Unconditional

Unconditional

Rev Dr. Tom Sorenson

For

Kirkland Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

March 31, 2019

Scripture: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

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 is of course one of Jesus’ most familiar parables, the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I also find it to be one of the most powerful of all of Jesus’ parables. It’s a simple story really. A man has two sons, and he apparently is rather well off. We know he has a house and at least some farm animals. His younger son asks him for his share of his inheritance in advance, while his father is still alive. The father agrees and gives him what would amount to one third of his net worth. That’s what the younger son would have received upon his father’s death under a law that appears in Leviticus. The younger son takes his money and disappears. We’re told that he squanders all that he has been given in “dissolute living.” Then, perhaps not surprisingly, he falls on very hard times. He thinks to himself: I’d be better off as one of my father’s hired hands than I am now. At least I’d have enough to eat. So he composes a little speech of repentance: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. [Gee, do you think?] I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” Then he heads home. Before he gets there, while he is still far off our text says, his father sees him. We’re told his father was “filled with compassion,” though presumably the father doesn’t know at this point why his son is returning home. We’re told the father “ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The son then starts to deliver the little speech he had devised: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” He never gets to deliver the last line of his speech, his request to be treated like one of his father’s hired hands. It seems his father interrupts his little speech, or at least turns away to give instructions to some of the father’s slaves: “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” The man’s older son disapproves of his father’s extravagant welcome of the prodigal son, but the father brushes off the older son’s objections by repeating what he had said before: “This brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” Whereupon the parable ends.

Now, if you’re like most church people with whom I’ve discussed this parable you probably agree with the older son. After all, he’s been the faithful one. He’s the one who has never left. He’s the one who has stayed and done all the work. He says his father has never given him anything so he could party with his friends. So why does the father so extravagantly welcome the wastrel son home? Shouldn’t the father be condemning him for his sinful ways? Shouldn’t the father say to the younger son “you made your bed, now lie in it. Be gone with you! You’ve gotten all from me that you’re gonna get!” That at least is what the older son thinks he dad should be saying to his younger brother. And most of us say yes. That’s right. The older son is the good guy here. The younger son has lived an evil life. He has sinned just as he says he has. The only right and proper thing the father should do with him is condemn him and send him away. Right?

Well no, not right. See, an awful lot of us think that that is precisely what the father should be doing here; and from a worldly perspective I suppose it is what the father ought to be doing here. Yet the one person who says no that’s not right is Jesus. It’s his parable. He tells it to refute Pharisees and scribes who condemned him for welcoming sinners and eating with them. According to the Pharisees and the temple authorities (the scribes) of the time a righteous person didn’t welcome sinners, he shunned all contact with them. He didn’t invite them to dinner, he’d have nothing to do with them. So Jesus tells this parable about a father who welcomes a sinful son and throws him a party to celebrate his return. Jesus tells this parable to say to those Pharisees and scribes who were criticizing him: No. You’re wrong. God doesn’t want us to reject sinners, God wants us to welcome them. God doesn’t want us to refuse fellowship with sinners but precisely to break bread with them. We may think the older brother is right. Jesus says no, the older brother is wrong and the father is right. I imagine those Pharisees and scribes to whom he told the parable thought he was nuts or at least horribly wrongheaded. Jesus’ parable advocates a morality that certainly wasn’t their morality.

And here’s the thing: This parable is about a very earthly family, a father and two sons. We don’t know where the mother is, but it doesn’t really matter. We have in the parable three human beings. Jesus doesn’t present any of them as divine figures in any way. They’re just mortal human beings like the rest of us. But remember: This isn’t just any old story. It is a parable of Jesus. Jesus’ parables usually speak on one level of here humans, but he tells parables to make some point about the kingdom of God or about God’s ways and desires. It seems pretty clear that the father in this parable represents God. He speaks and acts the way Jesus taught that God would speak and act in the circumstances of the parable. Jesus is telling us through this parable that God is like the father here. God’s not like the younger son of course, but neither is God like the older son. God doesn’t engage in dissolute living the way the younger son did, but neither does God reject or condemn the younger son who had engaged in dissolute living the way the older son does andNo thinks his father should. No, God in the person of the father welcomes the prodigal home with joy and thanksgiving, no questions asked.

That’s how God is. God always welcomes us home with joy and thanksgiving, no questions asked. In this parable the father doesn’t wait to hear an explanation from the son. He doesn’t wait until the son has begged his forgiveness. He doesn’t even let the prodigal son recite all of the little speech he had prepared. The father sees the son. That’s all it takes. The father welcomes the son back unconditionally. Unconditionally! No questions asked. No  answers required. No repentance necessary. That’s how God is. Just come. Just be there, and God will, metaphorically speaking, put the best robe on your back, a ring on your finger, and throw you a big party. In other words, God will welcome you with great joy. God always welcomes everyone with great joy, no questions asked. God’s love, God’s grace which is God’s love in action, is unconditional. Always. Everywhere.

And somehow the absolutely unconditional nature of God’s love is something we humans keep trying to change. We, or at least the church, always wants God’s grace to be conditional. We turn grace into an if/then proposition. If you do the right things God loves you. If you don’t do the wrong things God loves you. If you believe the right things God loves you. If you don’t believe the wrong things God loves you. Don’t do the right things and God will damn you. Do the wrong things and God will damn you. Don’t believe the right things and God will damn you. Believe the wrong things and God will damn you. We’ve all heard it. You have to do life right in order to be saved the church says. God will only save you if—fill in the blank.

