Expect the Unexpected

 

Expect the Unexpected

November 29, 2020, the First Sunday of Advent

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I’ve written here before of my dislike of the way the Revised Common Lectionary, that schedule of Bible readings for every Sunday and other holy days that many preachers use, gives us New Testament texts about a supposed second coming of Christ during Advent, the season in which we anticipate and prepare to celebrate the first coming of Christ in the birth of the infant Jesus of Nazareth. Those second coming texts have nothing to do with the Jesus’ birth to Mary and Joseph as a human infant. I won’t now go once again into my objections to the whole notion of a second coming. I want here instead to look at Mark 13:24-37, the Revised Common Lectionary’s Gospel text for today, the first Sunday of Advent. I want to consider whether it gives us anything at all of value as we begin our season of anticipation not of the second coming of Christ but the first.

Those verses from what is known as the Little Apocalypse of Mark begin with portents of cosmic disorder. We read that after a period of suffering

 

the sun will be darkened,

     and the moon will not give

          its light,

and the stars will be falling

          from heaven,

     and the powers in the heavens

          will be shaken.”[1] Mark 13:24b-25.[2]

 

All of these cosmic phenomena set the stage for the second coming of Christ: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.” [3] Mark 13:26. His coming will have world-changing effects on earth: “Then he will send out his angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” Mark 13:27. It’s hard to imagine a second coming of Christ less like his first coming than the one Mark depicts here. It’s all cosmic and earthly transformation, all power and glory, with angels no less.

Of course when the Gospel of Mark was written, probably in the early 70s of the first century CE, none of these things had happened yet. Nothing remotely like them had happened though the Little Apocalypse promises that they will happen soon: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” Mark 13:30. We know from earlier sources like 1 Thessalonians that people were getting worried because Christ had not returned in power and glory to bring salvation and set the world aright. So our text says more about the timing of the things it says will happen: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come.” Mark 13:32-33. Mark’s Jesus says here that a second coming will happen and will happen in a particular way, but don’t worry about when. There’s no way to know when, but be ready.

How are we to understand the apocalyptic vision of this text? We could take it literally as a prediction of future events that are bound to happen just as this text describes them. Lord knows enough people have taken these words that way over the centuries, often with tragically disappointing results. Yet nearly two thousand years have passed since these words were written, and the events they describe haven’t happened yet. Frankly I doubt that they ever will. Whether they do or not, however, here is what I think is better way of understanding them. Try thinking of them like this. They express how people wanted and even expected the Messiah to come. The Messiah was supposed to come and change things, to clean up the world and set things aright. He could, people thought, only do those things through the application of great power. The Messiah was to represent God breaking into creation, so they envisioned him coming down from heaven in a great show of the divine power through which he would establish the kingdom of God on earth. That’s how the Messiah will come, people thought. We may not know when, but we know how—from above in power and glory.

So how did the Messiah come? He didn’t come from above. He came from Bethlehem, a quite real town here on earth.[4] He didn’t come in power and glory. He came as a newborn human baby as weak and helpless as any other human baby. So far from coming in the grandeur of the divine he came born in a stable to poor parents who couldn’t even find an room in which Mary could give birth. In one account of his birth three earthly Gentile wise men came to worship him, but in the other account of his birth the people who heard and came were shepherds, the poorest of the poor. The world didn’t change when he came. At least it didn’t change suddenly and dramatically through an application of the power of God. Instead in Matthew’s story of his birth his parents had to take him and escape to Egypt to avoid the murderous intent of one of those earthly kings the Messiah was supposed to judge, condemn, and displace. People expected the Messiah to come the way Mark describes the Son of Man coming at some unknown time in the future. Instead he came in the very different way in which Matthew and Luke describe his birth.

In Mark 13 Mark’s Jesus tells the disciples to keep awake because they do not know when Christ, called the Son of Man, will come. He tells them what to expect of that second coming, just not when to expect it. Here’s the thing though. When the Messiah came the first time his coming was nothing like what people expected. He came in a way that was totally unexpected, and there is a great lesson for us in that truth. We await the birth of Christ. We know when it will happen, or at least we know when we will celebrate it. We know how he came the first time. That time people got something they didn’t expect. God often does things in ways people don’t expect. So much so that we’re likely to get something unexpected too.

Do you have expectations of what the birth of Christ will do in the world? Do you think you know what Christmas will mean? I usually think I know what it will mean, but there is a real caution for us in Mark’s Little Apocalypse and the two Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth. We don’t know what it will mean. We can’t know what it will mean. We can know that it will mean things we don’t expect. It will change the world, but not in ways we might expect of want. So with Mark 13 I say to you and to myself “keep awake.” Something big is going to happen, we just don’t know what it is. So keep awake. Expect the unexpected in your life and in the life of the world. Jesus didn’t come the way people thought the Messiah would come. He didn’t do what people thought the Messiah would do. He was totally unexpected. That’s how it always is with God. So: Keep awake! You never know what’s going to happen, you just know it will come from God.

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[1] The ancient world didn’t know how big even a small star is, how far away from us the stars are, or that they are all moving away from us at tremendous speed. Hence the reference to the impossible phenomenon of the stars falling from heaven. I should perhaps mention here that I don’t believe we have the words of Jesus here. We have the words of the Gospel of Mark that reflect realities in his time not in Jesus’ time a few decades earlier.

[2] These lines are in Hebrew verse form because they are quotations from scripture where they appear in that form

[3] Th words “the Son of Man coming in clouds’ is in quotation marks within this quotations because they echo if they don’t exactly quote Daniel 7:13-14.

[4] Or more likely he came from Nazareth. He was known as Jesus of Nazareth not Jesus of Bethlehem, but never mind.

Is It Worth It?

 

Is It Worth It?

