afghanistan, a place no foreign power has ever successfully conquered.  A place where we are still fighting, still killing, and still dying, more than ten years later, perpetuating a conflict that has killed more Afghan people than we will ever know.  A war that has created far more terrorists than it has killed.  Our spiritual disorder led us to commit acts of violence and destruction on a scale only a wealthy, technologically advanced country can commit.

And last Tuesday as Jane and I watched Death and the Civil War I realized that what our Sunday dedicated to peace needed wasn’t a heady, analytical sermon (as given as we all know I am to heady, analytical sermons) on the causes of violence.  It needed a cri de coeur, a cry of the heart.  So today I give you my cri de coeur.  My cry to myself, to you, to my country, and to the world:  Stop the madness!  Look into your hearts!  Look into your own souls for the cause of the madness, the cause of violence, the cause of war.  Discern your greed.  Discern your rage.  Discern your imperialist ambitions to dominate the world just to satisfy your own ego and your greed. 

We sang “God of Grace and God of Glory” to open our worship this morning.  I chose it because of its line “Cure your children’s warring madness.”  War is madness.  War is death and destruction.  War is pain and loss and grief.  War is lives ended and lives destroyed.  And war is unnecessary.  Nonviolent action can always prevent war if it is used creatively, assertively, consistently, and early.  War is always a failure of the human imagination, of the human spirit.  War may be the way of the world, but it is not God’s way.  It must not be our way. 

In that PBS program Death and the Civil War Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that our most sacred duty is to care for those who fought for our country and to treat the bodies of those who died fighting with dignity and respect.  My friends, that may be a sacred duty, indeed I believe that it is a sacred duty as long as we keep fighting wars; but it not our most sacred duty.  Our most sacred duty is to see to it that there are no more people who fought for our country to care for, no more dead military bodies to respect, because there are no more wars.  When will we get it?  When will we wake up?  When will we stop the madness?  The time is now, not tomorrow.  Stop the madness!  Stop it now!  Amen.

Introduction to the Bible Post Moved

I had mistakenly put a post here that I had meant to put on my church's adult education blog.  The title was Introduction to the Bible, Session 19, The Gospel of John, Part 2.  You can find that post at monroeuccadulted.blogspot.com.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1, On God

I recently gave a three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  Its first two parts lead up to part 3 that addresses the necessity of our beginning, at long last, to use female images for God.  Here's the first of those three sermons.  The other two follow below this one on the blog.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1:

On God

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 15, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Isaiah 55:6-9

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.

There is a question that I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, that I’ve wanted to preach about and not only to discuss in an adult ed. group.  It is the question of our language for God.  Now, I know that “our language for God” probably doesn’t sound like a question to you.  After all, we speak of God all the time without worrying much about the nature of the language we use.  But trust me on this one, it’s a question.  It’s a question for two primary reasons.  The first is the way in which Christians always have and still do understand the words we use for God literally.  The second is the tragic consequences of the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male titles and images for God.  I am convinced that both of these aspects of traditional Christian God talk need to be deconstructed and replaced.  So I am going to preach a three part sermon series, beginning today, on the question of our language for God. 

In this sermon series I want first to share with you some thoughts on the nature of God.  God is after all what we’re talking about when we speak of God.  God, whatever God means, is the object of our God talk, and it turns out that a proper understanding of what we mean when we say God determines how we must understand the nature of our God language.  Then, in the second part of this series next week I will address the question of what a proper understanding of the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God means for a proper understanding of the nature of the language we use when we speak of God.  Finally, in the third part of this series in two weeks, I will turn to the question of the exclusively male language that our tradition has used for God and suggest why we must change that usage to include female images.  I will suggest some appropriate female images for God that we can then start using.