This if/then understanding of God’s grace of course gives the church great power over people. The church can say, and for most of its history has said, we control your salvation. Do what we tell you to do and don’t do what we tell you not to do and you will be saved. Believe the things we tell you to believe and don’t believe the things we tell you not to believe and you will be saved. We, the church, have the keys to heaven. You’d better let us control your life and your thoughts or you’ll spend eternity in torment in hell. We’ve all heard it. We’ve probably all been taught it as divine truth. Just why we humans have bought the notion that God’s grace is conditional I don’t claim to understand. I do understand that God’s grace is absolute not conditional. If it were conditional it wouldn’t be grace, it would be payment for a service, a service of actions and/or beliefs.

So let me suggest something. If you’ve been taught that God’s grace is conditional go read the Parable of the Prodigal Son again. If you want to understand what God’s grace really is go read the Parable of the Prodigal Son again. When you do, pay attention to what the father in the story says and does. Notice how he welcomes his son home with joy and celebration before the son has said a word to him. Before he can possibly know anything about what the son has been doing or why he is coming home. Then understand this: That’s how it is with God. No matter where you’ve wandered off to, no matter what you’ve done, God is always there loving you. Caring about and for you. Doing all that before you’ve done a single thing to deserve it. Ready to celebrate when you return to God but not hating or damning you even if you never do. See, that’s often not how it is with human love. We make our human love conditional all the time, but that’s not how it is with God. God doesn’t engage in if/then arrangements. God engages is always and ever arrangements. God always loves us. God always saves us. God is like the father in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus wanted us to understand that truth. So often we don’t. Isn’t it about time we did? Amen.

What's Going on in Russia?

What’s Going on in Russia?

There are two things you have to understand if you want to understand what’s going on in Russia today, Russia itself  and Vladimir Putin. Few Americans understand either Russia or Putin well at all. We will never deal effectively with Russia on the international stage unless we understand both of them much better than most of us do.

I’ll start with Russia. Russia is not a western country. It is different from typical western countries in at least these ways:

It sits between Europe and Asia, and it has both European and Asian characteristics.

It has no tradition of democracy.

It has no tradition of respect for individual rights.

It has a centuries old tradition of government that is authoritarian at best and totalitarian at worst.

It has a centuries-old history of repeated foreign invasions. Over the centuries Russia has been invaded at least by Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, the French under Napoleon, and the Germans under Hitler. That history affects how Russians as a people think of issues like order, security, and individual freedom.

Except for the relatively short period of Communist rule (1917-1991), it has a centuries old tradition of unity between the government and the very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[1]

Russia did not experience the Renaissance with its emphasis on the primacy of the human.

Most of Russia, except for a very small social and political elite, did not experience the Enlightenment with its emphasis on human reason as the primary source of knowledge.

Most recently Russia experience totalitarian terror and oppression at the hands of the Communist Party, worse under Stalin than after him but never entirely overcome.

Under the Soviet Communists Russia became for the first time a first rank world power. Not long after the US did the USSR created nuclear weapons.

Russia lost its status as a major world power when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was no longer Communist. The Soviet Union consisted of most of the territory and peoples of the Russian Empire (absent Finland and part of Poland). It controlled territory from the border of Poland in the west to the border with North Korea in the east and from the Artic Sea in the north to the border with Iran in the south. It was huge. Today Russia is still huge, but it’s nowhere near as big as it was as the Russian Empire or as the dominant element of the Soviet Union.

It still has the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal.

Many if not most Russians feel diminished by Russia’s loss of global status.

Despite the country’s basically non-western character the Russian people have made enormous contributions to western culture. Think of Lomonosov (a scientist after whom Moscow State University is named), Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Oistrakh, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and so many others. The Russian people are as talented and creative as any other and could be as productive given improved circumstances.

Few Americans understand Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Here are some pertinent facts about him.

He was born October 7, 1952, in what was then Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg. His parents barely survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad in which well over one million people died.

He studied law at Leningrad State University (where I lived for a time while doing dissertation research in Leningrad in 1976).

He was a low level KGB agent who worked in Dresden, Germany, from 1985 to 1990

After the collapse of the Soviet Union he left the KGB to enter politics in St. Petersburg, where he served under a reform minded mayor named Sobchak. He worked mostly in the city’s foreign relations and was accused of significant corruption.

He returned to the successor to the KGB, the FSB, and eventually became its head.

Boris Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Federation, made him a deputy prime minister, after which he became prime minister and Yeltsin’s chosen successor.

On Dec. 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, and Putin became Acting President. He was later elected President and has served as either President (the office with all the power) or the power behind the president as Prime Minister ever since.

In his many years in power he has done many things, few of them good.

He has cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church and adopted its ultraconservative social agenda.

He has turned Russia into a kleptocracy, ruling in alliance with massively wealthy, mostly corrupt Russian oligarchs who are exporting much of Russia’s wealth for their own benefit rather than reinvesting it in the country.

He has seized control of most of the media outlets including all of the major television networks.