November 25, 2020

 

In 2019 the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris was extensively, indeed nearly totally destroyed, by fire. Notre Dame was a great treasure of French, European, and even world culture. It brought together all of the elements of Gothic architecture for the first time. It’s stained glass windows, especially the famous rose windows, are beautiful beyond description and are utterly irreplaceable. Notre Dame has stood on the Ile de la Cité in Paris for eight hundred years. It is a great monument to European culture in the High Middle Ages. Even for people for whom its religious function and the religious nature of the art with which it is filled are not important, Notre Dame has been a magnificent symbol of Paris, of France, and of the human spirit. As the news of the fire came in I thought the entire structure had been lost. Thank God it wasn’t. It appears that Notre Dame will be saved, although substantial risks of collapse or other damage remains. The French government is committed to rebuilding Notre Dame, but that reconstruction will cost an enormous amount of money. The French government has not finalized the budget for the reconstruction, but experts say that the cost could well exceed one billion dollars. That of course is an immense amount of money.

The question naturally arises: Is it worth it? Think of how much else the French government could do with that much money. Imagine the social ills it could address. Imagine how French education could be enriched. Imagine how much health care that much money could provide. Imagine the other cultural projects to enrich the lives of the French people that money could finance. Think of the housing it could build or the families it could feed. Imagine how it could reduce French taxes. The list of other worthwhile things that money could do is virtually endless. Few Europeans, including few French people, are religious anymore. Notre Dame’s religious significance as a Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to the mother of Christ doesn’t mean much to most contemporary French people. So why spend that much money to restore it? Why not just tear it down and use the money for something else?

These questions remind me of an experience I had when I was a young university student doing a year abroad in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1968-69 academic year. We are all young radicals. We had wanted Gene McCarthy to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 1968. We hated Richard Nixon. We hated the Vietnam war. We were all radical social liberals at least if not outright socialists. There we were in Germany surrounded by the great monuments of Germany’s history and culture. There are Gothic and baroque cathedrals everywhere. There are palaces of magnificent architecture decorated with beautiful art everywhere. Most of the members of our group from the Oregon State System of Higher Education thought those treasures were a total waste of money. They said most people in the years when those things were built were extremely poor. Huge amounts of money went into creating them. My colleagues said think how many people could have been fed and housed with the money that went into building those things. What a waste, they said.

I said no, it wasn’t a waste at all. I said that these structures, especially the churches, are magnificent expressions of the human spirit. I said they express the yearning of the human spirit for something more, for an expression of the spiritual heights to which the human being is capable of aspiring. I said that if we ever lose our spirit of creation, our ability to create and appreciate beauty, to strive for the transcendent, we will lose a great deal of what it is to be human. Yes, I had to acknowledge, a lot of human needs could have been met with the money that went into building those churches and palaces, but I believed then and I believe now that human life would be immensely impoverished if we were to lose our drive toward something higher, something more beautiful than our ordinary lives, something even divine. That’s why I disagreed with my friends in their dismissal of the value of the great monuments of the human spirit that we saw in Europe that year.

I didn’t express it this way then. I wasn’t the least bit religious then. I didn’t have the education and experience with things spiritual then that I have now. Today I say that what those great achievements of the human spirit express is our drive toward the transcendent. Yes, the great Gothic cathedrals were built as much for civic and political reasons as for religious ones. Still, they are cathedrals. They are churches. Notre Dame de Paris is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. Even the secular baroque buildings like palaces give people a vision of heaven, a vision of a life better and more beautiful than the lives they live. We would lose a lot if we ever lost our inherent human drive toward the transcendent that those buildings express.

Today that drive mostly gets expressed in different ways. There have been great places of worship built in many religious traditions in modern times, but our drive toward the transcendent mostly gets expressed in different ways. I was in Stuttgart during that year abroad when the US landed two men on the moon and returned them safely to earth. A lot of people were asking the same questions about that project as my friends asked about the cultural monuments of Europe that we saw that year. Was it worth the enormous cost? Think of all the good that could have been done with the money we spent to go to the moon. Think of all the food we could buy, all the housing we could build, all the education and medical services we could provide. Of course it’s true. We could have done a lot in those areas with the money we spent to go to the moon. Was going to the moon worth it?

Yes, I say. Going to the moon was worth it, and it was worth it for the same reasons that it was worth it for Europeans of earlier times to build the Gothic cathedrals. It was worth it because going to the moon was an expression of the human spirit always to always accomplish more. Always to strive to reach beyond ourselves for what is higher. Always to strive to transcend our reality and to reach for something better, something higher. Building great cathedrals was an expression of that inherent aspect of what it is to be human. So was going to the moon. So are our efforts to disclose the secrets of the universe and of subatomic particles. So is the work of poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and all who seek to create beauty and meaning in the world. Perhaps none of that feeds a single hungry person, but all of that makes us human. All of that expresses our nature as made in the image and likeness of God.

So yes. It’s worth it. It’s worth it to rebuild Notre Dame. It is worth it to go to the moon and to reach for the stars. It’s also worth it to do everything we can to address the very real human needs of people in this country and around the world that so often and so tragically are not met. The two realms of human endeavor need not be mutually exclusive. We can do both if we just will. Both are part of what it is to be truly, fully human. So let us reach for the stars literally and figuratively in every area of human undertaking. Our call as humans is to become fully human. We don’t do that by not creating beauty and spiritual meaning. We don’t do that by not doing everything we can we can to make life better for every human being. Yes, it’s worth it to rebuild Notre Dame despite the enormous cost of doing so. Let’s never forget that striving beyond ourselves is a core part of what it is to be human. So let’s strive. Let’s be fully human. Let’s never let anything stop us from that sacred task.

Maybe They Were Just Wrong

 

Maybe They Were Just Wrong

November 25, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Time and again we see the New Testament authors wrestling with what for them was a big problem. They had believed that Christ would return in glory and power to judge the earth and set things right. Thus as Mark 13:32 we see the text just assuming a second coming of Christ: “But about that day or hour no one knows….” They just knew, or thought they knew, that there would be a day and an hour when Christ would return. Matthew 25:31 assumes a second coming too: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory….” St. Paul promises a second coming of Christ in the oldest Christian document we have: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven….” 1 Thessalonians 4:16. From the earliest years of the Christian faith Christians believed that Christ would return. His second coming would not be like his first coming. This time there’d be no manger, no shepherds, no magi, no panicked flight to Egypt to escape a murderous king. There’d be nothing humble about Christ’s anticipated second coming. No, this time Christ would come in glory and power to punish the evildoers and establish the kingdom of God on earth.

