Reflections on Memorial Day and Christian Nonviolence

 

Reflections on Memorial Day and Christian Nonviolence

March 31, 2021

 

Today is Memorial Day. Here in the United States we have three days each year dedicated to different people who are or were associated with the United States military. Armed Forces Day is meant to honor people currently serving in the military. Veterans Day is dedicated to people who once served in the military but no longer do. Memorial Day, which we observe today, memorializes the men and women who died while serving in the military. Let me say right at the beginning of this post that I intend nothing I say here to disparage anyone who is serving, or has served, or who died while serving in the US military. I mean in no way to minimize the loss suffered by the families of those who died while in the military. I intend nothing I say here to judge or disparage those who have served and are serving. My late father served in the United States Navy during World War II. I have been pastor to many US military veterans. I respect them. I don’t believe God judges them, and I don’t judge them either.

But here’s the thing. I believe in, advocate, and try to live out Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. He told and showed us that nonviolence must be our way because it is God’s way. I am convinced that violence, hunger, and disease are the great banes of human existence. I also believe that the only way to stop violence in the world is to have to courage to stop being violent in the world. Not to be violent in our personal lives, not to be violent in our national life. The entire purpose of any military forces, including our American military forces is to be violent. Those forces therefore by their very nature contradict what I believe to be God’s call to all of us.

I once heard an American soldier say on television that his job was to kill people and destroy their stuff. Precisely. We always hear that the purpose of the US military is “to protect our freedom.” I don’t believe that that is primarily what our military does. I think its primary function is to project and protect American political and economic power in the world. Yet even if the purpose of the military were to protect our freedom it would do that through the application of massive amounts of violence. Military units may at times do things like serve people suffering from natural disasters. Today the US Air Force may be flying desperately needed oxygen to India. That’s all very well and good, but it isn’t the military’s raison d’être. The US military, indeed every military, exists to kill and to destroy.

We so universally fail to think of the military that way. We don’t say it inflicts death and destruction on people, we call it “service.” When someone identifies himself as a veteran the cultural expectation has become that we respond “Thank you for your service.” We don’t say that to teachers. We don’t say that to doctors and nurses. What? Is what they do not better service than killing people is? People serve other people in so many ways that are constructive not destructive, but service in our country has come to mean military service and not much else.

The purpose of the military is to kill and destroy. It is to inflict pain, misery, and loss on other people. What it does when it is doing what it is there to do is brutal and bloody, and we don’t much like brutal and bloody. So we cover up the horror of military violence by calling it “honorable.” We perform elaborate ceremonies at the funerals of military people who have died in war. We give their widows neatly folded American flags in little triangular boxes. We give those to any deceased veteran. We call mothers who have lost daughters or sons in our wars “Gold Star Mothers,” as if a gold star could compensate for the loss of a son or a daughter even if it really were gold. On formal occasions we dress our military people up in striking dress uniforms in which they don’t even look much like fighters. And it’s all a sham. It’s nothing but an attempt to hide from ourselves what the military really does so we can continue to send our people out to do it. We make the infliction of death and destruction honorable so we can convince ourselves that it’s OK for us to keep inflicting them on people.

There is only one fitting memorial to our women and men who have died serving in the military. It isn’t a neatly folded flag in a triangular box. It isn’t the president in civilian clothes giving a military salute even though he’s supposed to be a civilian commander in chief. It is one thing and one thing only. It is the creation of a world in which there will be no more Memorial Days or Armed Forces Days or Veterans Days because there will be no more military violence. It is for us to have the courage as a nation to stop fighting. To pursue peace through distributive justice not through war. It is be use our country’s massive natural and human resources to build up rather than to blow up. The only meaningful and appropriate memorial to the ones we call “fallen” (as if they had tripped not died) is peace. Is nonviolent resolution of disputes. Is the people of the world caring for and about each other not trying to kill each other. People will say it’s a dangerous world, and we must be prepared. It is a dangerous world, but the an end to the violence must start somewhere. We’re the strongest nation in the world. It has to begin with us.