He has killed journalists, oligarchs, and politicians who opposed him, and he’s done it both in Russia and abroad.

He has had political opponents arrested on trumped up charges to keep them from becoming significant political figures.

He has said that the dissolution of the USSR is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century, never mind the Holocaust or the Stalinist terror I guess.

He has identified opposition to western liberalism as his principal ideology.

He has to some extent restored many Russians’ pride in their nation after the humiliation of the disintegration of the USSR.

He wants as much as anything else for Russia once again to be a major, respected force in the world.[2]

He is both intrinsically Russian and Soviet, and it is unrealistic to expect him to act as anything else.

By American standards he is bad guy. He is anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, anti-personal freedom, and in bed with organized crime and oligarchs who are exploiting Russia’s immense natural resources and exporting most of their wealth.

By Russian standards however he’s rather predictable and unsurprising. It was probably inevitable that after the collapse of the USSR Russia’s history of authoritarianism combined with what Russia doesn’t have—traditions of democracy and individual freedom—would produce someone like Putin.

What’s surprising is that it produced Putin in particular. He came to power almost by accident. Nothing I’ve read suggests that he was ever particularly ambitious or plotted a path to power. He’s where he is because Yeltsin chose him. Yeltsin chose him probably for two reasons. First, he was a blank slate. He didn’t seem to have an agenda of his own, so Yeltsin didn’t have to choose between representatives of competing political camps vying for power. Second, because of his influence in the FSB he could (and did) protect Yeltsin and his cronies from prosecution for their multiple violations of law.

His future isn’t entirely clear. Russia’s constitution limits the president to two consecutive six year terms.[3] He is 66 years old and as far as we knowd in good health. A significant majority of Russian voters support him and his policies. He won a fourth overall term as president and a second consecutive six year term in 2018 with 76% of the vote. That figure is probably inflated by electoral fraud, but it is certainly still true that he has the support of a majority of his people. In 2024, when he will have to relinquish the presidency (unless he changes the constitution, which so far he has not done except to change the term of the president) he could do what he did at the end of his first second consecutive term—make an underling a more or less subservient president while he again assumes the post of prime minister.[4] Just what he will do remains to be seen.

So how should the US relate to Putin? We don’t have to like him, but he is a reality with whom we must deal. Russia may still be what it was when I was there more than forty years ago, a third-world country with nukes, but it has a lot of nukes. It also has massive reserves of natural resources, oil and natural gas among them. It has enormous human resources as well.

For Putin and for a great many Russians “Russia” includes all of the territory Russia lost when the USSR dissolved and all of its constituent “republics,” including Russia, became independent nations. In particular, for Putin and a great many Russians Ukraine is not something separate from Russia but a constituent part of it.[5] That’s why Putin occupied Crimea and incorporated it into Russia and why Russia has been meddling militarily in eastern Ukraine, where much of the population is Russian not Ukrainian.[6]

There is a circumstance as a result of the history of the Russian Empire/USSR that has a troubling historical parallel. There are significant numbers of Russians living in all of the nations that used to be Soviet republics, not just in Ukraine. The issue is particularly acute in the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia. Those places had been part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. If you see photographs of cities like Riga and Tallinn in those nations you’ll see that there are Russian Orthodox churches as well as churches of other denominations there. That’s because there are and have been lots of Russians in those nations. That circumstance has unsettling parallels to the situation in what was Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Significant numbers of Germans lived in the Sudetenland, the western regions of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany. Hitler used the presence of those Germans under Czechoslovak rule as an excuse to occupy the Sudetenland, one of the steps that led in short order to World War II.

Putin makes noises about Russians in Estonia and Latvia that sound a bit like the noises Hitler made about Germans in the Sudetenland. Will Russia invade Latvia or Estonia the way it has already invaded Ukraine and Georgia? Latvia and Estonia are now members of NATO. Russia invading them could well ignite a full-scale war between Russia and NATO, both of which have enormous numbers of nuclear weapons. I hope that the fact that Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO will stop that from happening, but time will tell.

So what are we to make of Russia under Putin? As it has been since at least the eighteenth century, Russia is an essentially non-western nation with a veneer of western culture superimposed upon it. Russia has a constitution that provides for elected governmental leaders, and so far Putin has complied with the constitution—at least superficially. Yet Putin is not a western democrat because Russia has no traditions anything like the western democratic ones. Putin is positioning Russia as the champion of conservative social beliefs including, among other things, denial of rights to LGBTQ people. He is doing that in close cooperation with the very, very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[7] In the major cities life may be better for most people than it was under the Communists, or it may not. Moscow looks a lot more western today than it did when I was there in 1975 and 1976. It has western-style skyscrapers that weren’t there in Soviet times. There are neon signs for western brands like Mercedes Benz and many others. Yet Russia is still Russia. It is not a western country. Its political traditions are authoritarian and even totalitarian not democratic. Because of that history and because of Russia’s centuries-long history of repeated foreign invasions Russians as a people prefer order and security to western-style freedoms. It is unrealistic to expect Russia to look or act like a western country anytime soon. We must understand Russia better than most Americans do, which doesn’t mean we must kowtow to it the way Trump does. We must be realistic, recognize Russia as a significant nuclear power with enormous natural and human resources, and not expect Russia to be what it is not.