They thought it would happen soon. Indeed, there was the notion that no Christian would die before it happened. Thus the author of the Gospel of Mark has Jesus say “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away…” until the end times had come. Mark 13:30. The issue behind Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica is that Christ’s return was supposed to have happened, but it hadn’t. That why Paul says, “But I do not want you to be uninformed…about those who have died….” 1 Thessalonians 4:13a. The early Christians of that church were afraid that their people who had died before the second coming of Christ would not benefit from that second coming because they had died too soon, that they would not get the everlasting life that they thought the second coming would bring them. Just why the early Christians believed in a second coming that would happen soon is something about which I will offer an opinion anon. For now just know that they did believe in such an imminent second coming of Christ.

Several New Testament authors wrote in response to the people’s concern that the second coming hadn’t happened yet. We see two basic responses that they gave. One was essentially to say that we weren’t wrong about a second coming, we were just wrong about the timing. Thus at Mark 13:32, part of which I have already quoted, we read that we just don’t know when the second coming will happen. Then Mark’s Jesus uses an analogy to explain how we don’t know. Mark has Jesus say,

 

It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. Mark 13:34-37.

 

It will happen, this text says. He will return. We just don’t know when.

The other response we see to the concern that Christ hadn’t returned amounts essentially to just don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter. That’s what Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians. He wrote to them:

 

For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself…will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. 1 Thessalonians 4:14-17.[1]

 

Paul is saying yes, they died before he returned, but it’s cool. They won’t be left out at the second coming. That they died before he came just doesn’t matter.

Now, do you notice what these New Testament authors don’t say in response to the people’s concern that the second coming they had been promised hadn’t happened? They don’t say oops, I guess we were wrong about his coming again. We’ll just have to live with what he gave us when he was here the first time. No, they keep insisting that he really is coming back and that what they had told the people to expect from that second coming really would happen. It didn’t happen, but their leaders kept insisting that it would.

Why? Why were these early Christian writers so convinced that Christ would return in power and glory? Why were they so convinced not only that he would return but that his second coming would be so radically different from his first coming? I can think of only one possible reason, and it isn’t that Jesus told them he would come again in that way. I can’t imagine Jesus of Nazareth ever having said anything like that. No, the only reason I can think of why they kept looking for a second coming was that they were deeply disappointed with the results of his first coming. Had conditions in their world changed because of Jesus’ first coming? No, not really. Christians may have experienced a spiritual change because of their commitment to him, but almost everyone was still poor and exploited by the rich. The Romans still taxed them and brutally suppressed any opposition. They still experienced injustice and violence in their lives. No one except Jesus had been taken up into heaven to live forever. Sure, Jesus was a great guy and all. He did miraculous things. He talked a good game about peace and justice as God’s way, but where were the peace and justice? Nowhere that they could see. So they thought he’ll have to come again and do it right this time. He’ll return and do it our way, the way of power not the way of love. He has to. What he did the first time didn’t work, so he has to come and try it again, this time in glory and power so that it will work. That at least is how I imagine them thinking. That they thought that way at least explains why they thought he would return as well as their concern that he hadn’t done it yet.

We have nearly two thousand years of experience that they didn’t have. He hasn’t come back yet, at least not in the way those early Christians thought he would.[2] He certainly hadn’t come with a great display of power and glory that transformed the world overnight. Will he come that way some day? Who knows? Here’s what we do know. He came once. He taught us a great many things about God and God’s ways. Yes, he spoke a divine vision of a world of peace and justice, but he sure didn’t try to establish one by force. Two thousand years is a long time to wait for him to do it. Yes, perhaps as 2 Peter says “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” 2 Peter 3:8. That however is not how it is for us. We’ve waited so long for Christ to come again in power and glory that perhaps it’s time for us to rethink the whole second coming thing.

Surely God calls us to something other than an interminable wait for something that may well never happen. God hasn’t given us a second coming of Christ of the kind for which those early Christians longed. God did give us a first coming of Christ. Surely our call is to live with and into what we have rather than sit around pining for what we don’t have. I sure wish those early Christian writers whose words ended up in the New Testament had said something different than they did about a second coming. What they said has misled people ever since. Time and again Christians have predicted that the second coming would happen at a particular time, and they’ve always been wrong. I wish those writers had said well, I guess we were wrong about that second coming thing or at least we were wrong about when and how it would happen. I wish they had drawn conclusions from their error about the timing that they didn’t draw. I wish they’d said he came once, and that’s what matters. Let’s learn what he came to teach us when he was here the first time. Let’s understand that creating a world of justice and peace is our work with God’s help. It’s not Christ’s work to come again and do it for us. That’s what’s true. That’s our call from God. Live into the first coming, don’t sit around waiting for a first coming. The New Testament writers who predicted a second coming of Christ appear just to have been wrong. So let’s get on with living into the first coming, shall we?

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[1] Believers in the eschatological nonsense of the Rapture point to the line here about meeting the Lord in the air as biblical support for their belief. Why anyone would build a whole theology on one phrase from a letter written nearly two thousand years ago about something that never happened escapes me, but never mind.

[2] I have heard the idea that there actually has been a second coming. It is either that his Resurrection appearances are a second coming or, more likely, that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost was. I quite like that notion, but clearly the New Testament writers didn’t think there had been a second coming as they wrote.

On the Need for Confession

 

On the Need for Confession

November 14, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Confession of sin is an ancient spiritual practice in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. Jews and Christians have been confessing their sin to God for millennia. Confession is considered a sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church. People are expected to confess their sin before participating in the Eucharist. Confession of sin has been a practice in the Protestant traditions too from the very beginning of those traditions. Confession was a practice in ancient Judaism too. Psalm 51 is one of the great prayers of confession in any religious tradition. Consider these lines from that Psalm:

 

Have mercy on me, O God,

       according to your steadfast

              love;

       according to your abundant

              mercy

       blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my

              iniquity,

       and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,

       and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone have I

              sinned,

       so that you are justified in your

              sentence

       and blameless when you pass

              judgment. Psalm 51:1-4.

