Not Even Death

Not Even Death

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Romans 8:38-39

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.

OK. I get it. I’m old. I suppose that the truth of that statement necessarily depends on what you mean by old. I mean by it that I’m 72 years old. That’s not old compared to some people I know. I know two women who are over 100 years old and are still mentally quite sharp. I’m not old compared to them, but at least I’m getting there. Sure. Everyone is aging; but at least by the time we’re in our 70s, if we’re lucky enough to live that long, age gets to be more of an issue than it was when we were younger. Or at least it does for me. We learn when we are still quite young that we’re all mortal. Everyone dies. We know that for most of our lives, but when we’re old mortality becomes more real. At least, it does for me.

I’ve been thinking about mortality a lot recently. The other day I wrote this in my journal: “Everybody you love dies. Every animal you love dies. Everyone who has been important in your life dies, and eventually you do too. I [can] feel the despair creeping in….” I have lived through the deaths of so many people who were important to me and whom I loved or at least respected a lot. My first wife, who is the mother of my children, died far too young over 16 years ago. Both of my parents are gone. Every dog or cat I’ve ever had and loved has died. (Why by the way is losing a pet so hard? I don’t know, but I find it so hard that I’m reluctant ever to have another one.) My major Ph.D. professor has been dead for many years. A Presbyterian minister who was a friend and mentor of mine died a while back. So did a UCC pastor who had given me great pastoral care when my first wife’s cancer was diagnosed and surgery on it performed. Everyone you love dies. Everyone who was important in your life dies. It can just become overwhelming. It is so easy to think: “What’s the point of living? Everyone dies.” Everyone who is important to you dies. Sooner or later everyone still alive who loved you or to whom you were important loses you. That reality has been hitting hard these days. After all, I’m old.

I feel the threat of despair over the reality of death creeping up on me, but every time I start to feel it one of two things comes to my mind. The first is some of the lyrics of the old hymn “Abide With Me:” “When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.” “ Change and decay in all around I see—O Thou who changest not abide with me.” “Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?” “I triumph still if Thou abide with me.” Then there’s this final verse:

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;

Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;

Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;

In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

I’ve always said, and I say again now, that I’m agnostic about life after death. I don’t know if there is any life after death or if there is what it looks like. Still, I find “Abide With Me” to be powerful and comforting. I hope they sing it at my memorial service. I find them to be profoundly true: “I triumph still if Thou abide with me” They express my deepest hope: “In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” They call God “help of the helpless,” and we’re all ultimately helpless in the face of death Those words were written over 150 years ago. They spoke divine truth then and they speak it now.

That God will abide with me—and with you and everyone—is my deepest hope. Yet in Christ Jesus I know that it is more than a hope. In faith it is a certainty. It is the promise of Christian scripture and tradition. We see the promise clearly and powerfully in these words from St. Paul: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39 NRSV. In these ancient lines Paul speaks the greatest truth there ever was or could be. Nothing ever has, does, or ever will separate anyone from the love of God. We Christians know that unfailing love in Jesus Christ. People of other faith traditions know it in other ways, but the truth is still there. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can or ever will separate anyone from the love of God. Thanks be to God!

What is speaking to me with particular power these days is that Paul specifically includes death in his list of things that cannot and never will separate us from the love of God. Death so seems to have the last word. Our deceased loved ones are gone—from this plain of existence anyway. Almost everyone who ever lived is dead, gone, and forgotten. One day we will be gone and forgotten too. Gone from this life, that is. Forgotten by people in this life. The deceased just aren’t here anymore, and one day we won’t be here either.

That’s where Paul’s inclusion of death in his great list comes in. All of our dead loved ones are gone from us, but they are not gone from God. We’ve forgotten most of the people who ever lived, but God hasn’t. We never knew most of the people who’ve ever lived, but God knew them and still does. Death has separated them from us, but it hasn’t separated them from the love of God. Death won’t separate any of us from that love either. That’s the assurance our Christian faith gives us. We don’t know what not being separated from the love of God after death looks like. We just know that whatever it looks like, even if it is only the oblivion of nonbeing, we are held in it in God’s love.

That old hymn “Abide With Me” speaks to that truth, or at least we can legitimately hear it speaking to that truth. Despair over the reality of death is what the Christian tradition calls a temptation. It is a temptation to the sin of giving up on life and giving up on God. So “Abide With Me” sings: “What but they grace can foil the tempter’s pow’r?” Indeed it is by trusting and resting in God’s grace that we can overcome the sin of despair. Indeed, I am convinced that it is the only way to overcome the sin of despair. So when despair comes knocking on your door close the door with prayer. Close the door with scripture. Close the door with faith. Close the door with trust in God. Close the door knowing that not even death can or ever will separate you, me, or anyone else from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Staying on the Mountain, Or Not

Staying on the Mountain, Or Not

Scripture: Mark 9:2-9

Years ago when I was practicing law in downtown Seattle I had a corner office on the 66^th floor of the tallest building in the city. I had spectacular views of the Cascade Mountains to the east and Mount Rainier to the southeast. One winter morning I got to the office early. I looked out my window to the east. I saw a spectacular sunrise over the Cascades. It was a bright clear morning. The Cascades were covered in snow. As the sun came up behind them the sky turned vivid pinks, oranges, and reds. I thought I’d just sit down and enjoy the view for a couple of minutes before beginning work. After what I thought was just a few minutes I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed, minutes of which I had no memory, indeed minutes of which I had not been consciously aware. That experience, I think, sheds some light on the New Testament story for Sunday, March 3, the story of the Transfiguration. So let’s take a look at that story.