To begin:  Of what do we speak when we speak of God?  A simpler if less theologically precise way of putting that question is Who or What is God?  Philosophers and theologians have grappled with that question for millennia.  They’ve give lots of different answers.  Aristotle called God “the uncaused cause.”  For the ancient Israelites God had a name—Yahweh.  For Hindus God is the ultimate oneness of all being, far beyond anything that can be named.  For Jesus God was Abba, Father.  For the Christians of the Ecumenical Councils from the fourth century CE on God was the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons.  For Muslims God is Allah, which isn’t actually a name but a contraction of Arabic words that mean “the God.”  For theologians of the High Middle Ages in Europe God was that greater than which nothing can be imagined.  For us today God is mostly just God, or the word God with some other word that names some attribute or characteristic of God—God the Father, the Almighty, the Creator, etc.  Islam actually has 99 names for God of this sort.  One of the most commonly used is Allah the Most Merciful.  Actually, Islam has 100 such names for God, but only the camel knows the 100^th.  That’s why camels look so smug and superior.  Theologians often resort to abstractions when speaking of God.   In the twentieth century God became ultimate concern, being itself, and the ground of being.  Theologians speak of the ultimate, the absolute, the infinite.  Or they use words that point to God as something beyond the physical—the spiritual or the numinous, or the transcendent for example.

Pretty obviously God is a difficult concept for us humans to get a handle on.  There is one thing about God, however, that most of these attempts to get a handle on God have in common.  They all point in one way or another to God as other.  To God as different.  To God as beyond that which we normally perceive.  Indeed, one famous definition of God from the twentieth century is “totally other,” although of course theologians insist on saying it in Latin, as if that added anything.  That, I think, is one thing that we can say about God with confidence.  God is other.  God is different.

In the end, when we try to speak of God, we are left with one abiding truth, one abiding aspect of God that remains forever.  God is mystery.  God is ultimate mystery.  Not the kind of mystery Agatha Christie wrote.  Not the kind of mystery that we are to try to figure out but a mystery that we humans can never solve.  A mystery that we should never try to resolve.  A mystery that we are to live with and within, not a puzzle to be figured out with a triumphant Ta Da at our great mental achievement.

God as mystery isn’t a new concept.  We have always somehow dimly perceived that God is ultimately beyond us.  In the Bible, for example, Isaiah has God say “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”  Isaiah 55:8  Yet we have always had reservations about God as pure mystery.  As we have sensed the ultimate unknowability of God we have nonetheless spoken a great deal about God.  We have named God.  We have spoken of God’s will and God’s grace.  We claim to know things about God even as we acknowledge the God is ultimately unknowable.  What’s up with that?  Are we stupid?  Are we nuts to hold to two things both as true when both of them cannot be true?

Well no, we’re neither stupid nor nuts when we do that.  Rather, we are holding onto both sides of a paradox.  A paradox is when two things that cannot both be true are both true.  God is ultimate paradox.  God is known and unknowable.  God is transcendent and immanent.  God is personal and beyond all the limitations of personhood.  It’s not possible for God to be all of those things at once.  It’s not possible, it’s just true.  God is paradox because paradox preserves the ultimate mystery of God.  Paradox points precisely to the way that God is totally other, beyond the bounds of our usual human knowing.

And you may hear the truth that God is ultimately mystery as bad news.  You may well be asking:  If God is so mysterious, so unknowable, what use is God to  me?  It’s a legitimate question, but I think that God as ultimate mystery is actually very good news.  It’s very good news because anything that wasn’t ultimate mystery couldn’t truly be God.  Elizabeth Johnson addresses this truth by saying that rather than signify divine absence, God’s unknowability “fills the world to its depths and then overflows….”  (From The Quest for the Living God.)  God as mystery means that God is truly God.  Anything that we could finally know, could accurately name, could precisely define could not truly be God.  That’s because anything that we can know, name, and define has limits.  It has boundaries that mark it off from everything that it is not.  Yet as the Absolute, the Infinite, the Transcendent, God has no limits.  God has no boundaries.  God’s lack of boundaries and limits, God’s ultimate unknowability, means that God is not something less than God.  That we can in some sense imagine a reality without limits, a reality that we experience but which we can never pin down with our human words and concepts means that we can, however dimly, imagine that which is truly God.  The good news of God as mystery is that we can imagine and connect with a reality that is not less than God, that is indeed God.

The first step then in speaking rightly of God is precisely to realize that whatever we say about God cannot contain the fullness of God.  God transcends our words and our ideas absolutely, and that truth has profound consequences for the nature of our language about God.  To give you just a hint of where this is going, if our language cannot capture or even truly name God, then God is not male.  Which means that if male metaphors or symbols for God, like Father for example, are appropriate, and they are, female metaphors or symbols for God, like Mother for example, are also appropriate.  More about the consequences of God as mystery for our language about God is the subject of next week’s sermon.  Stay tuned.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2, On God Language

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2:

On God Language

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 22, 2012

Scripture:  Exodus 3:13-15

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.