 

The ancient Hebrews knew the psychospiritual value of confession. In Psalm 32 we read:

 

While I kept silence, my body

              wasted away

       through my groaning all day

              long.

For day and night your hand was

              heavy upon me;

       my strength was dried up as

              by the heat of summer.

 

Then I acknowledged my sin

              to you,

       and I did not hide my iniquity;

I said, ‘I will confess my

       transgressions to the Lord,’

       and you forgave the guilt of

              my sin. Psalm 32:3-5.

 

After he confessed his sin the psalmist of Psalm 32 could see God as “a hiding place and a deliverer from trouble.” Psalm 32:7. He was able once again to know the steadfast love of God. Psalm 32:10.

It may come as a surprise to Christians who think God forgave human sin only after the supposed atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to learn that ancient Israel knew God as a God of forgiveness centuries before Jesus. We see that profound understanding of God in Psalm 32:5 quoted above, but that’s not the only place we see ancient Israel’s understanding of God’s forgiveness. In Psalm 130 we read:

 

If you, O Lord, should mark

              iniquities,

       Lord, who could stand?

But there is forgiveness with you,

       so that you may be revered. Psalm 130:3-4.

 

In addition to the verses we’ve already seen from it, Psalm 32 has these lines:

 

Happy are those whose

              transgression is forgiven,

       whose sin is covered.

Happy are those to whom the

              Lord imputes no iniquity,

       and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Psalm 32:1-2.

 

Christians were by no means the first people to experience forgiveness of their sin in their relationship with Jesus.

Yet it is still true that Christians have found forgiveness of their sin in Jesus Christ from the beginning of the faith. We have known the value of confession of sin just as long. The foundational prayer of the Christian faith, the Lord’s Prayer, contains an element of confession. We pray “and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” or some variation of that line. Confession has been part of the life of faith for Christians from the beginning. They probably inherited that spiritual practice from the mother church of Christianity, the ancient Jewish tradition.

So why do some progressive Christians today refuse to confess their sin? They do, you know. Years ago I served as a seminary intern in a United Church of Christ congregation that would not let their pastor include a prayer of confession in her weekly worship service. They said they had nothing to confess. They experienced confession as an utterly unnecessary self-flagellation. They wouldn’t do it. Even in the congregations I served as pastor, which did not preclude me from having confession in the worship service, I thought I had more or less to justify having confession in the service every time I came to it. That’s why I always included a “Call to Worship” in the order of the service right before the unison prayer of confession. It did call people to confession, but it also included at least a few words about why we confess at all. No, progressive Christians don’t like confession. They don’t like being told they have sinned, so many of them just don’t do confession. Or maybe they’ll sort of do it, but only when the pastor explains to them over and over again why they should.

Our tradition knows better. It knows that we all need to confess our sin. In my call to confession I often included this line from 1 John: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” 1 John 1:8. I am convinced that that New Testament verse is absolutely correct. I know it’s correct about me. I’m confident that it is correct about you too whoever you are. It’s true about us because we are human beings not gods. None of us is perfect. Sinless life is not given to us. It just isn’t. Confession is a powerful way to cope with that perhaps unfortunate reality. In confession we get honest with God. Just as importantly, in confession we get honest with ourselves.

Confession is then a vital part of the life of faith. We all have things to confess. We can’t improve aspects of our lives that we won’t admit need improving. Confession can be a rich time of self-reflection and discernment. Admitting that we have done some things wrong doesn’t mean we’ve done everything wrong. It doesn’t mean we haven’t done good things too. It means only that we know we’re not perfect and that we need God’s forgiveness. The great good news of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God’s forgiveness is always near at hand. Indeed, I believe that God has already granted it to each and every one of us. In confession we connect our spirits with God’s spirit of forgiveness. We are freed from guilt. Then we can get to work making amends for the things we have done wrong when that is possible and working hard to do better in the future. So let’s not be reluctant about confession. It is a powerful spiritual discipline. It is pleasing to God, and it can be pleasing to us too if we’ll let it. So let’s get on with it, shall we?

On First and Second Comings

 

On First and Second Comings

November 13, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

In a couple of weeks it will be Advent, one of the two seasons of waiting and anticipation in the Christian calendar. Advent is the time of anticipation of and preparation for the birth of Jesus. Like Lent it is an artificial season. We pretend that something that something that happened over two thousand years ago hasn’t happened yet. We anticipate the coming of God into the world, which really is a strange thing to do. It’s strange because as a matter of mere fact Jesus was born ages ago. It’s also strange because we confess the God is always in the world and always has been. We can think of that strangeness in terms of Trinitarian theology if we like. God is and always has been in the world as the Holy Spirit and came into the world as God the Son Incarnate in Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Son being both the same and not the same at the same time. Or we can just anticipate Christmas without worrying about obscure (though ultimately important) theological issues and answers. Either way, Advent is the time of anticipating and preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ.

Every year as we approach Advent I feel sorry for the people who compile lectionaries, those schedules of Bible readings for Sundays and other holy days. Preachers in some traditions like the Roman Catholic tradition are required to use them. Others of us aren’t required to use them, but many of us do anyway. Lectionary compilers try to make the readings they select relevant in meaningful ways to the holy days and seasons of the Christian year. That’s easy enough to do for many seasons and holy days. For Christmas just put readings from the Christmas stories of Matthew and Luke (the only two Christmas stories there are) in your lectionary. For Lent include stories of Jesus as he comes to Jerusalem for the first time in his adult life (except in John, where he comes to Jerusalem several times). Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Epiphany and other holy days present no particular challenge to people compiling lectionaries.

Not so Advent. In Advent Christians want to hear the stories of Christmas, never mind that Advent isn’t Christmas and the short season of Christmas in the Christian calendar doesn’t begin until Christmas Day (though we usually cheat by a few hours and start it on Christmas Eve). Lectionary compilers want to give us stories that lead up to the birth of Christ. That, after all, is what Advent is all about. When they try to do that they run into a great big problem. Except in Luke there really are no Bible stories leading up to Christmas. After a puzzling genealogy the Gospel of Matthew jumps right into its birth narrative. Mark has no birth narrative. Neither does John, so they don’t have stories leading up to a birth narrative.[1] Luke has the stories of the angel’s annunciation to Mary and Mary’s visit to Elizabeth before Jesus is born, but at least the Revised Common Lectionary, the one most used by Protestant pastors, doesn’t want to use Luke’s stories all the time. There aren’t enough of them, and that lectionary wants to restrict its use of Luke mostly to year C of its three year cycle.[2] So lectionary compilers coming up with appropriate readings for Advent is quite a big challenge.