It’s one of those famous New Testament stories that comes up in one version or another every year in the Revised Common Lectionary. This year the Revised Common Lectionary gives us Luke’s version, but I’ve cited Mark’s older version above because I like it better. The Transfiguration comes up in the lectionary every year because the Christian calendar has a Transfiguration Sunday in it every year as the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent. It certainly is an odd story. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John, the inner circle of the inner circle, up a mountain with him. There isn’t anything in Galilee that we would call a real mountain, but never mind. Such as the mountains there are, they went up one. Then Jesus was “transfigured” before the eyes of the three disciples. His clothes become whiter than anything on earth could make them. Then Moses and Elijah appeared there with him. We aren’t told how these guys other than Jesus knew who these figures were since the story doesn’t say that they identified themselves or that Jesus introduced them, but never mind. Moses and Elijah are really important figures. They represent the two parts of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, that were already scripture in New Testament times, the Law and the Prophets. Moses brought the Torah law to the people. Elijah is (supposedly) the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, the one who was to reappear before the coming of the Messiah. A voice, clearly intended to be the voice of God, says: “This is my Son whom I love. Listen to him.” Peter is beside himself. The text says he didn’t know what to say, but in good Peter fashion he said something anyway. He said to Jesus let’s build three shelters up here on this mountain, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. Pretty clearly Peter wants to stay up there on the mountain with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Jesus doesn’t even respond to Peter’s suggestion. He just leads his three friends down off the mountain. A truly strange story indeed.

It’s a strange story, but it has some really important things to say. The story says that Jesus is the fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. That is at least one of the meanings of Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus. What the voice from heaven says is really important too. Referring to Jesus Christ the voice doesn’t say believe in him. It doesn’t say worship him. It says “listen to him.” For a very long time Christians have been a whole lot better at believing in Jesus and worshipping him than they’ve (we’ve) been at listening to him. The world would be a much better place than it is if people would do a lot more listening to Jesus whether they believe in him as Lord and Savior or not.

All of that important stuff is in this story, but there’s something else in it that I want to focus on here. Peter wanted to stay up on the mountain with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Our text portrays him as befuddled, or better, overawed. He doesn’t know what to say. Mark’s version of the story, the oldest one we have, says he was “terrified.” The way the text says that Peter said something but didn’t know what to say points to how this bizarre experience of the Transfiguration had affected him. He was beside himself. He was transported out of his usual consciousness into a befuddlement, but it was a befuddlement he wanted to prolong. That’s why he suggested building dwellings for the three great figures before him and staying up on the mountain.

The experience I had that winter Sunday morning when I became transfixed by a sunrise over the Cascades and lost track of time is called a mountaintop experience. Peter had a mountaintop experience that day on the mountain with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. That doesn’t just mean that I was looking at mountaintops and Peter was on one. Mountaintop experiences in this sense don’t necessarily have anything to do with mountains. A mountaintop experience is one of elevated consciousness, an elevated consciousness in which one can even lose awareness of time like I did that winter morning high in a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. It is a transcendent experience, one that is entirely unlike our normal, everyday, conscious experiences. Mountaintop experiences are what every mystic longs for and seeks to induce. They transport us above and beyond our ordinary world into a higher state of being. They may be immensely exciting, or they may produce a calmness in our souls that we don’t otherwise experience. Either way, they are wonderful, powerful experiences unlike anything else in life.

And when we have one we always want to stay in it. We want to prolong it. We want to stay with the high that no drug has produced. We want to stay on the mountaintop. Mountaintop experiences are some of the peak times of our lives. They’re wonderful; and they’re very rare, at least for most of us. We wish life could always be like that. We’re like Peter. We want to stay forever up there in our transcendent state. But here’s the thing: When Peter says to Jesus let’s build shelters for you, Moses, and Elijah and stay up here Jesus doesn’t even answer him with words. He just leads his friends back down the mountain. Back into the real world. Back into the world of struggle and pain, the world of love yes but also the world of fear and despair. Back into a world of troubles, a world of suffering. Back into the world where we really live. Back into the world where our work is. Back into the world where God’s work is. Our story doesn’t say that Peter argued with Jesus about going back down the mountain into the real world, but I imagine he must have been disappointed. It really was much better up there on that mountain, or so at least I’m sure it seemed to Peter. But Jesus just led him back down. Jesus wanted him back down. Jesus wanted him back in the real world where there is real work to do, not up on that mountain where Peter was both physically and spiritually high.

That’s where Jesus wants us too. Back in the world. Back to the work to which God calls us. Mountaintop experiences have their place and their role in life. They can reinvigorate us. They can both calm and inspire us. They can help us understand what our work in the world actually is and help us find the resources to keep at that work. Mountaintop experiences have their role, their value, but they aren’t where we’re supposed to stay. The world needs us. The world needs everyone who is willing to undertake the sacred work of being God’s love in the world. The sacred work of caring. The sacred work of relieving suffering. The sacred work of creating justice. The sacred work of peace.

So let’s value our mountaintop experiences when we have them. Perhaps like the mystics let us even seek them out from time to time. But let’s always remember: Life is in the valleys, the low places, not on the mountaintops. That’s where God wants us most of the time. So let’s get on with the work gives us off the mountaintop. Amen.

On the Indictability of the President

There is a big issue in the United States today around whether or not a sitting President of the United States can be indicted for criminal conduct. The matter is of great public import today because it appears obvious that Donald Trump could and probably should be indicted for various crimes including but not limited to obstruction of justice. We hear in the media that there is a Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting president. The argument against the indictability of a sitting president usually involves two contentions. One is that the president's constitutional duties are so important that the president should not be distracted from them by having to respond to a criminal indictment. The other is that the Constitution specifies impeachment as the remedy when a president has committed a crime. The issue is of course a legal one. The place to begin any inquiry into any legal issue is with the applicable constitutional or statutory law. 

In the case of the indictability of the president the only foundational law that might apply is the United States Constitution. There is no federal statute on the issue. Two primary legal considerations arise from an examination of what the Constitution has to say about the issue. First, the Constitution does not expressly provide that a president either can or cannot be indicted while in office or otherwise. The question would be easier to answer if the Constitution did say something directly on that issue, but it doesn't. It does provide that the president may be impeached by the House of Representatives and removed from office by a vote of the Senate upon the House's articles. 