Welcome to the second part of our three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  I want to thank Jane for stepping in for me last Sunday and reading the first sermon in the series for me.  And I want to apologize to her too.  As she said to me after the service last Sunday when we spoke on the phone, that was a very heady sermon.  I know, and I know that this whole series is pretty heady.  In other words this sermon series is very me.  It’s not very Jane, not that she disagrees with the points it makes.  In reading it she was definitely giving you me, not herself.  So Jane, thank you; and I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to give that sermon myself.

In that first sermon in this series I stressed the point that God is and always remains ultimate mystery.  Not a mystery we are to solve but an eternal mystery because God, who on the one hand is always present with us, is also and paradoxically always infinitely beyond us and our human conceptions and understandings.  I said that the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God turns out to have consequences for the nature of the language that we use when we speak of God.  Those consequences of the nature of God, and specifically of God as transcendent mystery, for the nature of our God talk are the subject of this second sermon in this series.

The human desire, indeed the human need, to speak of God is universal.  All human cultures have spoken of God.  Perhaps they have spoken of gods rather than God.  Perhaps they have spoken of Brahman or the Tao, concepts for ultimate reality that are utterly impersonal and without any human characteristics at all.  However they’ve done it, all human cultures have spoken of God.  Our does too.

Yet that human desire, that human need to speak of God presents us humans with an enormous dilemma, or at least it does if we have a proper understanding of that of which we speak when we speak of God.  God is mystery.  God is transcendent.  God is other than and beyond the created world in which we live.  That’s one prong of the dilemma.  The other is this:  We desire to speak of God, yet the only tool we have with which to do it is human language.  We wish to speak, but we can speak only in human words.  That’s the other prong of our dilemma because the human language that is the only tool we have with which to speak of God arises within and is part of the created world that God so utterly transcends.  Because God transcends creation, and because our language is part of creation, God transcends our language.  God is “totally other” than creation (to use a phrase from last week’s sermon), and God is totally other than our language.

Let me use an example to illustrate our dilemma when we try to speak of God.  Behind the house that was my parents’ in Eugene is a great tree.  It’s a tulip tree, and I have always loved that tree.  I call it my tree.  It has grown from a little sapling that we planted many years ago into a large, magnificent tree today.  I can speak with precision and accuracy about that tree.  I can speak precisely of its height, the color and shape of its leaves, the circumference of its trunk.  With a little more investigation I could describe its roots and measure their length and depth.  With more investigation and a microscope to aid my observation I could describe my tree’s cellular structure.  Well maybe I couldn’t.  I flunked plants in high school, but somebody could.  These and many more things about my tree I can observe with my human senses and describe most adequately using human language.  There is nothing about my tree and nothing about human language that means my language cannot adequately describe my tree.  It can.

It is not so with God.  God and human language are of essentially different natures.  Human language is created, God is not created.  Human language is finite, God is infinite.  Human language is a human creation, God (our friendly local atheists to the contrary notwithstanding) is not a human creation.  Human language arises out of and is part of human life within creation.  God is beyond creation.  Human language is a tool humans have the capacity to create and have created to facilitate their existence within creation.  God creates creation, is immanent in it, but ultimately remains beyond it and is different from it.

So we’re left with a big question:  If God is so transcendent of and different from our created human existence with its human language, and if human language is all we have with which to speak of God, how can we speak of God at all?  Isn’t our language, which is the only tool we have, completely inadequate for the task of speaking of God?

The answer, or at least the beginning of an answer, to that question is that indeed we cannot speak of God, indeed our language is completely inadequate for speaking of God, if we understand the statements we make about God to be the same kind of statements that I can make about my tree.  That is, we cannot speak of God, and our language is completely inadequate to speak of God, if we understand our statements about God literally, that is, if we understand them to be stating facts about God the same way my statements about my tree state facts about that tree.  If we understand our statements about God that way we are saying that God and my tree are on the same order of existence, that they exist on the same level of creation and we can talk about them the same way.  In other words, when we understand our statements about God literally, when we understand them to be stating facts about God, we bring God down to the level of my tree.  In other words, we make God a thing.  Yet of course God is not a thing.  Things are created.  There was a time when they were not.  God is not created.  There never was a time when God was not.  We cannot make literal, factual statements about God with our human language without making God less than God.