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[1] Even under the Communists the Russian Orthodox Church was subservient to the government and was thoroughly infiltrated by agents of the KGB.

[2] President Obama once referred to Russia as a “regional power.” I don’t know if Obama intended that phrase as an intentional insult to Putin, but I’m sure Putin took it in bad form.

[3] It was originally two consecutive four year terms, but one change to the constitution that Putin got through was to change the term of the president to six year.

[4] The first time around that person was Dmitrii Medvedev. Medvedev tried on occasion to act independently. Putin quickly put an end to those efforts.

[5] The tsarist government never recognized Ukrainians as a separate people or Ukrainian as a separate language. They said it was merely a dialect of Russian.

[6] Crimea was also important to Russia because the port of Sevastopol has long been the home port of first the Russian then the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.

[7] Western Christians sometimes criticize Orthodox Christianity by saying that it hasn’t had an original thought since the eighth century. Orthodox Christians reply in effect “Yeah, ain’t that great?” To a considerable extent today’s Russia has reverted to the relationship between the government and the Russian Orthodox Church that existed before 1917 (except that the Church still has a Patriarch, which it didn’t have between 1721 and 1918). The government has enacted laws giving the Orthodox Church a privileged position compared to other churches that could have been written by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the ultraconservative Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church (the institution that replaced the Patriarch in those years I listed above) who was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. Given my experience in the USSR I was shocked some time ago when I saw film of a Russian Orthodox priest blessing a Russian rocket before it took off taking astronauts to the International Space Station. You’d never have seen that under the Soviets.

On Israel and the Palestinians

On Israel and the Palestinians

There has been a difficult issue in American political life for a long time. Of course there have been lots of difficult issues in American political life for a long time, but there’s one in particular that I want to discuss here. It’s making the news these days because when Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim, raises questions about how Israel treats the Palestinians and how Jewish American lobbying affects American policy other American politicians, mostly conservatives, accuse her of anti-Semitism. The issue is this: Can one be critical of the policies of the state of Israel, including disagreeing with those who support those policies, without being anti-Semitic? I am convinced that the answer is yes, but in our American political life today it often seems that the answer is no. So I want here to consider this issue: Can one criticize Israel, in particular Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, without being anti-Semitic?

The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948. I won’t retrace the entire history of Israel here. After all, it goes back over three thousand years. For our purposes we need only go back to 1896 when an Austrian-Hungarian journalist named Theodor Herzl published his book Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State. Herzl’s book marked the beginning of the modern Zionist movement aimed at creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Then in 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated that Britain intended the creation of that Jewish state in Palestine. In 1922 the League of Nations granted Great Britain a mandate over Palestine that included the aim of the Balfour Declaration on the creation of a Jewish state.

All of these events took place against a background of virulent anti-Judaism in Europe, before 1917 especially but hardly exclusively in Russia. The population of Palestine at the time was largely Arab and Muslim. There was some significant Jewish immigration into the area in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but Palestine was still the home mostly of Muslim Arabs.

The rise of Nazism and related fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s led to a significant increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine, and of course the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust both increased immigration and heightened awareness in Europe and North America of the need for Jewish people to be safe from Gentile persecution and murder. By the end of World War II Jews made up about one third of the population of Palestine. After World War II Jewish militias in Palestine engaged in an armed struggle which included what looked like acts of terrorism against British rule. On July 22, 1946, for example, armed Jews attacked the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed British governmental and military agencies. Nearly one hundred people were killed and many more were wounded. The British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine, saying they were unable to find a solution to the conflicting aims and interests of the Arabs and the Jews there that both sides would accept. In 1947 the United Nations proposed a plan of partition of Palestine with an independent Arab state, an independent Jewish state, and Jerusalem as essentially an international city ruled by neither. The Jewish leaders in Palestine accepted the proposal. The Arab leaders did not. They vowed to resist implementation of the UN’s plan or any other plan of partition. On May 18, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, declared the creation of the State of Israel in “Eretz-Israel,” the land of Israel. Ben-Gurion’s declaration was not more specific than that with regard to the borders of the new state of Israel.

War with neighboring and other Arab nations began almost immediately. Eventually a truce was reached, but something like seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs had either been displaced by the Israeli military or had fled to avoid the Israeli military. Many of them wound up in refugee camps in the territory known as the West Bank (the west bank of the Jordan river) that at the time belonged to Jordan or in Jordan itself. Conflict between Israel and neighboring Arab states continued. Most significantly for our purposes in 1967 after another war with neighboring Arabs Israel occupied the West Bank that had belonged to Jordan and the Gaza Strip that had been occupied by Egypt. Those hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who were displaced or their families have never been returned to the homes they or their families occupied before 1948, then lost.

Most Americans tend to look at Israeli/Palestinian issues from the Israeli perspective. That may be because there are more American Jews than there are American Muslims. Or it may be a consequence of the horror we all feel over the Holocaust. Whatever the reason Americans tend to understand the Israeli side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict better than they understand the Palestinian side. The Israeli perspective says that the land called Palestine is the ancient homeland of the Jews. It is where the Jewish people lived for centuries. It is where Jewish faith developed. Religious Israelis say the land belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them. They can and do cite various passages from Hebrew scripture to that effect. The land that had been ancient Israel ceased to be inhabited primarily by Jews after the Romans crushed various Jewish rebellions in the first and second centuries CE. The Jews became dispersed into the Jewish diaspora. There were Jewish communities throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Palestine became predominately Arab with the rise of Islam and the Arabic Caliphate beginning in the seventh century CE. Yet Jewish people always looked to Palestine as the homeland of the Jewish faith.