The proper legal way to frame the question, then, is: Does the Constitution intend impeachment and removal from office to be the sole remedy for criminal conduct by a sitting president? The Constitution does not specify that impeachment is the sole remedy for criminal conduct by a sitting president, but neither does it say that impeachment is not the sole remedy. When we're faced with a question of constitutional interpretation like this we must look to the entire constitution to see if there is anything in it that can answer the question before us. When we do that with the US Constitution we don't find a lot that's helpful, but we do find a little bit.

We find first of all that, like I said, the Constitution does not expressly answer our question. We then ask, however, whether it says anything at all about whether or not officials of the federal government are or are not subject to criminal indictment while in office. We find that while the US Constitution doesn't say much on the issue it isn't entirely silent on it. Article 1, Section 6, of the US Constitution provides, among other things, that US Representatives and Senators "shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, shall be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses...." The Constitution thus provides a limited immunity from arrest for United States Representatives and Senators. It reasonably follows from the immunity from arrest that the Constitution provides for Representatives and Senators that those persons are also immune from indictment under the terms of their immunity from arrest. The Constitution provides no such immunity for the president.

That the US Constitution is not entirely silent on the question of immunity from arrest (and by implication indictment) for federal officials but says nothing about immunity of the president gives rise to a strong argument in favor of the indictability of a sitting president. The framers of the Constitution knew how to provide for immunity from criminal process when they wanted to. They did it to an extent with regard to Representatives and Senators. They didn't do it with regard to the president. The necessary inference is that the framers of the Constitution did not intend the president to be immune from criminal process while in office. They did not intend impeachment and removal from office to be the sole remedy against a president guilty of criminal conduct. 

The argument that a president cannot be indicted because he or she can be impeached and removed does not stand up to critical legal scrutiny. The argument that the president's constitutional duties are so important that he or she should be immune from indictment remains, but it appears from the analysis above that the framers of the US Constitution did not intend the president to be above the law. This issue becomes one of conflicting public interests. On the one hand there is a public interest in having the president free to conduct the office of the presidency. On the other hand there is a public interest in maintaining the rule of law. That we are a country ruled by law not by persons is a bedrock principle of our republican form of government. That we have hardly always lived up to that principle doesn't change the fact that it is a bedrock principle for us. Making the president immune from indictment puts the president above the law at least while he or she is in office. It seems to me that especially in a case such as the one we currently have before us in which our president appears to have committed the crime of obstruction of justice preserving the rule of the law, which the president's statements and actions have directly attacked, must prevail. The president must not be allowed to claim immunity from prosecution because he is above the law in any case. When the president has ignored and attacked the rule of law that rule applies with added force. President Trump is not and must not be held to be immune from indictment.

What a Difference a Word Makes

What a Difference a Word Makes

                                                                         Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Luke 6:29; Matthew 5:39

So, we all know about the Sermon on the Mount, right? At least, I’m sure we’ve all heard of it. In seminary we used to joke that if we ever gave the Sermon on the Mount as a sermon in a preaching class we’d flunk. See, the Sermon on the Mount isn’t really a sermon. It is a long collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. You’ll find it at chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew. It is a diverse collection with sayings that cover a broad range of issues. Here I am interested in part of it that comes in chapter 5. There Jesus famously says: “Do not resist the evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Matthew 5:39. Keep that verse in mind as we turn to a similar verse in Luke, Luke 6:29. There Luke has Jesus say: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” Obviously this verse and the one from Matthew I just quoted are similar. They both refer to someone striking a person on the, or a, cheek. But notice the difference here. Matthew has Jesus say “right cheek” while Luke has him say only “cheek.” Luke leaves out a word that’s in Matthew’s version of this saying, namely right. It is that difference that I want to explore here.

The verse in question about cheek strikes in Luke appears in a collection of Jesus saying that, though much shorter, is quite similar to the Sermon on the Mount. Except here Jesus isn’t on a mount. He’s on a plain. Scholars call this selection of Jesus sayings “the Sermon on the Plain.” It begins: “Then he came down with them….” Luke 6:17. It’s quite striking how Luke, apparently quite intentionally, removes Matthew’s mountain and puts Jesus “down,” that is, specifically not on a mountain. The reason why Luke does that is probably that the author we call Luke wasn’t Jewish but the author we call Matthew was. Matthew puts Jesus on a mountain to deliver what is by far the longest collection of his sayings because Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses, and Moses received the Torah law from God up on a mountain. Luke doesn’t present Jesus as the new Moses. He doesn’t at least in part because he’s writing for a Gentile audience to whom Moses didn’t mean nearly as much as Moses meant, and means, to Jews. So Luke gets Jesus off his mountain and places him on what scholars call “the plain.”

Then there’s that difference in wording in the two versions of the strike on the cheek saying. Matthew has it “right cheek,” and Luke has it just “cheek.” One word difference, and how much difference between two nearly identical sayings does that really make? Especially here? I mean, if Jesus’ point is just that we shouldn’t hit back why should it matter which cheek someone hits us on? We’d think none. We’d think it doesn’t make any difference at all. I’m pretty sure that’s what most of us would think, and we’d be flat wrong. That Matthew makes it specifically the right cheek that someone hits us on is important. Really important. Let me explain. Or better, let me let Walter Wink explain.

The late Walter Wink was a major 20^th century Protestant theologian. He is best known for a huge and scholarly trilogy on what he (along with St. Paul and a lot of others) calls “the powers.” He also wrote a smaller, more accessible book about the powers called The Powers That Be. It would be worth your time to read it. Here I want to look only at one small but really important part of Wink’s work, namely, how he explains the meaning of Matthew’s “right cheek.”