So is there no legitimate way we can make statements about God at all?  Well yes, actually, there is a legitimate way we can make statements about God.  We can make legitimate statements about God in our human language without making God less than God if we understand our language about God not literally, that is, not factually, but symbolically. 

OK, our language about God has to be symbolic.  Our words for God are symbols, but what’s a symbol?  For our purposes here a symbol is a word.  It can also be an object, like the cross, but for now we’ll consider a symbol to be a word.  A symbol is a word that isn’t taken literally but that points beyond itself to something else, something beyond itself, something transcendent, something to which the symbol can connect us but that it cannot capture, define, or fully and accurately encompass.[1] 

Again, perhaps, an example will help.  One of the most common words for God in the Christian tradition is Father.  Christians call God Father all the time—Our Father, who art in heaven; Heavenly Father; the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so on.  When we call God Father we are probably already using the word symbolically even perhaps without knowing it.  You can see the symbolic nature of the word Father for God if you will consider all of the ways that God is not your father.  God didn’t beget you biologically, a human male did.  God didn’t raise you in any human sense.  Human beings did; and probably, although not necessarily, one of those people was a man.  Ancient Israel may have thought of the god Yahweh as a male person of sorts, but I doubt that any of us really thinks God is a male person or anything much like a male person.  We call God Father all the time, but we can recognize the limitations of that word for God.  There are lots of ways in which God is not father.

So is it inappropriate to call God Father?  No, calling God Father is perfectly appropriate as long as we recognize the symbolic nature of the word father when we apply it to God.  Calling God Father is appropriate if, as many of us have, we have experienced God as present in our lives in a way that we experience as fatherly.  There is nothing wrong with calling God Father if you also recognize that God isn’t literally father but is symbolically father.  Father doesn’t pin God down.  Father isn’t God’s essence.  God as Father is a symbol not a fact.  The word father can point to something about God.  It may truly express something about our experience of God.  In that sense calling God Father may be true, but it is also necessarily false.   God may be like a father to you, but at the same time God is not a father to you.  That’s how you know that the word Father as applied to God is a symbol not a fact.

It cannot be otherwise.  Our words for God must be symbols not facts because God transcends our words absolutely.  If God did not transcend our words God would not truly be God.  God would be just another fact, and God is surely not just another fact.

Now, in preparation for next week’s final sermon in this series, I invite you to consider briefly what the symbolic nature of our language for God means for the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male images for God.  Is God male?  No, God transcends such biological distinctions as male and female.  Do our male images for God, like Father, define, capture, or fully characterize God?  No, God transcends those images absolutely.  So if we may experience God as Father but God is also not Father, are male images like Father the only appropriate images for God?  Stay tuned.

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[1] For a fuller discussion of symbols see my book Liberating Christianity, Chapter 3.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3 She Who Is

This is the third sermon in my sermon series on our language for God.  The other two appear above.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3:  She Who Is

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 29, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Luke 15:8-10

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.

So here we are.  We’ve come to the third and final sermon in this three part series on the language we use for God.  In the first two sermons we looked at the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God and found that God, while always paradoxically present with us in the world, is ultimate mystery, transcendent, beyond, totally other.  In the second sermon we looked at what that understanding of God means for language for God and found that our God language is necessarily symbolic not factual.  Now we come to the third and final sermon, and I understand perfectly if you’re saying to yourself, or even out loud to others, Why in heaven’s name has Sorenson subjected us to these sermons that are more like theology lectures than sermons?  I freely admit that these sermons are more like theology lectures than like real sermons; but today I ask you to bear with me one more Sunday, because as heady as the subject of this series has been, this stuff is really important.  Today we turn to the necessity of using feminine images for God, and that’s really, really important.

It’s really important because the language that we use for God matters.  It matters a lot.  As Elizabeth Johnson, one of my teachers, one of my favorite theologians, and a real hero to people of faith today because of the outrageous and unfounded attacks on her work by the Catholic hierarchy, says:

“The symbol of God functions as the primary symbol of the whole religious system, the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life, and the world.  Hence, the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicitly represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty.  She Who Is

What we say about God both reflects and shapes what we take to be good, true, and beautiful; and that really matters.  Our tradition’s history of using exclusively male images for God matters.