Saying that may cause some to call me a coward, but in this world in which violence is the norm it takes as much courage not to fight as it takes to fight. Preaching peace through distributive justice not peace through destructive violence takes the courage to be called a coward and not back down. To take being called naïve and unrealistic. In some places to endure social ostracism and scorn. And sometimes to take violent assaults on one’s person without responding in kind. Jesus held to his teaching of nonviolence and justice though it led him to the cross. Here in the US we’re lucky I guess. Nothing like that is likely to happen to us. But I have to ask: Do we have the courage to take it if it did come to that? Do I? I don’t know. I just know that nonviolence is the path to which God calls us. I pray for the courage to stay on that path no matter what, and I pray that more people will catch the spirit of our national saints Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis and join me and lots of others there. May it be so.

Reflections on the Centennial of the Tulsa Massacre

 

Reflections on the Centennial of the Tulsa Massacre

May 30, 2021

 

These days we are marking, but certainly not celebrating, the centennial of the murderous destruction of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black part of that city known as the Black Wall Street, by a mob of whites who leveled Greenwood only because most of the district’s residents were Black. No one knows for sure how many people died. Estimates run as high as three hundred. This tragedy is often called a race riot. Perhaps it was, but it was the white people of Tulsa who rioted against Black residents of the city not Blacks rioting against whites. The Tulsa massacre was one of the worst cases of racial violence in US history, but in my experience at least it is one of the most covered up. I never heard of it until year or two ago. Why? Why isn’t it universally known as one of the worst consequences and manifestation of the racial hatred of whites toward Blacks in our country’s sordid history of racism?

I can think of only one answer to that question. The Tulsa massacre was not a case of Blacks rioting against whites. It was a case of white rioting against Blacks. White Americans have always controlled the mainstream media and the teaching of history in this country. The white media and white textbook writers (whose book are always written to be acceptable to conservative white racist authorities in Texas) don’t like to discuss things that make white Americans look bad. Instead of the truth we get coverage like the banner headline in the Tulsa newspaper The Tulsa World after the disaster: Two Whites Dead in Race Riot. Perhaps orders of magnitude more Blacks died in that attack by vicious whites against unusually prosperous Blacks, but that was not the local white newspaper’s headline. The death of two whites was. There you have white racial centrism in a nutshell. Who gives a damn about the Blacks? They aren’t really human anyway. It’s us whites who matter. So our media have reported. So our history has been told.

The Tulsa massacre is finally getting the recognition it deserves. There is however one truth that most Americans don’t know. History matters. The parts of history that matter most are the ugly parts we’d rather ignore. The parts we’d like no one to remember. The parts many of us which hadn’t happened. Yet knowing them is indispensable for understanding much of anything in the world today. History matters everywhere. No one can understand contemporary Germany without knowing about Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, and World War II. No one can understand contemporary Russia without knowing about the reign of the tsars, Stalin, Communism, and World War II. Contemporary Germany is formed by its past, both the good parts (of which there are many) and the bad parts (of which there are far too many). The same is true of contemporary Russia.

Our present American reality too has been formed by our past too. There are many good things in that history. The United States Constitution, at least since the addition of the post-Civil War amendments and the 19^th Amendment in 1920, is perhaps the best foundational document any nation has ever had. It guarantees civil liberties to an extent no constitution did before it and few have done since. In many ways the United States has been the envy of the world. The standard of living is high by world standards for most (though certainly not all) Americans. We have those constitutionally guaranteed rights. The technological and intellectual cultures of the United States rival those of any other nation. There is much that is good in American history.

It is equally true and substantially more important however that there is also an enormous amount of bad in that history. Many of the worst parts of our history stem from the fact that our country was founded by racists as a racist nation. There were Black slaves in America before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The US Constitution originally considered a Black person to be only three-fifths of a person, and it only outlawed slavery after a brutal civil war in which the states that made up the Confederacy fought for nothing so much as to preserve the sinful, brutal, and inhumane institution of slavery on which their economies depended. Yet it wasn’t just the old Confederacy that was racist. Northern racism took different forms than did southern racism, but it was every bit as sinful. It too blighted the lives of millions of people.