Wink starts out by calling Jesus ethical teachings “Jesus’ Third Way.” Of course if there’s a third way there must be first and second ways that come before it, and for Wink there certainly are. The first of those ways is the way of violence. When people act in this way—and tragically this is the way in which most people have always acted—they try to solve problems with violence. They try to create a world of peace and justice through violence. Through armed might. Through using that armed mite to kill people they think are the enemy. Jesus rejected the way of violence. We often understand his “turn the other cheek” as precisely an expression of his rejection of violence, and it is but in its own way. The second way is the way of pacifism. It is the way total nonresistance. It is letting the assailant hit you again without doing anything to stop the assault. For a couple of millennia now this second way is what people have thought Jesus was counseling with his “turn the other cheek.” Don’t fight back. Don’t do anything to resist. Just take another blow because that’s what God wants you to do. It may surprise you to learn that Wink says Jesus rejected that way too. Well, that’s precisely what Wink says, and it’s precisely what Jesus did. Wink uses an exegesis, an explanation, of the other cheek saying in Matthew to explain his point. His explanation goes like this.

We start by understanding something about the world, the culture, in which Jesus uttered this saying. In that world, the world of first century CE Judaism, the left hand was considered unclean. People avoided using it as much as possible. There is an assumption behind Matthew’s “right cheek” that the person hitting you is doing with their right hand. No one in the world would do that with the left hand. Then we ask: If someone is going to hit you on the right cheek, what’s the only way he can do it? Only with the back of his hand, that’s how. Go ahead and try it, although of course don’t actually hit anyone. You could hit a person on their left cheek forehanded or with your fist. You can’t really hit them on the right cheek with your right hand that way. You can hit them only with the back of your right hand. That’s why Matthew’s Jesus says “right cheek.” Luke apparently didn’t get it. He was Greek not Jewish, so he didn’t have a Jew’s strong aversion to using the left hand. If he knew a version of this saying that included “right cheek” he apparently didn’t understand the significance of “right.” So he left it out and said only cheek. In doing that he lost a great deal of Jesus’ meaning.

Wink then tells us that striking someone with the back of the hand is how a person in a superior position of authority and power would strike a person in a lower position of authority and power. In particular, that’s how a master would strike a servant or a slave. Just slap them across the face with the back of your hand. That’s all they deserve, not that you use all of your strength against them. Hitting with the fist is how equals fought. And of course if I hit someone in the face with my right fist I’d hit them on the left side of their face, on their left cheek. Jesus is assuming here that the cheek blow in question is one administered by a superior person to an inferior one with the back of the hand.

So now what happens if the person who has been slapped across the right cheek turns the other cheek, the left cheek, to the assailant? It puts the assailant, who assumes he is superior to his victim, in an impossible position. Now if he is going strike his victim again he has to strike that person’s left cheek. He could do it with his forehand or with his fist but not with the back of his hand. In other words, our assailant has two choices. He can break off the attack, or he can treat his victim as his equal. Either way the victim wins and the assailant loses.

In Matthew’s version of the saying though not in Luke’s Jesus is being quite brilliant. He has given a poor, subordinate person who could never beat a superior one in a fistfight without suffering dire consequences a way to win without fighting. Use something the assailant is assuming, that he is superior to you, against him. Don’t hit back, but don’t just take it either. Be clever. Be creative. Be assertive. Understand the situation you’re in and find something in it that you can use to win without using physical violence. That, Wink says, is Jesus’ Third Way. That way is radically nonviolent. Jesus tells us never to use violence for any purpose. But that way is not passive. It doesn’t just take it. It doesn’t play the victim. It counsels the victim to stand up for herself, to assert her dignity and her equality, but to do it nonviolently. That, Wink tells us is what the whole passage that “turn the other cheek” comes from is about. “Do not resist” means do not resist violently. It doesn’t mean don’t resist at all.

Jesus always stood on the side of the victims, the voiceless, the powerless; but he never told them to get violent. Quite the opposite. Put your sword away. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. Jesus knew the profound truths about violence. Violence always begets violence. More importantly, God is nonviolent. Radically nonviolent. Always and everywhere nonviolent; and God calls us to be nonviolent too. Nonviolent, but not passive. Nonviolent, but not mere victims. Be nonviolent, but oppose evil with nonviolent, creative, assertive resistance. That’s what Jesus taught—and teaches. So let’s get on with it, shall we? Amen.

God Did It? Really?

God Did It? Really?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Genesis 45:3-11, 15

The patriarch Jacob has a lot of sons, twelve of them actually. One of the latter born of them was Joseph, who was Jacob’s favorite because he was his first sons by Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel. Back at Genesis chapter 37 Joseph’s brothers did a terrible thing to him. Yes, he was being a jerk. Yes, he told his brothers dream he’d had, or at least claimed to have had, that suggested that one day he would lord it over them though he was younger than they. Still, what they did to him was terrible. First they threw him into a dry well planning on leaving him there to die. Then instead they sold him to some passing Arab traders who took him as a slave to Egypt. What Joseph’s brothers did to him was an act of unspeakable treachery and cruelty. They sinned gravely in what they did. They violated God’s laws several different ways. They acted out of human hatred not out of divine love. There’s no way to justify what they did. What they did was cruel, vicious, and utterly inexcusable, or so it seems to us and must have seemed to Joseph.

The story Genesis tells about what happened to Joseph in Egypt is wildly improbable. There’s nothing in the records of ancient Egypt to corroborate it. It surely never happened as a matter of historical fact, but never mind. That doesn’t matter for purposes of the story. Genesis says that Joseph became in effect the ruler of Egypt, or at least as the pharaoh’s agent he did. Genesis has it that Joseph ruled one of the ancient world’s greatest empires and greatest civilizations. He, a Hebrew not an Egyptian, supposedly did that. He didn’t as a historical matter, but never mind.