I hear women say that they do not feel excluded by male language for God.  Some of you have said that to me.  Good.  I’m glad you don’t feel excluded.  But I have to tell you that the issue we’re addressing of the use of feminine images for God is larger than whether individual women do or do not feel excluded by exclusively male language for God.  Like all true symbols, the symbols we use for God function, as Elizabeth Johnson says; and they function in the psyche of people and of whole cultures whether individual people are aware of their functioning or not.  The Christian tradition’s exclusive use of male language for God has cultural consequences even if on the individual level we are not conscious of those consequences.  That’s why the issue of the language we use for God is so important.

The tragic but undeniable truth is that throughout Christian history women have been and still are dismissed, diminished, and disparaged by sexist cultures in church and society.  Patrimony—rule by men, excludes them.  Androcentrism—the centrality of the male—diminishes them.  Misogyny—hatred of women—degrades and even dehumanizes them.  The sexism of the Christian tradition cannot be overemphasized.  It appears even in the later writings of the New Testament, especially in the letters known as the pastoral letters, which seek to limit the role of women in the church.  In the high middle ages St. Thomas Aquinas, still a towering figure and unavoidable authority in Catholic theology, taught that women are inferior to men in every way, that they are essentially misbegotten men.  Martin Luther, the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation, agreed, saying that women were created only to serve men and to bear children.  Our Congregationalist forbears in New England branded independent women as witches and even killed some of them.  Today by far most Christians belong to churches that will not ordain women to the full ministry of Jesus Christ, a fact we in the progressive UCC would do well to remember.  Even in our secular American society sexism persists.  Women still don’t earn equal pay for equal work, for example.  Christianity has a miserable record on its treatment of women both in the past and today.

Exclusively male language for God not only expresses Christian sexism, it is a ground of Christian sexism.  It perpetuates Christian sexism.  Over and over Christianity says God is Father.  It calls God He.  It doesn’t say God is Mother.  It doesn’t call God She.  We hear it over and over, and we learn, subconsciously perhaps but all the more powerfully for that, that God is male.  That men are more like God than women are, that God is more like men than God is like women.  Because, as Elizabeth says, our language for God reflects what we take to be the highest good and greatest beauty we learn that male is the human norm.  We learn that women somehow deviate from the human norm, are somehow less than the human norm.

Let me give you an example of how unconscious sexism works.  Have you ever noticed how our young girls, our daughters and granddaughters, call all of their stuffed animals “he”?  They do, or at least until very recently they did.  They learn very young that male is the norm.  I was pleased recently when I heard my five year old grandson call his favorite stuffed animal, called Baby Bear, she; but surely that’s an exception among us.  In our society and in our faith tradition male is the norm, and our exclusively male language for God is both a source and a buttress of that sexist conception.

We have learned that God is beyond all gender distinctions.  We have learned that our language for God is symbolic.  We have learned, I hope, that our exclusively male symbols for God are destructive.  They diminish women, whom Genesis says are made in the image and likeness of God every bit as much as men are.

So if all of that is true, and I am convinced that it is, why don’t we use female images for God?  We call God Father.  Why don’t we call God Mother?  We call God He.  Why don’t we call God She?  Some Christians do.  Elizabeth Johnson’s  primary symbol for God is “She Who Is.”  I am convinced that it is imperative that we too start using female words and images for God.

Throughout my ten and a half years here as your pastor I have actually avoided male images for God.  I have tried to use gender neutral ones; but, as Elizabeth Johnson taught me long ago, it’s not enough.  Gender neutral images aren’t enough because they don’t do enough to correct the destructive imbalance in our God image that our centuries of exclusively male language have created.  Our hymnal, the New Century Hymnal, also avoids male images for God, but it has only a few female ones.  I’ve managed to find a couple of hymns that do, and we’ll sing them in this service.  I wish there were more of them.