American racism oppressed Black people from our nation’s beginning. It still does, yet Blacks weren’t its only victims. White Americans killed American Indians to an extent that we can only call genocide. Hitler thought we couldn’t object to what he was going to do to the Jews because of what we had done to the Indians. The Indians we didn’t kill we forced onto small reservations, almost always breaking some treaty we had signed with them in the process. We tried to rob them of their culture and make them more like us. We took their children and put them in institutions where they were not permitted to speak their native languages or engage in their own religious practices. We forced them to become Christians.

And most white Americans don’t know this history, won’t admit to it, and deny that the country is racist. Yet we see an illustrative example of the functioning of American racism in that headline in The Tulsa World that I mentioned above. What mattered to white Tulsans was not the massive death and destruction they had inflicted on their Black fellow residents of that city but only that two white people died in the mayhem. As members and propagators of racism we white Americans have turned a blind eye to the suffering and even the very lives of our Black compatriots. Beyond that, for decades if not centuries we characterized Black people in print and in all the media as only semi-human, portraying them as being as much ape as human. We’ve excluded them from the corridors of power in business, academia, and government. That President Obama identified himself as Black and served eight years in the White House changes that truth not at all. He was after succeeded by the clearly racist Donald Trump, who thinks there are fine people among white supremacists. Those hundreds of Black people who died in the Tulsa massacre? Who cares! What matters is that two white people died. To most white Americans those two were the only ones who mattered. That’s how racist our country has been in its rather inglorious past. It is how racist it still is.

Black Americans have been struggling for freedom and equal rights for at least the last two hundred years, yet most white Americans noticed that struggle only in the late 1950s at the earliest. We have made some progress, but we have not made nearly enough progress in overcoming our country’s legacy of racism and the slavery and racial discrimination that flowed from it. Is another Tulsa massacre likely? Perhaps not, but it isn’t impossible either. Were it to happen most white Americans would blame the Blacks regardless of what the facts were. Most of us white Americans have learned of the Tulsa massacre only recently. May we allow our new knowledge of that vicious example of American racism inspire us to continue, indeed to strengthen our efforts at overcoming the racism in which our nation was born and which it still struggles.

On Trump's Big Lie

 

On Trump’s Big Lie

May 28, 2021

 

Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, thank God. He has however maintained a rabid following by propagating a Big Lie in the style of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler. Stalin’s big lie was that the Communist Party represented and advocated the interests of the working class. Hitler’s big lie was that the Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s problems. Trump’s Big Lie is that he actually won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide and that his victory has been stolen from him. That’s not true. Tyrants’ big lies never are. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support Trump’s claim. Nonetheless, millions of Americans, almost all of them Republicans, have accepted the claim as the truth. We are then faced with two significant questions, namely, how do we explain people clinging to an obviously false claim and what do we do about.

In his book His Truth is Marching On, John Lewis and the Power of Hope, presidential historian Jon Meacham gives us a quote from American author Walker Percy in an article in Harper’s in the spring of 1965. Percy was writing about racism in Mississippi in the 1960s, but his words have broader application. Meacham quotes Percy as having written:

 

‘Once the final break is made between language and reality, arguments generate their own force and lay out their own logical rules. The current syllogism goes something like this: (1) There is no ill-feeling in Mississippi between the races; the Negroes like things the way they are, if you don’t believe it I’ll call my cook out of the kitchen and you can ask her. (2) The trouble is caused by outside agitators who are communist-inspired. (3) Therefore, the real issue is between atheistic communism and patriotic, God-fearing Mississippians. Once such a system cuts the outside wires and begins to rely on its own feedback, anything becomes possible.’[1]

 