Then we come to horrors of European anti-Judaism that was always there but that led up to and produced the Holocaust. Under Adolph Hitler the Germans tried quite intentionally to eliminate European Jewry by killing all European Jews. They went a long way toward accomplishing that despicable, diabolical goal. The suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust was worse than anything anyone could even imagine before it happened. The pictures of the Nazi forced labor and death camps that came out after World War II and the stories that went with them were so horrendous that western people who at worst had been strongly anti-Semitic and at best had never given Jews much thought started to understand that something had to be done for the Jews. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust could never be made right, but the western nations that had defeated the Nazis could help assure that it never happened again. One way to do that was to create a Jewish homeland outside of Europe. Palestine was the obvious place to do that. It was Judaism’s ancient home. It was home to a significant number of Jews, though they were still a minority of the population after World War II. Most Americans and other western people knew little or nothing of the Arabs who lived there. Palestine had been predominately Arab for centuries, but it was relatively easy for us to ignore them and their claims to the land. Creation and preservation of a Jewish state in Palestine became a widely accepted goal in western Europe and the United States. Significant Jewish voices in the US have spoken strongly of the need for a safe and secure state of Israel ever since that state was created in 1948. American Jews have supported politicians who also stood for that safe and secure Jewish state. Support for Israel quite regardless of what Israel was doing became a keystone of American politics.

The actions of the Israeli government in recent times have caused many of us to object to those actions and to call for justice for the Palestinians. Israel gave up occupation of the Gaza Strip some years ago, but it has blockaded Gaza and attacked it often, usually in response to attacks on Israel from Gaza. Today Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth and one of the poorest. Unemployment is very high, and the situation must seem hopeless to most Gaza residents.

After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 it began to allow if not outright support the creation of Jewish settlements in that Arab land that had not been recognized as part of Israel at the creation of the Israeli state. Those settlements are illegal under international law. They appear to represent an attempt by the Israeli government to turn the West Bank or at least significant parts of it Jewish. That the Israeli government authorizes and supports those settlements is one of many Americans’ major objections to Israeli policy.

The Israeli government oppresses Palestinian Arabs in other ways as well. It has built a barrier separating much of the West Bank from Israel proper, saying that the wall is necessary for security purposes. The wall sometimes blocks Palestinians from access to agricultural land that belongs to them and on which they depended for their livelihood. Many residents of the West Bank work in Israel. The Israeli government operates armed access points through which these people must pass every day to get to and from work. Again Israel says that these check points are necessary for security purposes.

The Israeli government has made life very difficult for great many Palestinian Arabs. Moreover, every time some rogue Palestinian forces attack Israel, Israel responds with massive military force. These actions create a perpetual cycle of violence that is harmful to both Palestinians and Israelis. Neither side is prepared to take a risk for peace by stopping the violence. Israel is, of course, the dominant party in the Israeli/Palestinian relationship. Many of us believe that Israel’s dominant status in the relationship puts the onus on them to stop the violence. So far they have shown no inclination to do it.

So many of us Americans today have serious objections to Israeli policies toward the Palestinian Arabs. Those policies strike us as unjust, violent, and oppressive. Some Jewish folk in the US and in Israel share those objections. We call for Israel to modify its policies so that they are less oppressive of the Palestinians and more conducive to peace in the region.

Do those objections make us anti-Semitic? No, I am convinced that they don’t. Objecting to policies of the Israeli government makes one anti-Semitic only if one equates those policies with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. I and most Americans who object to the way Israel treats the Palestinians do make that equation. Israeli governmental policies are not the same thing as the Jewish people. They are not the same thing as the great Jewish faith. Yes, some Israelis ground some of those policies in the passages in the Hebrew Bible that say Israel’s God gave all of Canaan, including what today we call the West Bank, to the Jews.[1] Yet surely basing contemporary political and military policies on scripture passages that are well over two thousand years old is hardly justifiable. Moreover, even if one believes that the Israelis have an exclusive, divinely given right to the land, that does not necessarily give them the right to oppress other people whose ancestors have lived on the land for well over one thousand years. Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, believes that God is a God of justice. Not justice for one people only but for all people. There simply is no justifiable religious reason for current Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.

Now let me speak more personally. Many people have heard me say that I love the Jewish faith. I’m an ordained Christian pastor, and that means that Judaism’s scripture is my scripture too. Jesus of Nazareth, the One I claim as Lord and Savior, was a Jew. He lived, taught, and died entirely within his Jewish context. I consider myself to be a lover of Jewish faith and Jewish culture. My Christian faith is incomprehensible apart from Judaism. I have known and worked with many Jewish people over the years. I have stood up against any discrimination against them, and I always will. My Christian faith is guilty of a powerfully sinful history of anti-Semitism. There is a direct line historically from some of the verses in the Christian Gospels to the Holocaust.[2] Anti-Semitism is something of which my faith tradition must repent. We must do everything we can to atone for the diabolical way our ancestors in the faith mistreated, oppressed, and killed the Jews.