As Genesis continues Joseph’s brothers, the ones who first meant to kill him and then sold him into slavery, come to Egypt to escape a famine back home in Canaan. The story of what happens next has several twists and turns, but basically Joseph provides for his brothers, whom he recognizes as his brothers, without revealing his identity to them. Then comes the part of the story the lectionary puts in the readings for February 24, 2019. Joseph tells his brothers who he is, but they are “dismayed.” So he says to them: “Now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” And again: “It was not you who sent me here, but God.” Whereupon Joseph and his brothers kiss and make up.

Every time I read this story I want to say: “God did it? Really?” Genesis would have us believe that God brought about a human act of treachery and violence in order to accomplish some divine purpose. Genesis would have us believe that God took a young man’s freedom, took him from his home, family, and everything the young man knew, without his consent. Genesis would have us believe that God did all that and that it was all OK because God had some great purpose to accomplish through those unconscionable acts, namely, to save God’s favorite people years later during a time of famine.

And every time I read this story I have to say: “I don’t think so! The God I know, love, and seek in my horribly fallible human way to serve doesn’t do stuff like that. The God I know never would do stuff like that.” No, it was Joseph’s brothers who did something terrible to him, and it was precisely they who did it, not God. In the story God doesn’t tell them to do it. God’s doesn’t tell Joseph to go along with it because it will all turn out to be for the good in the end. In fact, God doesn’t actually appear in the story of Joseph and his brothers at all. So no. I’m sorry. What Genesis says about it to the contrary notwithstanding, God didn’t first try to kill Joseph, then sell him into slavery instead.

So if God didn’t do it, why does Genesis say that God did? The first part of the answer to that question, I think, is that Hebrew people in the ancient world that produced this text believed that everything that happened on earth was somehow God’s doing. The ancient people who told this story surely believed that if Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery it was really somehow God’s doing. Ancient Hebrews believed that. I don’t. Genesis can lay what happened to Joseph (and a lot of even worse things) at God’s feet and say “You did it!” I can’t. Humanity’s catalog of horrors stops me from doing it. God didn’t create the Gulag and cause mass starvation of Soviet people in the 1930s. Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did. God didn’t cause the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazi henchmen did. We humans are tragically capable of immense cruelty toward our fellow humans. We can’t escape our culpability for doing it by pointing to God and saying “It wasn’t us, it was you” Genesis could say that. We can’t.

So no matter what Genesis says about it, God didn’t first plan to murder Joseph, then sell him into slavery instead; but we must then ask: Does that mean that this story of Joseph and his brothers has no meaning for us? Well, no. I don’t think it means that at all. I think we can see a profound truth in this story even if it isn’t the truth the story claims to tell. Let me use an example from my own life to illustrate the point.

On July 31, 2002, at about 10:45 pm, my first wife Francie died of breast cancer. She was only 55 years old, too young to die by our contemporary standards. Her death was nothing but a tragedy. There was and is absolutely nothing good about it. Her life ended too soon. Mine has gone on, and there has been much blessing in it since Francie’s death; but none of that makes her death anything but a tragedy and a deeply painful loss for me and our two children. The only sense in which I can say that God did it, that God ended her life too soon, is that God made us all mortal. But her too early death was a loss for God too. God didn’t do it.

God didn’t do it—and yet. That Francie’s premature death was a tragedy and that God didn’t do it doesn’t mean that God couldn’t bring something good out of it. I have long said that I was a better pastor than I otherwise would have been had I not lived through Francie’s final illness and death with her. That experience and the profound grief that followed helped me understand other people’s tragedies and grief in a way I never would have otherwise. That the people I served knew that I had lived through that loss and grief gave me a credibility with them in their time of loss and grief I otherwise would not have had. God used Francie’s illness and death and my suffering and grief over her illness and death to make me a better pastor. God brought that good thing out of what was and remains only a very sad and tragic thing.

But let’s make one thing perfectly clear here. That God was able to bring something good out of something horribly bad doesn’t mean that God caused the bad thing! Bad things happen. We are creatures not gods. Suffering and death are inescapable parts of created existence, of human life. Bad things happen, and the only good news in those bad things is that God loves us, holds us, and walks through them with us. And sometimes God is able to bring something good out of them. God did it with me after Francie’s death. That’s how I know it is true.

That’s how I think we should understand the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers did a very bad, a profoundly sinful thing to him. They meant to kill him. Instead they sold him into slavery. There is nothing good about what they did. We must understand what they did as an act of pure evil, for that’s what is was. We must also understand that God didn’t do it, for the God we know in Jesus Christ never would. Yet the good news here is that God brought something good out of an act as evil as what Joseph’s brothers did to him. God can and does draw good things even out of terrible, sinful acts and events. That is a lesson I and many others have learned from life. It is a lesson we all can learn from the story of Joseph and his brothers.

So no, God doesn’t perform evil acts. God doesn’t cause suffering and death, but know this: God is with us holding us in love through our suffering and death. God can and does use suffering and death to bring good things to us and to God’s world. God did it with Francie and me. God did it with Joseph and his brothers. God can, and will, do it with you too. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Does Science Prove That All Reality Is Subjective?

Does Science Prove That All Reality Is Subjective?

I am no kind of scientist. I’m even less of a mathematician. I haven’t had a science class since I was a college undergraduate in the late 1960s, and I haven’t had a math class since the early 1960s when I was a sophomore in high school. So I certainly don’t claim any understanding at all of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. I see programs about it on TV. I see chalk boards covered with mathematical formulas that mean absolutely nothing to me. I am no kind of scientist or mathematician, but I find quantum mechanics absolutely fascinating. I suppose I’m fascinated with it because even the scientists who claim to understand it say it makes no sense. They say you know how a subatomic particle is moving or where it is but not both, or something like that. They say a subatomic particle doesn’t take an actual shape until we observe it. When we’re not observing it it’s just an amorphous mass of probabilities, or something like that. Quantum mechanics is so bizarre that I even have a book in my bookcase with the wonderful title Alice in Quantumland. The scientists say quantum mechanics explains reality at unimaginably small sizes. They say Einstein’s theories of general and special relatively explain reality at very large sizes. Then they confess that no one has ever successfully put quantum mechanics and relativity together into a unified theory that explains all of reality. I don’t understand it, but I find it all quite fascinating.