The Revised Common Lectionary at least solves that problem in a way that I find quite problematic. While there are almost no New Testament stories that lead up to the birth of Jesus, that is, to the first coming of Christ, there are all kinds of references in the New Testament to an anticipated and hoped for second coming of Christ. Matthew 24:37, for example refers to a second coming of Christ as “the coming of the Son of Man.” At Acts 1:10-11 we read that two men in white, presumably angels, tell the disciples who have just witnessed Jesus’ ascension, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” The oldest account we have of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist clearly anticipates a second coming when it ends with the line, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” 1 Corinthians 11:26. 1 Thessalonians, a letter written largely in response to people’s concern that the second coming hadn’t happened yet, has a reference to a second coming that has caused a good deal of mischief because of misguided Christians who call the even predicted there “the rapture.” We read:

 

For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17.

 

Other New Testament references to an anticipated (or at least hoped for) second coming of Christ can easily be found. From the earliest days of the post-Resurrection Christian movement, Christians hoped that Jesus would come again.

The Revised Common Lectionary solves the problem of there being very few New Testament passages that really are appropriate for Advent by putting many of these references to a second coming of Christ into the lectionary during Advent. Thus that lectionary has as its Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent in that lectionary’s Year B Mark 13:24-37. Those verses are part of what scholars call “The Little Apocalypse of Mark.” The Little Apocalypse begins at Mark 13:3 and continues to the end of chapter 13.[3] It is indeed apocalyptic. Here’s how it begins:

 

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, ‘Tell us when this [the destruction of the temple] will be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’ Then Jesus began to say to them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray….When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. Mark 13:3-7.

 

Jesus goes on to speak of natural disasters, persecution of the disciples, and betrayal within families. It’s all very unpleasant. It’s all very apocalyptic.

The verses of the Little Apocalypse that the Revised Common Lectionary specifies for the first Sunday of Advent in Year B appear at the end of chapter 13 of Mark. They include a prediction that people will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. Mark 13:26. Jesus tells the four disciples with whom he is speaking that only the Father knows when these end times will come. Therefore, keep awake.

These verses obviously have nothing to do with the birth of baby Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas. The adult Jesus speaks them, but he doesn’t talk about his birth. They are about something that’s supposed to happen in the future not something that has already happened in the past. They aren’t about a human baby being born or even a divine one. They are about a vision from the book of Daniel about a figure called a son of man coming through the clouds. See Daniel 7:13a. (When Jesus called himself the Son of Man his audience would immediately have thought of that vision.) Yet there they are in the Revised Common Lectionary’s readings for this year on the first Sunday of Advent.

Now, I understand why the lectionary people put second coming texts in the readings for a season about the first coming. They don’t have much choice. I get it, but I can’t approve of it. I can’t approve of it first of all because the New Testament’s images of a second coming are so radically different from its images of the first coming and of who Jesus was during that first coming. When he’s born into his first coming he’s destitute and born in a stable. In one vision of his birth (Matthew’s) he and his parents have to flee to Egypt so that the evil king Herod doesn’t kill him. When he grew up he healed people and preached love, forgiveness, inclusion, and nonviolence. Earthly power tortured and executed him. He was gentle and kind (most of the time at least), not imposing or intimidating (except on rare occasions).

Compare all that to 1 Thessalonian’s images of a second coming. In those images Christ comes in the air not in a stable. He comes with a cry of command and the sound of God’s trumpet not with the lowing of cattle. He chooses some over others to meet him not on earth in their common lives but in the air as he descends. The early Christians envisioned the second coming not as a time of grace but as a time of severe judgment. At Matthew 25:46 for example the risen Christ doesn’t forgive those who didn’t care for “the least of these,” he sends them off into eternal punishment. The New Testament’s images of the actual first coming and an imagined second coming could hardly be more different. Those second coming images in no way speak of preparing for the first coming, a truth that makes it odd at best that they get used during Advent.

Yet I have a second and more fundamental reason for not approving of the Revised Common Lectionary’s use of second coming passages for Advent. I can’t approve of it because I reject the whole notion of a second coming of Christ (unless his resurrection appearances are his second coming, but that’s not what the New Testament means by a second coming). What are these New Testament images of Christ coming again in power and glory really? With John Dominic Crossan I say that they are a great denial of the first coming. They say in effect yes, Jesus was a nice guy and all, but the world’s still a mess. Those damned Romans are still here. We’re still poor and living at the mercy of the tax collectors and moneylenders. Sure, Jesus said some nice things and all, but look around. What did he accomplish? Not much.

Here’s what those second coming images have the early Christians saying to Jesus: Lord, we need you to come again and do it right this time. We don’t need your meekness, we need divine power. Grace? We don’t need no stinking grace. We need the bad buys judged and condemned. We don’t need you to bless the poor, we need you to make the poor not poor. We don’t’ need someone the Romans executed, we need someone to drive the Romans into the sea. Not metaphorically as at Mark 5:1-13 but literally. We need you to use lethal force to get rid of them for us. We don’t need you to come as a nobody from some backwater hamlet like you did. We need power. We need force. We need violence against the bad guys. We need them judged and damned not loved and forgiven. That first time you came was nice and all, but it just didn’t work. So now come again and do it right this time. Don’t do it God’s way like you did the first time. Do it our way.

I simply do not believe that our call from God is for us to dream of some unreal future time when Christ will return to do it “right.” Our call isn’t to wait for a second coming, it is to live into the first coming. It’s not to wait for Christ to come again to establish the realm of God on earth. Our call is to do the work of building the realm of God on earth, the work of justice and peace, ourselves, relying always of course on God’s unfailing support as we do. Jesus came and did it God’s way. It’s high time for us to start doing it God’s way too as at least some Christians have for a very long time.