Percy’s analysis applies perfectly to the dynamics of Donald Trump’s Big Lie. It helps us understand how so many Americans can cling to a claim that is obviously false. When we apply this analysis to our current Big Lie we get the following syllogism: (1) President Trump won the 2020 presidential election and remains the legitimate president. (2)Democrats stole his election victory from him. (3) Therefore, the real struggle today is between God-fearing, patriotic Trump supporters and dishonest Democrats who will do anything to gain power so they can impose socialism on the country. This claim that Trump won the election certainly has made a “break between language and reality.” The claim’s language is that Trump really won. The reality is that he really lost. Joe Biden won the election fair and square. There isn’t a shred of evidence that says otherwise. Trump’s Big Lie denies that reality, and it seems not to matter at all to its adherents that the Big Lie hangs suspended in midair with no connection to reality, to what really happened in the 2020 election. That Trump really won the election is no more solid a claim than was the claim Percy used that there was no ill-feeling between the races in Mississippi in the 1960s. The only way anyone can accept the premise of either lie, Trump’s or Mississippi racists’, is by ignoring or denying obvious reality.

Once you accept the Big Lie as true, however, this claim does exactly what Percy said racism did in the Jim Crow south. It generates its own force and creates its own logic. If Trump really won the election but Biden was sworn in as president, it simply must be true that someone stole the election from Trump. That’s not true of course. No one stole an election from anyone, but the belief that someone did steal the election from Trump fits perfectly into the logic of the Big Lie. There is no evidence that anyone stole the election, but all that matters to those who believe the Big Lie is that it makes sense within the Big Lie’s logic. If the first proposition is true, then logically the second proposition must also be true.

Within the logic of the Big Lie the third assertion must also be true. Those who are trying to undo the supposedly fraudulent results of the 2020 presidential election are the true patriots. In the logic of the Big Lie those who have tried first to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president, then to overturn the election results and put Trump back in office, are the ones fighting to preserve American democracy. Within this logic, what could be more patriotic than fighting to assure that the actual winner of the election is declared to be the winner of the election? Preserving American democracy, this logic says, is so important that drastic measures are called for. The people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 weren’t trying to overthrow the US government. They were trying to protect American democracy from a nefarious plot by the socialist Democrats to steal the election.

The vital need to preserve democracy, this logic says, justifies Republican led states passing laws with the obvious intent and result of restricting the vote of people who by and large don’t vote for Republicans. I justified state Republican parties hiring totally unqualified right-wing hacks to conduct bogus “audits” of a state’s ballots. These phony “auditors” will certainly claim that they have discovered proof that Trump really won the election. It matters not in the logic of the Big Lie that the “auditors” had reached their desired conclusion before they got their hands on the ballots. It matters not to this logic that these “audits” are not impartial efforts to find the truth but wholly partisan efforts to support an a priori truth, namely, that Trump won the election. The proponents of the Big Lie are already convinced of a truth they will let no reality contradict. That “truth” is that Trump won the election and someone has stolen his victory from him. Everything else that the Trump supporters say flows logically from the Big Lie. Within the logic of that lie anything Trump’s supporters do to try to pull an election victory from the jaws of defeat makes perfect sense and is fully justified.

We are faced therefore with a most difficult situation. The proponents of the Big Lie will not be persuaded by evidence that the Lie is just that, a lie. The lack of impartial evidence to support the Big Lie won’t persuade them. To them their candidate won but was fraudulently declared the loser. They bought the Big Lie not because there’s evidence that makes it true but because their Dear Leader Donald Trump says the lie is actually truth. Against all the evidence they will continue to believe the Big Lie for as long as Trump keeps asserting it as truth.

How then do we defeat the Big Lie? The big lie of southern racism was defeated (to the limited extent that it has been defeated) by federal legislation and by a change of attitude by a sufficient number of Americans over decades of time. Trump’s Big Lie is sufficiently different from the big lie of southern racists that the same tactics won’t work against it. There is nothing for federal legislation to prohibit, at least not without violating the First Amendment. We don’t have decades of time in which to defeat Trump’s Big Lie. That’s true in part because of Trump’s age. As I write this essay in May, 2021, he is 74 years old. He surely won’t live another fifty years, which is roughly the amount of time after the civil rights movement of the 1960s that it has taken the country to get over its heritage of racism even a little bit. We don’t have that kind of time also because of the threat the Big Lie poses to American democracy. We don’t know what those who believe the lie will do. They’ve already rioted at the Capitol once in an attempt to stop a branch of the federal government from performing its constitutional duty. There’s no particular reason to believe they won’t try something else like that again. Government forces can almost certainly defeat them should the matter come once again to violence, but that doesn’t guarantee that some fanatical adherents to the Big Lie won’t resort to violence again. We don’t have decades of time also because the Big Lie serves to undermine public confidence in our democratic system of government. We simply cannot allow it to continue if there is any way to stop it.