Then there’s something called “quantum entanglement.” I’ve seen a program about it from PBS’s Nova series. I’ve actually seen that program twice in an attempt better to understand it. Here’s what I got out of it. Albert Einstein figured out mathematically that in quantum theory something affecting one entangled quantum particle must simultaneously affect another quantum particle entangled with it regardless of how far apart they are. Einstein thought his discovery proved that there was something wrong with quantum theory because what came to be called quantum entanglement just makes no sense. Einstein, despite being the great genius that he was, wanted things to make sense; so he never quite accepted quantum mechanics. The quantum scientists couldn’t find anything wrong with Einstein’s math and the prediction it made, but of course science doesn’t accept much of anything that it can’t prove through experimentation. They couldn’t prove quantum entanglement experimentally, so the concept sort of got forgotten for quite a while.

Then back in the 1960s some scientists at the University of California at Berkeley rediscovered older papers on quantum entanglement and set out to prove or disprove it experimentally. Their experiment, the specifics of which I don’t understand but which don’t much matter here, seemed to prove that quantum entanglement was real. There remained, however, the possibility that some unaccounted for variable had gotten into their experiment an influenced the results. Finally to prove quantum entanglement scientists has to come up with a way of demonstrating it that eliminated that possibility. Eventually some scientists led by a physicist from the University of Vienna did just that using two telescopes on the Canary Islands to capture light from two separate quasars billions of light years away that couldn’t possibly have been altered as part of the experiment. They showed that quantum entanglement is real. When we observe one entangled particle, thereby giving it shape, its entangled particle takes the same shape at precisely the same instant though they are physically unconnected with each other. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense, but I have to admit that it’s immensely fascinating.

One of the scientists on that Nova show, trying to explain quantum entanglement, said that it is as if space and time disappeared. I take that to mean that what we perceive as space and time, as distance between objects and a period to time that it would take anything to move between them, at the quantum level doesn’t exist except in our perception of it. We perceive it, but it has no objective reality outside of our perception of it. We set up an experiment that has quantum particles located at what appears to us to be a distance. To them they aren’t at a distance at all. Space disappears. Time between an effect on one and the effect on another disappears. We perceive them, but they aren’t objectively there.

And of course all of that makes absolutely no sense. Or does it? Quantum entanglement suggests to me that science may be proving through experimentation what I have long maintained on the basis of my understanding of how we sentient beings are created and function in the world. In my book Liberating Christianity, I put it this way:

Because we humans perceive the world from a center that we call our self, because as humans we have no other way of being in the world, all we can know is what we perceive, what we experience. Whether anything beyond that is real, we simply cannot know.[1]

And:

Because as humans all we have is our perception, our experience of things, all reality is subjective and experiential. The only reality that we humans can know is subjective, experiential reality. Reality is subjective for me because I experience it. I know what I experience through my senses. I cannot know that my senses do not deceive me. Indeed, I know that sometimes they do.[2]

When we stop to think about the matter, which of course we rarely if ever do, these conclusions, that all we humans have is our perception or experience of things and that therefore our reality is necessarily subjective and experiential, seem unavoidable to me.

Perhaps another reference to Liberating Christianity will help here. I trust you’ll excuse me the faux pas of quoting myself again.

Perhaps you’ve seen the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves. In that movie computers have taken over the world. They have enslaved all humans so they can use the electrical current every human body produces to run themselves. The humans, however, or at least most of them, don’t know that they live in little pods hooked up to machines feeding the computers because from birth the computers have manipulated their consciousness, their perception, so that they perceive what we would call a normal human existence. They have homes and families. They have jobs. They live the way we live, except they really don’t. They only perceive that life, they experience it, and so, to them, it is real. The movie shows us that their perceived life is in fact objectively unreal. The point that we have to come to terms with is that we cannot know that the same thing isn’t happening to us! All we have is our perception, our experience of reality, and our perception and experience are what make ‘reality’ ‘real’ for us.[3]

Some of the conclusions that necessarily flow from this understanding are troubling. I don’t do a very good job of wrestling with them in Liberating Christianity, and I won’t tackle them here. The point for now is that those troubling conclusions do not make the understanding any less unavoidable. Perception and experience are all we have. Therefore reality is for us unavoidably subjective.

What we perceive as reality when it comes to quantum entanglement is unavoidably subjective too. We perceive distance between two entangled quantum particles. The particles don’t. We’ve set up an experiment that includes placing our detection devices for the particles some significant distance apart. The particles couldn’t care less. To them, as the scientist on the Nova program said, it is as if space and time didn’t exist.

That reality of quantum entanglement seems to me to support my contention that all reality is for us experiential and subjective. I don’t of course need science to prove my contention. I am convinced that it remains valid even if science has nothing to say about it, and I don’t think science could ever disprove it. We aren’t talking about scientific truth here. Still, I find it fascinating that this odd, counterintuitive, nonsensical conclusion of quantum mechanics, a conclusion that even the great Albert Einstein could not accept (though his contemporary and co-Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr could and did), fits so neatly with my understanding of the nature of reality. We perceive space between entangled quanta. They don’t. So is space real? To us yes. To them no. Actually, it all makes perfect if perfectly counterintuitive sense.

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon 2008, p. 202.

[2] Id., p. 203.

[3] Id. pp. 203-204.

Living in the Parched Places

Living in the Parched Places

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Jeremiah17:5-8

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.