None of which means that we must quietly accept or support policies by the Israeli government that are unjust and oppressive toward Palestinian people. Just as we must reject and condemn the terrible history of Christian anti-Semitism, so we must reject and condemn unjust and oppressive policies against any people no matter who is engaging in them. Today the Israeli government is engaging in such unacceptable policies toward the Palestinians, whose ancestral land Israel now occupies. Anti-Semitism, Christian or otherwise, is morally reprehensible and utterly unacceptable. Sadly, so are some of Israel’s current policies. May we continue to love and support our Jewish brothers and sisters as we do what we can to bring about a more just and peaceful world for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

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[1] The Gaza Strip, by the way, was never part of ancient Israel. For much of ancient Hebrew history it was the home territory of the Philistines, a Gentile people with whom Israel was often at war. It is therefore not surprising that the Gaza Strip is the one part of the Palestinian territory that Israel once occupied from which it has withdrawn. Also, Hebrew scripture is at least on occasion ambiguous about just to whom God gave Canaan. Genesis 15:18, for example, has God say to Abram (Abraham) “To your descendants I give this land….” The Jews of course identify themselves as descendants of Abraham, but so do the Arabs. The Jews trace their lineage back to Abraham through Abraham’s son Isaac. The Arabs trace their lineage back to Abraham through Abraham’s firstborn son Ishmael. This verse at least seems to give the Arabs as much of a divine claim to the land of Israel as the Jews have.

[2] A good example is Matthew 27:25, which has the Jewish people say in response to Pontius Pilate saying he is innocent of Jesus’ blood “His blood be on us and on our children.” Tragically, Christians have used that and other hateful verses from Christian scripture to justify hatred of Jewish people. I have and always will refuse to read Matthew 27:25 in worship. We Christians must reject and condemn that verse and other slike it our holy books.

What Sort of Christ?

What Sort of Christ?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

March, 2019

Scripture: Luke 3:41-53; Luke 4:1-11

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.

Preparation. So many things in life require preparation. Going on a long trip? Prepare. Plan your itinerary. Figure out what you’ll need to take with you and how much you’ll be able to take with you. Then pack and go. Want to have your first child? Read up on pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for infants. Buy all the stuff you’ll need. You’ll think you’re ready (although those of us who have had children know that you really aren’t). Want a new career? Discern what you want and/or need around that career. Explore employment possibilities in that career. Get the education or training you’ll need. Quit your old job. Start a new one. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Big things in life, and even small ones, require us to prepare. To get ready. To figure out as best we can what this thing we’re going to do is and how we’re going to do it.

The Gospels, or at least three of the four of them, tell us that it was no different with Jesus.[1] Yes, of course what had to prepare to do was a whole lot bigger and more important than anything we have to prepare to do. And yes, he was both just like us and totally different from us. Yet for all that he still had to prepare to carry out the mission God had sent him to do. Here’s how we see that preparation in Luke.

Luke says that Jesus was about thirty years told when he began his work. Luke 3:23a. What had he been doing those thirty years? We know virtually nothing about that. We have no reliable sources to tell us. Luke does have that little story about Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem at age twelve. Luke 2:41-52. The story says that Jesus was essentially teaching in the temple though he was only twelve and that all who heard him “were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” Luke 2:47. Taking these lines from Luke as the only source we have on Jesus as he grew up without raising any annoying academic questions about the story’s historicity we hear that by age twelve Jesus was already wise, presumably wise in the sources and beliefs of his Jewish faith. How did a twelve year old get so wise? Almost certainly through a lot of preparation, through a combination of natural ability and hard work.

We also hear however that his appearance in the temple at age twelve, wise as he already was, wasn’t the end of his development. Luke tells us that after the age of twelve Jesus didn’t just get older, he “increased in wisdom.” We learn that his preparation continued. We know what he was preparing for, although it isn’t clear that he did yet. Luke tells us no more about Jesus’ life between the ages of twelve and thirty. Since Luke says Jesus increased in wisdom in those years we can safely assume that he kept studying. Kept talking to wise elders of the faith. It’s a pretty safe bet that all through those 18 years Jesus kept preparing. Then, at age thirty, he decided to act. He went from his hometown of Nazareth of Galilee south to where John was baptizing people in the River Jordan. There John baptized Jesus, and Jesus had a liminal experience of a voice from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Luke 3:22.

You’d think that hearing God say that about you would mean your prep work was done. You’re good. You’re set to go Well, apparently Jesus wasn’t done with his preparation, for what comes next is Luke’s version of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Jesus is tempted for forty days—Bible speak for a long time—by the devil. Those temptations tell us what Jesus was doing all that time out there in the desert. He was trying to figure out just what it meant that he was the Son of God with whom God was well pleased. He was trying to figure out just what kind of Christ, that is what kind of Messiah, he would be.

Luke, like Matthew, tells us of three temptations Jesus wrestled with during this time of testing and preparation. They are the temptation to turn stones to bread to feed his famished body, the temptation to rule the whole world by worshipping the devil, and the temptation to tempt God by throwing himself off the pinnacle of the temple and have God save him. By rejecting those temptations Jesus tells us a lot about what kind of Christ he decided to be.