The only things I can see that might stop it all have to do with Donald Trump. He made up the Big Lie and continues to espouse it every chance he gets. He is its focus and the source of most of its energy. Were he to die (which I pray would happen only from natural causes of course), the Big Lie might just fade into the oblivion it so richly deserves. The same thing might happen if Trump doesn’t die but gets convincingly discredited. He is already a defendant in several significant civil cases. He faces criminal investigations in New York and Georgia. Perhaps if he were convicted of a crime he’d lose much of the luster the proponents of the Big Lie see in him, and the Big Lie might at least lose some of its support.

Beyond these possibilities the only thing we who see clearly can do is to continue to operate within our democratic, constitutional system of government and make sure that it remains as free, open, and uncorrupt as it has been through most of the country’s history (Jim Crow suppression of the vote of Black Americans and the denial of the vote to women until 1920 being the two major instances in which the system didn’t work the way it is supposed to). We must keep asserting the truth that the Big Lie is just that, a lie. In addition we must never again elect as president a person like Donald Trump, one who is so morally corrupt with an ego that is both very big and very weak at the same time. We must never again elect someone who will resort to the totalitarian tactics of the Big Lie to remain in power the way Trump has. We can have confidence that try as it might the Big Lie will not destroy American democracy, and we can pray that that confidence is not misplaced. American democracy today faces its most serious threat at least since the Civil War. We must do everything we can to assure that it will survive that threat.

---

[1] Walker Percy, quoted in Jon Meacham, His Truth is Marching On, John Lewis and the Power of Hope, (New York, Random House, 2020), p. 158.

A Sermon from 1992

 

A Sermon from 1992 on a Vision of the Church

 

In 1992, nearly thirty years ago now, I was a practicing lawyer who had never had a thought about going to seminary and becoming a church pastor. My late wife Francie and I were members of Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ in the Shoreline area just north of Seattle. One Sunday our pastor, Rev. Steve Hanning, was going to be away, and either he or someone else at the church asked me if I would preach that Sunday. I agreed. I gave a sermon with the title “Vision of the Church.” I just rediscovered the text of that sermon and reread it. It’s really good. I would edit it a bit today, but I’m going t present it here just as it is in text I discovered except for correcting a couple of typos. When I reread the sermon I thought, gee, I guess it was inevitable that I would end up going to seminary and becoming a pastor. I am posting it here for what it’s worth.

 

In 1975 and 1976 Francie [my since deceased wife], our son Matt, and I lived in what was then the Soviet Union while I was doing dissertation research. The Soviet state was officially atheistic. The society it created was, in its outer, public aspect at least, bleak, humorless, largely hopeless, and both oppressive and repressive in a way that it is difficult for most Americans to conceptualize. The official values of that society were entirely material. Soviet ideology did not even officially recognize a spiritual aspect to human life. Outer conformity to standards of conduct and to a system of belief, Marxism-Leninism, was rigorously enforced by a system of secret informers, and any deviation from the imposed norm was punished, not so much by arrest and jail, thought that did happen, as by the withholding of career, housing, recreational, and other opportunities, the absence of which made life, already materially difficult in that country, virtually unbearable. Most Soviet citizens adopted a survival strategy of coldness, even rudeness in public life that made the accomplishing of even routine daily tasks difficult and unpleasant. Although in private Russians could be the most gracious and engaging of hosts, daily life in the Soviet Union was depressing and oppressive in a way I had never experienced and could hardly have imagined before living there.