So Revised Common Lectionary people, I’m sorry. I get why you do what you do for Advent, but what you do is just wrong. I wish you didn’t give us all the second coming stuff you give us. I wish you gave us more stories of Jesus doing it God’s way so that we could better learn how God wants us to be doing it. As far as I know no one is working on a second Revised Common Lectionary. I don’t expect the Advent readings to change. I just wish they would.

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[1] The Gospel of John does say that the Word became flesh and lived among us, John 1:14, but that’s hardly an account of a human birth.

[2] You’ll find the Revised Common Lectionary at lectionary.library.vanderbult.edu among other places.

[3] The verses Mark 13:1-2 are often considered to be part of the Little Apocalypse. They aren’t. For what they are see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition (Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, Inc. 2019), Volume 3, The New Testament, 50-52.

The Righteous or Sinners?

 

The Righteous or Sinners?

November 11, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

What is the church? Who is it for? There are at least a couple of different visions of the church that answer those questions differently. Here’s one ancient vision:

 

O Lord, who may abide in your

                tent?

        Who may dwell on your holy

                hill?

Those who walk blamelessly, and

                do what is right,

        and speak the truth from their

                heart;

who do not slander with their

                tongue,

        and do no evil to their friends,

        nor take up a reproach against

                their neighbors;

in whose eyes the wicked are

                despised,

        but who honor those who fear

                the Lord. Psalm 15:1-4b.

 

The references here to the Lord’s “tent” and “holy hill” are to the temple in Jerusalem. Psalm 15 gives us a list of qualifications for entering into worship there. This vision of the temple and its worship sees the temple—the church in our context—as a place for the righteous. One must live properly to be included in the worshipping congregation. Be blameless and do what is right. Do not do what is wrong. Then you’re good to go, or rather good to come, to come into the house of the Lord.

We might think, Well, OK, but that’s about a house of worship that hasn’t existed for the last 1,950 years.[1] It doesn’t have much to do with us, we might think. Well, it wouldn’t have much to do with us if the vision of the church that this psalm expresses had ended when the temple was destroyed. It didn’t. I can’t speak for Jewish synagogues, but I know that a great many Christian churches think of themselves in much the same way as Psalm 15 thought of the temple. In these churches people must somehow be “good” or “right” or at least act in compliance with what the church considers to be good or right in order to be a member of the church or to participate in the life of the church. A person who wants to be a member of such a church must believe what the church says are the right things to believe or at least say that they do. These churches will often expel people who they think don’t measure up to their standards. They often expel gay people and divorced people for example. In this vision of the church, the church is a place for the righteous however a particular church defines righteous just as the Jerusalem temple was for Psalm 15.

Here’s the other vision of the church:

 

And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’ Mark 2:15-17.

 

Because Christians strive to follow Jesus and even call the church the Body of Christ, many Christians (though not all by a long shot) prefer this vision of the church to the one expressed in Psalm 15.

Notice how different those two visions are. In the first vision the church is a congregation of the righteous, of the saved. It’s a club of religious insiders, those who have already gotten the message the church proclaims and agreed to live in accordance with it. In the second vision the church is more like a spiritual hospital. Indeed, that’s how St. Augustine (354-430 CE) thought of it. The church isn’t only a gathering of the saved, it is a place for those who know they need to be saved or at least are open to being convinced that they do. It is a place people come for spiritual healing. It is a place of confession and forgiveness. It is a place of spiritual seeking, of the lost looking for a path to spiritual health and wholeness. These two visions of the church could hardly be more different.

Given the quote from Mark above it should be  clear which of these visions is truer to Jesus Christ and his call to the church. It’s not just that Mark quotes Jesus here. It’s that the vision of the church as a place for sinners and spiritual healing is so much more in tune with what Jesus was all about than is the other vision. Jesus came to save the last, the least, and the lost. He came to show us that with God we are always safe in the ways only God can make us safe—claimed, loved, and forgiven. Jesus never said blessed are the self-righteous. The Pharisees appear in the Gospels as exemplars of self-righteousness, and Jesus never tired of condemning them for it. He would do the same today with our latter-day Pharisees, those who think faith is all about obeying rules and church is only for those the church considers to be good.

No, Jesus said “I have come to call sinners.” That’s what Christ’s church must be, a hospital for sick or wounded souls. A place of spiritual healing. A place of love, acceptance, forgiveness, support, and grace. Do those words describe your church? If so, wonderful. If not, what are you going to do about it? Or do those words describe the kind of church you’d love to find? If so, go looking for one. They’re out there. Keep looking until you find one. You might start by going to churches of my domination, the United Church of Christ (or these days logging on to their virtual worship) and talking to their pastor. Many of that denomination’s church are like that. Whatever your relationship to the Christian church is, I hope and pray that you will find a church where your spirit can heal. We’re all sinners after all. We’re the ones Jesus came to call. Thanks be to God!

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[1] The Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. It has never been rebuilt. A mosque that is sacred to Muslims stands today where the Jewish temple stood so many years ago.

Will We Survive Trump?

 

Will We Survive Trump?

I don’t mean to be alarmist. Well, yes actually, I do mean to be alarmist. I think a situation we’re facing today really is cause for alarm. The political system of the United States has survived and functioned for over 230 years. It has produced some God-awful results. Even in my lifetime it have us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, disasters all. In earlier times it gave us the Indian slaughterer Andrew Jackson and other 19^th century disasters. Still, it has functioned the way it is designed to function. That we have had really bad presidents is only partly the fault of the system. It’s mostly the fault of the American electorate, which seems addicted to making really bad choices from time to time. The Electoral College system has outlived any sense it may once have made, but it still works the way it was designed to work. The states run the elections not the federal government. States set up their election law, and state officials operate under it to produce an election result that complies with that law. The American political tradition is that the party that has lost an election accepts the results of the election. Even when the losing candidate really won, as Al Gore probably did in 2000, the candidate who is found by the states (or on very rare occasions by the courts) to be the loser concedes and accepts the result of the election no matter how disappointed they may be or how much they hate the result. Four years ago Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote. She didn’t go running to the courts to try to reverse the outcome of the election even though a great many of us realized, at least in part, what a disaster Donald Trump would be. That’s how it has been with us.