The first two temptations have one important thing in common. They are both temptations for Jesus to use his divine status for his own benefit. You’re hungry, so turn these stones to bread so you can eat. Use your divine power to benefit yourself the devil says. Jesus says no. He says in effect that his being the Son of God isn’t about doing good things for himself. By implication then it’s about doing good things for others.

You’re the Son of God on earth. You should rule the world in a worldly way, the devil says. Worship me and you’ll have it all. Jesus says no. He says in effect: I may be the Son of God with whom God is well pleased, but that doesn’t mean I’m here to be rich and powerful in any worldly sense. My role as the Christ is not self-aggrandizement. So no, I won’t worship you, Mr. Devil, and rule the world the way you rule the world.

The third temptation is a bit different. It isn’t about Jesus using his divine status for his own benefit. It is more about him using his status as the Son of God the way the world might expect him to use it. To use it for show. To use it to do magic tricks. Throw yourself off a high building and wow people with how your Father God will save you. Again Jesus says no. My being the Christ isn’t about getting people to be amazed at what God will do for me. It’s more about getting people to be amazed at what God will do for them.

So what kind of Christ does Jesus decide to be? Where does all that preparation both before his wilderness experience and during it take him? He decides to be a Christ for others not for himself. His preparation leads him to the conviction that his status as the Son of God isn’t primarily about himself. It is rather about being for God and all of God’s people. The rest of Luke’s Gospel tells us that that is precisely the kind of Christ Jesus became. The Gospel of Matthew calls him Emmanuel, God with us. Matthew 1:23. In all of his preparation we see Jesus deciding to be God not just with us but for us as well. Jesus decided to do a ministry for us not for himself. Thanks be to God!

But of course all of that is about Jesus. What about us? Let me suggest something. In the wilderness the devil kept putting superficial, worldly benefits before Jesus. The devil stayed on the surface, Jesus didn’t. Jesus went to the depth dimension beneath and behind worldly considerations. He sought and found spiritual truth not material truth. He found the truth beneath the world’s truth, the truth of self-giving not self-serving, the truth of quiet work not flashy showmanship. And here’s the thing: He calls us to do the same. To seek and find the spiritual dimension in everything we see and do. To move beyond narrow concern with the self into concern for God and all of God’s creation. To the truth of caring. To the truth of peace. To the truth of justice. To the truth of love. If we can do that we can meet and satisfy God’s call to us just as Jesus met and satisfied God’s much greater call to him. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] In John Jesus appears more or less whole and wholly prepared for his work. In the other three we see greater or lesser indications of the time he spent in preparation.

On Christian Creeds

On Christian Creeds

Christianity, my faith and perhaps yours too, is unique among the world’s many faith traditions in many ways. It’s the only major faith tradition whose foundational figure was executed as a threat to public order. It’s the only one that claims that its foundational figure rose from the dead. It’s the only one that says that its foundational figure was nothing less than God Incarnate—or at least most Christians do. Christianity’s many peculiarities make it odd, mysterious, and wonderful.

Yet there is another thing that is unique about Christianity that is perhaps less wonderful. Christianity has creeds, lots of them, and they tend to be very complex. Christianity has more statements about what it believes (or is at least supposed to believe) than any other religion. We’ve got more creeds than we know what to do with. We’ve got the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and many others. Even my own United Church of Christ, which claims to be noncreedal, has its “Statement of Faith” that sounds an awful lot like a creed. These creeds aren’t necessarily all that long, but they tend to be complex and hard to understand. Take the Nicene Creed for example. It was formulated by the First Ecumenical Council, a gathering supposedly of all of the bishops of the church that Roman Emperor Constantine called in 325 CE. Using concepts from Greek philosophy it says things like the Son was “begotten not made.” People ask me what that means, and I answer no one really knows. It says the Son is “of one substance,” or “one in being” (homoousious) with the Father. People ask me what that means too, and again I answer no one really knows. It says that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” or in a later western corruption of the original “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” People ask me what “proceeds” means, and again I answer no one really knows. The Nicene creed is still foundational for most of Christianity. It is relatively short, terse, complex, and obscure. Yet since most Christians think they can’t do without a creed they recite it and pretend to understand and to believe it. Christianity, or at least most of it, is solidly creedal, and in our complex creedalism we are unique among the world’s great religions.

It's not that other great faiths don’t have creeds. At least the other monotheistic faiths do. Both Judaism and Islam have statements that function as foundational creeds for those faiths, but it’s really striking how simple those creeds are compared to Christianity’s many creeds. Here’s Islam’s foundational creed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” That’s it. Islam shares the first part of this creed—there is no God but God—with Judaism and Christianity. Muslims say “There is no God but God,” and Jews and Christians, if they aren’t being bigots, say “Amen.” Muslims know God through Muhammad and the book he gave the world (or God gave the world through him), the Koran. There’s a lot more to Islam than its creed, but the point for now is only that while Islam has a creed that creed is short, simple, and straightforward.