The prophet Jeremiah is a fascinating character. He’s known as the “Gloomy Prophet,” and for good reason. He lived and prophesied in Jerusalem during the final Babylonian siege of that city in 586 BCE. It’s actually quite amazing that he wasn’t killed, not by the Babylonians but by his own people. He kept telling them that they should capitulate to the Babylonians. He said resistance was futile and that their defeat by the Babylonians was God’s punishment of them for their faithlessness. Some of his fellow residents of Jerusalem wanted him killed. The king didn’t kill him, but he locked him up in a guardhouse; and once he got thrown into a dry cistern. Yet he survived the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. The conquering Babylonians of course quite liked him. Eventually he went to Egypt, and as far as we know died there. Jeremiah can be bleak reading. He foresaw nothing good happening. He foretold defeat and destruction. He turned out to be right of course, but no one wanted to hear him in his day. He’s not a lot of fun for us to hear in our day either.

Yet for all Jeremiah’s doom and gloom there are passages in the book that bears his name that truly express profound truth. Jeremiah 17:5-8 is one of them. That text, which may or may not actually be from the prophet Jeremiah (probably not) says: “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals…, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” And: “They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness….” But: “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water.” The text here gives us a sharp juxtaposition  of two radically different ways of being. Trust in God, here called the Lord, that is, Yahweh, and you will live and thrive. Trust in mere humans, and you’ll live in the parched places, that is, places that are dried up and bereft of lifegiving water.

The text of course uses simile here. It uses images from the ancient Middle East—deserts with no water and life-sustaining places with water. It may be that those images spoke more powerfully in the ancient world of the text than they do to us, but those images still speak to a crucial dynamic of life among us. They speak to the distinction between life focused on the material and life focused on the spiritual. In our world today untold numbers of people suffer because they have lost their connection with the spiritual dimension of existence. They live only in and for the material. So many people live that way that they aren’t the only ones who suffer from it. Indeed the whole world suffers because so many modern people have lost touch with the spiritual. Let me explain.

Our dominant Euro-centered white American culture is the most materialistic culture the world has ever seen. And I mean materialistic in two senses. First, I mean what most Americans would mean by the term. Materialistic in this sense means valuing the accumulation of material things above all else. We may not hear the phrase “keeping up with Joneses” like I did when I was young decades ago, but we white Americans are still powerfully ensnared by the allure of physical possessions. One good way to see what’s going on in a culture is to look at its advertising, and in our advertising today we primarily see two things. We see a fear of illness and death in the way the big pharmaceutical companies pitch prescription drugs not to medical providers but to us lay people. That aspect of our culture too is a consequence of our loss of connection with the spiritual, but my focus here is on the other aspect of our culture that we see reflected in our advertising, namely, our preoccupation with material possessions.

I mean, just look at what TV advertising says to us. Buy this  car and your life will be perfect (in part because you’ll drive on roads with no traffic). Order a house full of new furniture from this online outfit so that you’ll look like a success and impress neighbors and family. Buy this insurance to “protect” your possessions, never mind that insurance may protect the monetary value of possessions but does nothing to protect the possessions themselves. Buy stuff at Walmart so you can save money and buy more stuff, and never mind the social and economic consequences of Walmart’s policies. Vacation at this immensely expensive resort to you’ll be young and beautiful. The examples could go on and on.

Folks, that way lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. Some of us have learned that material possessions can never truly satisfy our souls. We buy something hoping it will make us feel better. Maybe it does for a time, but the feeling doesn’t last. So we buy more and more and more. Perhaps we go hopelessly into high-interest credit card debt to do it. And it’s never enough. Countless Americans have followed that path into the parched places of alcoholism, drug addiction, broken relationships, depression, and even suicide.

Second, I mean materialistic in its philosophical sense, which is even more profound than the term’s economic meaning. Philosophical materialism is the conviction that only the material, the physical, is real. Philosophical materialism has its origins in the rationalism of the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution that was a big part of it. Enlightenment thinkers thought that human reason could solve all problems. It can’t, but the Enlightenment’s reliance on it led to a humanistic rationalism that has no room for the spiritual. Science deals with the material and only the material. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe science was offering up one fantastic discovery after another about the physical world and indeed about the whole physical universe. Science claimed, and claims, to prove its conclusions through observation and experimentation. Science is such a powerful tool for explaining physical reality (not that it has or perhaps ever will answer all questions about that reality, but never mind) that much of western European culture concluded that only that which can be established through science is real. Hence philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism is perfectly rational. It makes sense. After all, all we can see or touch is physical. Problem is, philosophical materialism denies a whole realm of existence. It denies an ocean of human experience around the world and across the ages. Yet even many Americans who self-identify as Christian, Jewish, or of some other faith are probably in their heart of hearts philosophical materialists. Certainly all or at least most secular humanists and all atheists are philosophical materialists.

That way too lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. That way lie the parched places because to be fully human is to long for connection with something greater than ourselves, with something transcendent, with something infinite. To be fully human includes striving for connection with that which is beyond us. It is to know at a deep level of our being that there must be and indeed that there is more to reality than this material world. To be fully human is to seek the depth dimension of reality, the reality behind reality, the more in everything that is. To deny that there is more, to deny the depth dimension of all that is, is to deny a core part of what it is to be human. It is to deny our true selves; and when we deny our true selves we shrivel up, maybe not physically but psychologically and spiritually.

When we wake up to who we really are, when we recognize the truth that most humans of every time and place have recognized, that there is a spiritual dimension of reality, that is, that God is real, we come alive, or at least we can. We become who we are meant to be, or at least we can. When we tend our relationship with God we blossom We see the world in new and lifegiving ways. We become like Jeremiah’s tree planted by water, or at least we can. We don’t have to live in the parched places of materialism. We can live in the lushness of life with God. So let’s get on with it, shall we? Amen.

Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

Concluding Remarks From a Critique of the 2018 UCC Manual on Ministry

In late 2018 a national entity of the United Church of Christ known as MESA (Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Accountability) issued a new Manual on Ministry. For several decades at least the UCC has used an older Manual on Ministry as a guide for authorization of ministry in the denomination. In the UCC authorization for ministry is handled not nationally but regionally by Committees on Ministry of the regional bodies known as Associations. Each Association is autonomous, and the Manual on Ministry that comes out of the denomination's national offices is not mandatory for any of them. Nonetheless, most if not all of them have used the Manual on Ministry that the new one seeks to supersede as their guide for making decisions on authorization issues of numerous sorts.