My friends, I intend to start using female images for God in our worship.  Not exclusively, for God isn’t female any more than God is male.  I will however continue to avoid male images because of the crying need for a corrective to all of those male images that we’ve all heard for so long.  My purpose in this whole, heady three part sermon series has been to explain the rationale, the justification, and the necessity for us to start using female words and images for God.  I didn’t want to spring them on you unawares.  So you will hear me call God Mother.  You will hear me call God She.  You will hear me start the Lord’s Prayer the way they do at University Congregational UCC in Seattle, my home church before I got the call here as your pastor, namely “Our Father, Our Mother who art in heaven….”  I hope you will understand.  More than that, I hope you will join me as we reject a harmful part of our tradition and move into new, broader, healthier, truer images of God. 

It won’t be easy.  I know that.  We are all products of a faith tradition that has never used female images for God.  We’ve never, or at best have only rarely, heard them.  They sound strange.  They grate even.  I know that.  I also know that it’s time, indeed it’s way past time, for us to take corrective action.  The symbol of God functions.  Exclusively male symbols for God function destructively.  God is neither name nor female.  Our words for God, be they male, female, or gender neutral, are symbols that point to God not facts about God.  Female images for God are every bit as appropriate as male ones, and they are much more needed today.  “In God’s image God created them.  Male and female God created them.”  Women too bear the image and likeness of God, and God may come to us in images of women and from the lives of women.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  So let us pray to God our Mother.  Let us praise the name of She Who Is, the great I AM in feminine guise.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  Amen.

On Peace

The Christian education folks at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, the church I serve as pastor, decided earlier this year that they wanted to do a vacation bible school for our children.  As they worked on that project they changed from doing a traditional vacation bible school to doing what they are calling a "peace camp."  They will teach the children about peace and will help them build a peace pole, a pole with the words "may peace prevail on earth" on it in four different languages.  They will install the pole on the grounds of the church as a permanent expression of our commitment to peace.

I can think of little more important in the world today than teaching children, and all people for that matter, about peace and specifically about the Bible's vision of peace, which is very different from the world's vision of peace.  So today, the day before our peace camp starts, I build the worship service around the theme of peace the way the Bible sees it.  Here's the sermon from that service.  May it inspire all who read it to think anew about the ways of peace.

On Peace

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 8, 2012 

Scripture:  Micah 4:3-4; Matthew 5:38-46; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

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 doesn’t make any sense, does it.  Jesus says “Love your enemies.”  He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist an evildoer violently.  He’s kidding, right?  We’ve got no business loving our enemies.  They hate us, and the only sensible thing to do it to hate them back.  How else are we going to defend ourselves from them?  Don’t use violence to resist an evildoer?  Nothing else works!  Oh, of course all that love your enemies stuff, all that beat your swords into plowshares stuff is very nice and all; but we live in the real world, not in some fairy tale where everyone is nice and peaceful.   The world just isn’t like that.

Now let me ask you something, or rather let me ask you quietly to ask yourself something.  How many of you just now as I said those things were shaking your heads and saying yes, that’s right?  How many of you agree with that rejection of nonviolence as unrealistic and even foolish?  It’s perfectly understandable if you do.  What I just gave you is the voice of the world on the issue of violence and war, of nonviolence and peace; and we all live in the world.  We’ve all been conditioned by the world.  We’re all immersed in the world’s way of seeing things from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death.  In the world’s way of seeing things that rejection of love of enemies and nonviolence as the way to peace just makes sense.  It’s the only realistic way to see things.

But here’s the thing.  The Bible is the foundational book of our faith, and the Bible really does have a different view of the matter.  The Bible really does call us to a different view of the matter.  We call Jesus savior and Lord, and Jesus really was a prophet of nonviolence.  As we heard in our reading from 2 Corinthians Paul really did consider what the world considers weakness to be true strength.  We can just dismiss all that out of hand if we want, but we can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we take the Bible seriously.  We can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we believe that Jesus is our savior and Lord.  So I invite you now to come with me on a brief journey into the Bible’s way of seeing issues of violence and peace, into Jesus’ way of seeing issues of violence and peace, and to consider them afresh.

Jesus is the Bible’s prophet of nonviolence par excellence, but the Bible’s teachings on peace go back much farther than Jesus.  In the Psalms, for example, peace is one of God’s greatest gifts to the people.  Thus Psalm 4 says “I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”  In the Psalms peace is a goal to which all should aspire.  Thus Psalm 34 says “seek peace and pursue it.”  For the prophets too peace is God’s gift to the people.  Thus Isaiah has God say “my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed.”  Isaiah 54:10  And then there is the great prophecy of peace from Micah that we recited as our call to worship this morning:  “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation shall not life up arms against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  It is one of the most enduring images of peace in all of scripture.