Judaism has its foundational creed too. You’ll find it at Deuteronomy 6:4-5. It says: “Hear O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” NRSV Christians know some of those words as the first part of Jesus’ Great Commandment, but before they were that they were the ancient creed of Judaism, Christianity’s mother faith. They are known as the “Shema” because the Hebrew words that get translated as “Hear O Israel” are Shema Yisrael. The words that the NRSV translates as “the Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” can actually be translated in slightly different ways. The NRSV has a translator’s note that says that the Hebrew original here can also be translated as “the Lord our God, the Lord is one” or “the Lord our God is one Lord,” or “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” A bit confusing perhaps. Originally the Shema was a confession that the god Yahweh (rendered in the NRSV and other translations as the Lord  in small capital letters like that) was Israel’s only god. Today the Shema is understood as a confession of the radical monotheism of the Jewish faith. There is one God and only one God. The Shema then goes on to say that we are to love the Lord our God with our whole being. That’s it. While there is of course a lot more to Judaism than that, that’s all there is to Judaism’s foundational creed.

So I think we Christians have to ask: If the other two great monotheistic faiths don’t need complex creeds, do we? We have them, but do we really need them? No, I don’t think we do. Of course, I’m ordained in the United Church of Christ; and as I said above the UCC claims to be noncreedal. We don’t require anyone to believe in some Christian creed or other to belong to the UCC. So I suppose it isn’t surprising that I say that Christianity doesn’t need a complex creed. I do think, however, that it is important for us to consider just what a creed is and why so many Christians think you can’t be Christian without one.

A creed of a faith tradition is a foundational statement of the faith’s fundamental beliefs. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God….” “I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible….I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ….I believe in the Holy Spirit.” They’re relatively short, concise, statements of theistic belief in the world’s three great monotheistic religions.

Now, notice that I used just a little bit of the Nicene Creed here for a Christian creed. That I felt the need to cut it down points to a problem that Christianity has with creeds that Judaism and Islam don’t. Basic Christian faith is just a whole lot more complex than are either Jewish or Muslim basic belief. It’s not that there isn’t complexity in either Judaism or Islam. There is, but those faiths can state their most foundational faith confessions considerably more concisely than Christianity can. In Christianity both the Trinity and the Incarnation are foundational beliefs, and it really isn’t possible to state what those confessions are simply or shortly. It just can’t be done. The Nicene Creed and others try to do it, but really they can’t. See, neither the Trinity nor the Incarnation makes any sense, and that’s their great virtue. They preserve the mystery of God and of Jesus Christ by being concepts that can’t be reduced to words. They can’t be reduced to concise creedal statements. When Christianity tries to  reduce them to creedal statements it ends up with something that no one really understands. I’ve already mentioned that truth here. No one knows what “begotten” means. No one knows what “proceeds” means. No one really knows what “homoousious,” the key phrase of the Nicene Creed that gets translated as one in being or of one substance, means. When we try to reduce Christianity to a concise creedal statement it just doesn’t work.

That’s why, I suppose, churches like the United Church of Christ and others claim to be noncreedal. We don’t require anyone to pretend to believe something they don’t believe or can’t understand. Yet are noncreedal churches like the UCC really entirely noncreedal? Not really. I’ll use my own UCC as an example. Article 2 of the UCC Constitution begins: “The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole Head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior.” Although that sentence doesn’t begin “I believe in,” it is essentially a creedal statement. This same article of the UCC Constitution has other statements that sound awfully creedal too. “It [the UCC] looks to the Word of God in the Scriptures, and to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit….” “In accordance with the teaching of our Lord…it recognizes two sacraments….”

Then there’s the UCC Statement of Faith that I mentioned above. In its traditional form it begins: “We believe in God, the Eternal Spirit, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father, and to his deeds we testify.” There’s more to the Statement of Faith of course, but I think the point is made. The UCC claims to be noncreedal, but that doesn’t mean that it has no foundational statements of its basic beliefs. The church’s foundational documents establish it first of all as Christian church. They place the church squarely in the Protestant tradition. They aren’t a creed exactly, but they have creedal elements to them.

Why? Could it be that no church can function without some basic statement of its foundational beliefs? Indeed, I believe that to be the case. Requiring people to say they believe all the statements in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, or any other creedal statement is inadmissible. Most of the people who say they accept everything in the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, the two most widely used creeds in Christianity, either don’t understand them or don’t accept all of them or both. The church must be open to and accepting of spiritual seekers as well as those who think they have faith all figured out.

So: Noncreedal? Yes. But without identity? No. Every organization needs a boundary, a way of saying who and what is in and who and what is out. Without a boundary an organization has no identity. Without a boundary an organization isn’t really an organization at all. The UCC and other Christian denominations may be noncreedal, but they are not non-Christian. They clearly identify themselves as Christian. Their boundary is the boundary of Christianity. Inside the boundary they may not require anyone to accept or profess any particular kind of Christianity, but they’re still Christian.

Creeds may have their place in Christianity. Our tradition has drafted and used them for centuries. Today, however, the world has changed. We no longer live in a world in which most people need to have truth dictated to them. In our world people generally would rather figure things out for themselves, or at least a lot of them would. Noncreedal Christianity invites people to do just that within the scope of the Christian faith. If someone figures out that no kind of Christianity works for them, OK. Go with God to a place where you fit better. Today noncreedal Christianity holds out the possibility of a future for Christianity in a time when that future is uncertain at best. So recite one of the Christian creeds if you like, but understand that creedalism has its limitations and that the world today is bumping up against those limitations. Christianity without a creed? Sounds heretical to many Christians. It is however the way of the Christian future.