Until today. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. There really is no doubt about that. Joe Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College result. There isn’t a shred of evidence that there is anything out of order about that result. Yet Donald Trump is screaming voter fraud. “I really won, and won big,” he shouts. “The Democrats stole the election,” he rants. That the President of the United States makes such baseless claims is bad enough, though it isn’t surprising given who Donald Trump is. We’ve known for a very long time that he is a narcissist with a weak ego who can’t stand to lose anything and will do anything to stay in power. What is surprising is that a great many other Republican politicians are going along with Trump’s deranged lies about election fraud. It’s not surprising that Attorney General Barr has changed longstanding Department of Justice policy and authorized the US Attorneys to investigate election fraud before the states have certified the election results and despite the fact that those US Attorneys have nothing remotely approaching traditional DOJ requirements for opening an investigation. We’ve known for quite a while that Barr is just a Trump stooge who gives not one good God damn about the rule of law. It is surprising that Republican senators, including those who were just reelected like Mitch McConnell, are going along with this destructive charade, surprising and deeply concerning.

In these baseless attacks on the results of the 2020 presidential election we are facing nothing less than a fascist challenge to our entire political system. Democratic political systems depend on the people of the country accepting the legitimacy of the system. Totalitarian systems can worry much less about what the people they rule think. By the 1960s at least almost no citizens of the Soviet Union thought their Communist system was legitimate. They were more than ready to overthrow it, but they couldn’t because it was so powerful. It had everyone convinced that they were the only ones who opposed it. Political systems that lose their legitimacy with their people fall, usually into some form of fascism. Russia is a good example. That empire fell into a leftwing fascist system called Communism because the people of the country lost faith in the legitimacy of their tsarist government. Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s is another. Hitler was able to overthrow the democratic system of the Weimar Republic through that republic’s own political system (combined with a lot of street violence) because the German people lost faith in the legitimacy of that system.

Something similar could happen here if enough of the American people lose faith in the legitimacy of our political system. False claims of election fraud by supposedly responsible public officials probably aren’t enough by themselves to delegitimize our political system enough to lead to its downfall. They are however a very disturbing sign of things possibly to come. No president before Trump has raised questions about the legitimacy of our political system the way Trump has. No Senate majority leader has gone along with such a president the way Mitch McConnell has. That these things are happening now must cause great concern to all true Americans.

Donald Trump has a base of radical, fascist supporters prone to violence who may some day be strong enough to challenge our political system violently. We aren’t there yet, but Donald Trump appears to have started us on the slippery slope to such a demonic result. We must all be aware of what’s happening. We must all do whatever we can to stop our country’s slide toward fascism. Fascist systems are simply evil. They oppress people and destroy their lives. Donald Trump is an American fascist. He’s being abetted by Republican politicians who I would have thought knew better. We’re in trouble folks. It’s way past time for us to wake up.

On Prophetesses and Vice Presidents

 

Of Prophetesses and Vice Presidents

November 10, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

People who are at all familiar with the Bible know that there are people called prophets in the Old Testament. Several of them have their names on books of the Bible—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, and others. They are of course all men. There are only two books of the Bible named for woman, Esther and Ruth. One of the great flaws of the Judeo-Christian tradition is its androcentrism. Christianity’s images and language for God are rooted in the ancient Jewish images and language for God. Those images are almost exclusively male, and in the Bible God is always “he.” The ancient Hebrew god Yahweh began in the people’s consciousness as a male war god. See Exodus 15:20, which also refers to Miriam as a prophetess. The ancient Hebrew’s understanding of God evolved way beyond that primitive conception. See for example Isaiah 44:6. In verses like that one ancient Israel gave the world true monotheism, thanks be to God. Yet ancient Israel’s God always remained “he.” He never lost the name of that ancient war god Yahweh, rendered in the New Revised Standard Version and other English translations as “the Lord” printed that way in small caps. There are a few places in the Old Testament (and more of them in the Roman Catholic Old Testament than in the Protestant one) where a female figure very nearly becomes an image of God. In Proverbs, for example, the female figure Wisdom describes herself in terms that could apply equally well to God. See especially Proverbs, Chapter 8. Some feminist theologians, including the great Elizabeth Johnson, consider Lady Wisdom to be a female image of God. Yet in Proverbs at least Wisdom refers to God as a figure other than herself and as “he.” So unfortunately the exclusivity of male images in Hebrew references to God remains.

Christianity inherited ancient Judaism’s androcentrism. Yes, there is the very feminine figure of the Virgin Mary, more important in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity than in Protestant. Yet Jesus called God “Father” not “Mother.” God remained “he” throughout the New Testament. Led by feminist theologians like Johnson and others many of us today work to correct Christianity’s exclusively male images of and language for God, but it isn’t easy. “Mother” may work as well and as badly as an image of God as “Father” as Elizabeth Johnson says, but we’ve been so conditioned by our faith’s male language for God that we must constantly guard against falling back into it.

It may therefore surprise some people to learn that the Old Testament has in it both prophets and prophetesses. There aren’t many, but there are a few. Miriam, to whom I referred above, was one. A couple of them receive only a passing reference. One of them doesn’t even have a name. At Isaiah 8:3 we read, “And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived and had a son.” I’ve seen one reference  to this prophetess as Isaiah’s wife, but it isn’t clear what that characterization of her is based on other than the fact that she had sexual relations with Isaiah. We know nothing else about her.

Another prophetess  receives equally brief treatment, but at least she has a name. At Nehemiah 6:14 we read, “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to these things that they did, and also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who want to make me afraid.” The events involving “the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets” are unknown.