I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, a Conference (a larger regional body) that also functions as an Association, that is, I did when I first posted this piece. I have been studying the new Manual on Ministry, at first in earlier draft forms, for well over a year. When MESA issued what it considers to be its final version of the Manual, I spent a good deal of time with it. I have written a rather long critique of that Manual that concludes that I cannot support my Conference adopting it as our guide on ministerial authorization. I present here a slightly edited version of my Concluding Remarks from that critique.

Before I get to stating my major remarks from that critique, I need to explain some background. For a long time the UCC has had three forms of ministerial authorization. They are ordination, licensing, and commissioning. All three of them are established in the Constitution and Bylaws of the United Church of Christ. In its earlier drafts of the new Manual, MESA reduced the forms of authorization essentially to one, ordination. MESA clearly would do away with licensing and commissioning altogether if it could. Objections from UCC people to that reduction led MESA to include in the new Manual something called Lay Ministerial Standing, a type of authorization that corresponds closely with what we used to call licensing. The new Manual has nothing that corresponds to what we called commissioning. Licensing and Lay Ministerial Standing are both intended to apply when a particular ministerial setting, usually a local church of the denomination, cannot for whatever reason call an ordained person to fill a ministerial opening. Commissioning was a type of authorization for ministry in which the UCC has an interest and wishes to support but that does not fit the traditional definition of an ordainable call. It has been granted to spiritual directors, for example. Our Pacific Northwest Conference has commissioned a woman to a national ministry related to the Our Whole Lives curriculum, the UCC’s study program on human sexuality.

We used to define an ordainable call as primarily a ministry that involved word and sacrament. That is, a person was ordained, with a couple of minor exceptions, only to a ministerial position in which the ordained person would preach and teach the word of God and preside at the UCC’s two sacraments, baptism and Eucharist. Eligibility for ordination used to require that the candidate have received an M.Div. degree from an accredited seminary. Some years ago the denomination’s General Synod, it’s national gathering, created something called alternative paths to ordination that sought to authorize ordination of persons without an accredited M.Div., but getting an M.Div. was still the primary way in which a person became eligible for ordination.

The new Manual replaces licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing. That’s not what this kind of authorization is called in the denomination’s Constitution and Bylaws, but MESA mostly ignores that reality. MESA clearly wants to do away with commissioning. Yet because commissioning too is established in the UCC Constitution and Bylaws it can’t write it out of the denomination’s practice altogether. The new Manual mentions both licensing and commissioning but says that new licenses and commissions are not expected after 2018. MESA wants us to replace licensing with Lay Ministerial Standing and to replace commissioning with ordination.

I have many objections to the new Manual on Ministry. It is badly written and edited. I point out some of those flaws in my larger critique of the Manual. It makes some unfounded theological assumptions about the faith of  all ordained people in the denomination. I point that error out in my longer critique too. Here I will discuss only my two major objections to the new Manual on Ministry. They are:

First, in my opinion the new Manual on Ministry's handling of the ordainability of a call is woefully inadequate. It represents a major departure from traditional UCC practice. Its discussion of ordainability is vague at best, but it clearly greatly expands the nature of an ordainable call beyond ordainability’s traditional definition. Ministry of word and sacrament, the traditional markers of an ordainable call, are mentioned in the manual’s discussion, but they are only small parts of much broader considerations with regard to a call’s ordainability.

The only reason I can see for this broadening of the definition of ordainability is the manual’s dismissal of commissioning as a type of authorized ministry. As I said, in its handling of licensing and commissioning the new MoM runs afoul of the UCC Constitution and Bylaws, which specifically provide for those types of authorization. Its (mis)handling of ordainability is one of the new manual’s major faults. It along with its dismissal of other types of authorization (other than Lay Ministerial Standing) are a major reason why I do not support our Conference accepting it as our standard for authorization.

Second, there’s how the manual handles ordainability of persons. In the past a person obtaining an accredited M.Div. degree was the major and preferred way for a person to satisfy most of the criteria for ordination. The new manual makes no mention of an M.Div. degree, not even as one path to ordination. It does mention seminaries in its discussion of theological education, but the manual’s clear intent is to make what we used to call alternative paths to ordination the primary path to ordination.

The manual calls for COMs to assess eligibility for ordination by evaluating a person’s qualifications by holding them up to the Marks of Faithful and Effective Authorized Ministers. Those Marks list a large number (although not as large as the first edition of the Marks) of characteristics and abilities a “faithful and effective” authorized minister should possess. The manual is vague at best as to how a Committee on Ministry is supposed to do that. It says nothing about how many Marks a person must satisfy or about how a Committee on Ministry is to assess a person against the Marks. The manual’s provisions with regard to the Marks are vague at best.

Assessment against the Marks is simply no substitute for seminary education. Yes, I know. Seminary education is immensely expensive. Seminaries are closing, so there are fewer local or regional options for seminary education. Nonetheless, I believe the seminary experience to be irreplaceable. I cannot imagine being as prepared as I was for ordained ministry without my seminary experience at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry. The learning I received in the classes, the interactions I had with faculty and fellow students, the field work I did with corresponding classes at school, all of these things formed me for ministry in ways I would not have been without them. Similar seminary experiences have formed women and men for professional ministry for a very long time.

Going to seminary is inconvenient for many people, but then it has always been inconvenient for many people, and it cannot be denied that the cost of seminary has created a crisis in seminary education. I am convinced however that the UCC would be much better advised to develop ways of making seminary more affordable through tuition assistance or subsidies to our seminaries than we are to abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination. Because the new Manual on Ministry does precisely that, abandon seminary education as the primary path to ordination, I cannot support our Conference adopting it as our guide for ministerial authorization.