It became clear to me that the bleakness, hopelessness, and malaise of Soviet life was the direct and unavoidable consequence of a rigidly materialistic philosophy. In Marxism-Leninism, the ideology by which the Soviet Union was nominally run and which in fact informed most of its civic life, there is no moral standard other than the good of the state. The individual counts for nothing, and there is no moral deterrent to even the most brutal and ruthless actions as long as those actions can be cast as being for the good of the working class and the state which supposedly represents it. This devaluing of the individual led in the Soviet Union to a society in which no one trusted his or her neighbor or even his or her own family members and in which an all-pervasive sense of hopelessness led to rampant alcoholism, domestic violence, and other social ills whose existence was no secret despite the official policy of silence and neglect with regard to most of them.

In this oppressive atmosphere, I was exposed to an alternative—actually the only intellectually consistent and comprehensive alternative to Marxism available in the Western world—the Church. Francie, Matt, and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church associated with the American and British embassies in Moscow. We became friends with the American pastor, a liberal Presbyterian, and his family. The Church became for me a refuge from the materialism and despair of Soviet society. The contrast between the warmth and love expressed in the church services and the coldness and meanness of Soviet life was overpowering. In the church I came to see the humanizing and enabling power of faith in God in stark contrast to the dehumanizing and diminishing effect of faith in man.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church in contemporary America? I submit to you that the society in which we live is not all that different in its fundamental aspects from the society created in the now defunct Soviet Union. The underlying principle by which both order their lives is materialism. In neither society are people valued for who they are. In our society—

 

·       People are valued for what they produce not who they are.

 

·       Success is equated with wealth, and it doesn’t much matter how that wealth was acquired.

 

·       We elect top national leadership which legitimizes racism by failing to provide leadership for the continuation of the civil rights movement and by catering to bigotry in the guise of code words like law and order and opposition to so-called quota bills.

 

·       We allow racism and economic policy based upon the selfish, short-sighted good of the well-to-do to create a third world in our inner cities, and when that third world reacts emotionally, irrationally and violently to the oppression under which it lives we are outraged, and our reaction is first and foremost the call for “law and order,” with any conceivable constructive response coming slowly and half-heartedly.

 

·       We purport to believe in the equality of all people, but one form of bigotry remains not only acceptable but politically necessary—bigotry against people of minority sexual orientation. Bigotry based on sexual orientation destroys families and blights the lives of millions of decent, constructive citizens.

 

·       We create a society in which domestic violence reaches epidemic proportions and most of us don’t even know it.

 

·       We claim that we believe in peace, but when diplomacy and reason fail we are quick to resort to military force to impose our will on others. In doing so we blithely destroy thousands upon thousands of lives and call ourselves heroic. We give our President his highest approval ratings when he is using military force overseas, thereby inviting him to use it again when his reelection appears to be in danger.

 

·       We tolerate the most violent society in the industrialized world, and no politician can effectively advocate even the regulation much less the obviously needed ban of the weapons which so terrorize so much our population because of the misguided but well-organized efforts of a small special interest group.

 

In short, we live in a society which falls so far short of its expressed ideals, so full of violence, so full of injustice that one is tempted to react with nothing but despair and a self-defensive apathy in the face of seemingly intractable problems.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church? I want to suggest to you that the church properly understood is the only institution that offers a hope of a viable alternative to the evils of the society we live in. Only the church offers a consistent, intellectually honest and spiritually satisfying belief system that answers the problems and vices of the world.

What does the church offer in response to the seemingly overwhelming problems of society? There are two major aspects to its response—a pastoral response and a prophetic response. On the pastoral level it offers refuge, comfort, and hope. Christianity teaches us above all else that God loves and accepts us as we are. That we don’t have to be perfect to be justified. Church is a place where we can bring our cares and burdens and be assured of understanding and forgiveness. When life can be so overwhelming, we need more than ever the refuge and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness and acceptance that the church offers us.