Two other prophetesses receive more attention than the three we’ve encountered so far. They are Huldah and Deborah. We meet Huldah in Chapter 22 of 2 Kings. There we read that the king has become greatly distresses after hearing a newly found book of the law read to him. So he sends a delegation to the prophetess Huldah “to inquire of the Lord for me, for the people, concerning the words of this book….” 2 Kings 22:13. Huldah delivers to them a rather typical prophetic judgment oracle similar to other such oracles delivered by male prophets. She begins by saying “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus says the Lord, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on all its inhabitants….” 2 Kings 22:15-16. She goes on to say, in typical prophetic fashion, that the Lord is angry because the people have worshipped other gods. She adds however that the Lord will let the king die in peace before the disaster comes because the king has repented. 2 Kings 22:18-20. The king here treats Huldah as he would any male prophet, and she speaks as any male prophet would.

The prophetess who receives the most attention in the Old Testament is Deborah. We meet her at Judges 4:4, where we read, “At that time Deborah, a prophetess,…was judging Israel.” We see right at the start of her story that she is more than a prophetess, not that being a prophetess was a small thing. She was also one of the judges of Israel. At her time in the history of Israel as told in the Bible Israel had no king. The kingdom of Saul, David, and Solomon had not been created yet. Instead of kings Israel had people called judges. Their primary function was to resolve disputes, as we see in the Bible’s account of Deborah where we read, “She used to sit under the palm of Deborah…and the Israelites came up to her for judgment.” Judges 4:5. The judges would also on occasion summon the people for war as Deborah does in her story. She summons a man named Barak and tells him to gather an army to fight the oppressive non-Israelite king Jabin of Canaan and Jabin’s military commander Sisera. In typical prophetic fashion she says that it is not she who issues this command but the Lord. After Deborah promises to go with him Barak does as she told him to do. As the battle begins Deborah says to Barak, “Up! For this is the day on which the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. The Lord is indeed going out before you.” Judges 4:14. Barak’s army wipes out Sisera’s army. Sisera flees and is killed in his sleep by a woman named Jael with whom he had sought refuge. Whereupon the prose portion of the story of Deborah ends. Chapter 5 of Judges is known as the Song of Deborah. It retells the story of Deborah in verse form with a lot of added details.

It is of course remarkable in the context of ancient Israel that a woman appears not only as a prophetess but as a judge. She is the only Hebrew woman to hold such a high political office. In her interaction with Barak she functions as a typical Hebrew prophet. Hebrew prophets and prophetesses were people with special access to the desires of Yahweh, here “the Lord,” the God of Israel. Like a typical prophet Deborah speaks a word of the Lord to the people or in Deborah’s case to a particular person. She is remarkable as a prophet only because she is a woman. We see in her story that, although it happened only with her, it was possible for a woman to assume a role of authority in ancient Israel.

The United States of America has never had a woman president or vice president. We lag years behind a great many other nations in that regard. Angela Merkel has been Chancellor of Germany for many years. Great Britain has had a woman prime minister. Golda Meir once led the modern state of Israel. Even Muslim Pakistan has had a woman at the head of its government as has Pakistan’s neighbor and rival India. We haven’t. Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic nominee for vice president back in 1984, but the Democrats lost that election to Ronald Reagan. We have had a Black president. We have never had a woman, much less a woman of color, as either president or vice president.

That is, we haven’t until now. On November 3, 2020, we elected Senator Kamala Harris as the next Vice President of the United States. Vice President-elect Harris is a woman of color, the daughter of immigrants. Her father was from Jamaica, her mother from India. She is only the second person of color to be elected to either of the two highest offices in our country. She is the first woman. This country has operated under its current constitution since 1789, some 231 years ago. In all those years we have never elected a woman as president or vice president, not, that is, until last week.

Why has it taken this long for us to elect a woman as president or vice president? I’m sure the reasons are complex. Political scientists can make most anything complex. Yet I am also sure that all of the reasons relate to a fundamental element of the dominant American culture. We have always been an overwhelmingly sexist country. We have always been ruled by men. Men have dominated all aspects of American life throughout our history. One of the historical roots of American sexism is the radical androcentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s not that the US is a “Christian nation” in the mistaken sense of claims made by the Christian right. Most of our founders were only nominal Christians, believing instead in a rationalistic reduction of Christianity called Deism. They were, however, all sexists. They didn’t give women the vote, for example. They all came out of European culture, and they all reflected traditional European, Judeo-Christian sexism.

Our nation was founded as a western European nation in a new world. The history of western Europe is our history. It isn’t our history in the sense that all Americans descend from Europe, which of course they don’t, but in the sense that the dominant thinking and institutions of the United States all derive from western Europe. The culture of western Europe was shaped by and in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That culture was radically sexist. Western culture formed in the tradition of Judeo-Christian androcentrism and even misogyny. Towering figures of western European culture like Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther said horrible things about women, who they considered in no way to be the equals of men. European culture was sexist. Therefore the dominant American culture became sexist too.

From the beginning the human norm in Euro-American culture has been the male human being. When we look at photographs of American political, business, and religious leaders before the last fifty years or so they are all or nearly all men. The woman’s movement that began in the 1960s has changed that reality to some extent, but in virtually all aspects of American life the glass ceiling that effectively stops women from rising to the highest levels of authority and responsibility in nearly every aspect of American life remains intact. The androcentric nature of Christianity bears much of the blame for that deplorable American reality.

That’s why the election of Senator Harris as Vice President is so important. She has broken through the glass ceiling of American politics. The importance of her achievement is immense. I’ve seen it expressed in images on the Internet. A young Black girl wearing a shirt with the words “My vice president looks like me” was one of them. An image of shattered glass with the words “Women, put on your shoes. There’s glass everywhere” was another. The election of Senator Harris as vice president has immense significance.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Senator Harris is a Deborah among us. I don’t mean that she is a prophetess. I mean that she is an exception to a sexist societal norm. A couple of prophetesses with short stories in the Bible don’t offset ancient Hebrew androcentrism. One Vice President-elect, as important as she is, doesn’t offset American sexism. In all three cases the cultural norms of the societies that produced them didn’t change. Ancient Israel’s never changed. America’s are changing, but they are changing only very slowly. The issues of injustice remain. The work of justice remains. So let us celebrate the election of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Her election is indeed something to celebrate. Let us not, however, forget that there is still work to do. So congratulations Vice President-elect Harris. Now let’s get back to work.