Of course, the world promises people peace too, but the Bible’s vision of peace is very different from the world’s vision of peace.  Or perhaps better, the Bible’s vision of how to attain peace is very different from the world’s vision of how to attain peace.  The world seeks peace through violence.  The world thinks that war, which is the opposite of peace, can bring peace.  Thus we call a war between imperial powers that decimates a continent and kills a generation of young men a “war to end all wars.”  We fight a “war on terror,” thinking that raining death and destruction upon people who already hate us will make them stop hating us.  That is the world’s vision of peace, peace through violence, and when you boil it down to its essence like that it really doesn’t make much sense, does it.

The Bible has a different vision, and a much better one.  The Bible envisions peace attained not through the opposite of peace but through the ways that truly make for peace, namely through economic justice and nonviolence.  We see the justice part of the Bible’s vision very clearly in our call to worship from Micah.  The prophet envisions a world free from war, and he sees how such a world can be created.  He prophesies peace, then says “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.”  Using an agricultural image like his image of the implements of war turned into the implements of peaceful and productive agricultural pursuits, Micah prophesies a world that is at peace, without the need for the implements of war, because it a world of distributive economic justice.  That is, it is a world in which all have enough.  All are secure in their material needs.  It is a world without poverty.  It is a world in which the rich do not exploit the poor.  That kind of justice, economic, distributive justice, may be a consequence of policies that may be pursued in peacetime, but the Bible knows that such justice is also and more importantly a cause of peace, a prerequisite of peace, a sine qua non of peace.

And the Bible knows that a true lasting peace cannot be created through violence.  A true lasting peace must be achieved through nonviolence.  That is Jesus’ message especially but not only in the brief passage we heard from the Sermon on the Mount.  There Jesus says “love your enemies.”  As a bumper sticker put out by the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches (which the UCC is not but I wish it were) says “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Jesus says “do not resist an evildoer,” and the word translated as “resist” means to resist violently, to resist through military force, as the late, great Walter Wink has taught us.  When he says turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, go the second mile Jesus gives us examples of how we are to resist evil.  Not with violence but through creative, assertive nonviolent resistance.  (If you’re not familiar with that interpretation of Jesus’ sayings on nonviolence please let me know.  I’ll be happy to explain it to you in greater detail after the service.)  The Bible’s vision of peace is a vision of nonviolence.  It is a vision of a world of economic justice and peace achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil.

And many people respond:  Well, isn’t that nice.  It’s nice they say, but it’s wildly unrealistic.  It can’t be done.  It doesn’t work, not in this world anyway.  Maybe in some ideal world up in heaven, but not here.  That’s what advocates of the Bible’s vision of peace always hear, but let me ask you something:  Has the world’s way of violence ever brought lasting peace?  The only possible answer to that question is no, it hasn’t.  Violence has defeated enemies, but it has never put an end to violence.  That “war to end all wars” ended in 1918 and led directly to an even bigger war that killed even more millions of people a few short years later.  Since then our country has bounced from one war to another—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, and those are only the major ones.  There have been lots of minor ones too.  We always say our wars are necessary to bring peace, and they never bring true peace.  They never result in an end to war.  It’s only a matter of time, and usually not very much time at that, before we’re back at war again.  People say nonviolence doesn’t work.  I say how do you know?  Have we ever really tried it?  And I say why is it so hard for the world to understand that it is precisely violence that doesn’t work?  I don’t see how history teaches any other lesson.

The Bible has a better vision than the world’s vision.  Jesus had a better vision than the world’s vision.  It is a vision of real peace, lasting peace, just peace.  It is a vision of peace through justice for all God’s people and of nonviolence as both its end and as its means.  It is a vision of peace that says you attain peace by being peaceful not by being violent.  It is a vision that knows with the sages of many times and many faith traditions that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Starting tomorrow many of our children will spend four days studying peace.  They will create a peace pole, a symbol of our faith’s abiding commitment to peace.  To peace the way the Bible sees it.  To peace the way Jesus saw it.  Peace the way God lives it and calls us to live it.  May they learn well.  May we learn well.  Amen.