But if the church’s response to the world was merely pastoral, merely a place for us to go for comfort, it would deteriorate into a narcissistic self-indulgence that would ultimately be irrelevant to the world. But Christianity, and the Judaism out of which it grew and with which it is so closely connected, when properly understood, does not stop with the pastoral response. We are the heirs of a great prophetic tradition going way back into Old Testament times. The saints of our spiritual tradition have for millennia called on the societies and states in which they lived to repent and to improve. Inspired by their understanding of the Divine will, they have fearlessly challenged the powers of the world to live by the eternal truths in which they and we believe. The church today is called perhaps as it has not been for many decades to continue that prophetic tradition. Our faith compels us to speak out against the evil we perceive. Our faith also empowers us to do so. We know that God will forgive our failures and our shortcomings. We know that ultimately the world can do nothing to harm us in terms of eternity. And we know that we can be true to ourselves and to our faith only by speaking out, by demanding that our leaders and our society as a whole turn away from the paths of violence and bigotry which they so often travel. Only the church has the great legacy and the great belief system which empowers it to be a prophet. If the church does not speak out for what is right, no one will.

Now the question arises of what I mean by the Church. Obviously a great many churches do not stand for the kind of end to bigotry and violence I am talking about. Many churches, indeed to some extent probably all churches, are more a part of the problem than they are of the solution. Large, socially respectable Christian churches stand today for a subordinate status for women and for Scripturally justified bigotry against God’s gay and lesbian sons and daughters. They preach an anti-intellectual and intellectually dishonest fundamentalism and offer a faith that is so self-centered that it loses all sense of social responsibility. They use our great Judeo-Christian spiritual legacy not as a basis for prophecy but as a narrow-minded justification of the social and political status quo. They preach not the infinite vastness of God’s love for all people but a judgmental doctrine which requires not a life of faith and love but rigid adherence to traditional life-styles and a restrictive morality which results in wide-spread misery among those who would believe and the alienation of huge numbers of people from the faith.

What then is my vision of the Church? It is of a church that is true to its real self. A church that responds to the evils of society by spreading the priceless treasure of the good news of God’s love for all people, where all, regardless of their station in life, regardless of their sex, race, age, sexual orientation or other distinguishing characteristic can come to know the love of God and the tremendous power of God’s forgiveness. And it is of a church that fearlessly and tirelessly calls our society to be true to itself, to its professed ideals, to the vision of live we have received from Jesus Christ our Lord, a life of love and forgiveness for all.

As a church and as individuals we have all been too timid in our prophetic mission. We have been too complacent and too comfortable. If the church is to be what it can and should be we must more aggressively speak out for what we know to be true. We have taken a good step here by adopting our open and affirming covenant. We must continue to speak out, and we must do so more visibly. We must take to heart the message we profess to believe, that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. In that forgiveness lies an infinite empowerment for good if we will only truly believe and act on it. Let us commit ourselves to making Christ’s church all that He would have it be—a refuge four our souls and a source of inspiration and prophecy for all of society.

In Not Of

 

In Not Of

May 16, 2021

for Prospect United Church of Christ

The Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

 

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.

Scripture: John 17:13-19

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.

 

In the early 1930s the Christian pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Germans both Christian and non-Christian faced a number of daunting crises—the economic collapse of the Great Depression; the rise of virulent German nationalism; the worst form of that nationalism, Nazism; and a profound feeling of shame and betrayal over the country’s loss in World War I and the gross unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles. Bonhoeffer and other German Christians struggled to understand just how the Christian church was called to be and to act in that world of so many overlapping crises. Most German Christians bought into German nationalism and even Nazism. They saw no conflict between Christianity in its German Protestant form and German nationalism. Bonhoeffer and several other prominent German Christians responded by issuing the Barmen Declaration. That declaration was not as radical in its opposition to Hitler as it should have been. It was concerned primarily with resisting efforts by the Nazi regime to control the churches. It did not address the greatest atrocities of Hitler’s regime like its rabid anti-Semitism. Nonetheless it at least marked the beginning of Christian opposition to Hitler’s political madness.

Some of the people associated with the Barmen Declaration later formed something they called the Confessing Church as a counter to the German churches that had capitulated to and been taken over by the Nazis. Some individual Christians went farther. The best known of them is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both he and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi participated in groups working to assassinate Hitler as the only way to stop World War II and the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer at least considered what he was doing a sin, but he thought it a necessary sin for which he would beg God’s forgiveness. The Nazis executed both Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi just before the end of the war. No German Christian organization was particularly successful in its opposition to Hitler, but at least some German Christians  resisted, sometimes at the cost of their lives. In retrospect it seems obvious that the call of the German church under Hitler was to oppose and resist Nazism in very way possible. Some Christians did. Most didn’t.

We do not live in Nazi Germany or anywhere too much like Nazi Germany, and I do not mean to suggest otherwise. No one is going to throw me into a concentration camp for what I say here this morning. No one is building gas chambers disguised as showers in which to commit genocide. Yet we do live in troubled times, and I don’t even mean by that the pandemic, though it has laid bare many of the contradictions in America’s social, political, and economic structures. I mean mostly other huge issues before us—racism, the climate crisis, sexism, a woefully inadequate and unjust health insurance system, college costs that leave many students with debt that still burdens them decades after they finish school, the immigration crisis and the gross mistreatment of immigrant families at our southern border (mistreatment that sometimes amounts to a crime against humanity), and the gross income disparity between a small number of unbelievably wealthy people and the rest of us. One of our major political parties has become a cult of personality that will not tolerate anyone who will not genuflect before the Dear Leader. Tens of millions of American Christians belong to that cult, hard as that is for most us to understand. No, we don’t live in Nazi Germany. We do however live in a complex time, and we face a number of daunting challenges.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other German Christians of the 1930s asked what the role of the church was in the disordered and dangerous world in which they lived. Today we must ask the same question. What is the role of the Christian church in our disordered and dangerous world? Though it may not have sounded much like it when you heard our passage from John this morning, I think we can tease out of those complicated verses an answer to our question. Let me explain.

In these verses in which Jesus is praying to God he says two seemingly contradictory things. He says first of all that “they,” meaning his disciples, “do not belong to the world.” He actually says that twice in these few verses, I suppose to emphasize its importance. Christ’s disciples do not “belong” to the world. Yet Jesus also says here that he is not asking God “to take them out of the world.” He says that he has “sent them into the world.” So what precisely is going on here? Jesus sends his disciples to a place, the world, to which they do not belong. What does that mean? Why would Jesus do that?

We start with that it means that Christ’s disciples do not belong to the world. Jesus means, I think, that they are somehow detached from the world. In fact the early Christians always thought of themselves as apart from the world. They called the church the “ecclesia.” While that Greek word was originally secular, it became the Greek word for church. It means “called out of.” The earliest Christians understood themselves precisely as a group of people called out of the world, called to be separate from the world. They considered themselves as apart from the world because they had committed themselves to something far greater than the world. They called Jesus Christ “Lord.” They mean by that term that Christ was the one they had obligated themselves to obey, the one they were to follow. To them Christ their Lord represented a radical new way of being, God’s way of being not a worldly way of being. At John 18:36 Jesus says to Pilate “my kingdom is not from this world.” He meant that the kingdom of God is located on earth but arises and has its authority not from the world but from God. When the earliest Christians called themselves ecclesia they meant essentially the same thing. They, the church, were located in the world, but they were called by God, got their authority from God, and were committed to follow God’s ways not the ways of the world.

Ok, but if Jesus’ earliest followers weren’t of the world in that way, if they didn’t belong to the world in that sense, why didn’t Jesus ask God to take them out of the world? Why did he specifically send them into the world? Certainly a lot of Christians have so emphasized being apart from the world that they have withdrawn from the world and wanted to have as little to do with it as possible. Monasticism in some of its forms is one example. Making the faith be only about an entirely inner pietism is another way that a great many Christians have understood and do understand the faith. That way of thinking effectively takes them out of the world.

Yet true Christianity does not call us and never has called us to that kind of withdrawal from the world. Bonhoeffer wrote at the height of World War II, and please excuse his male exclusive language, that a great many German Christians “fled from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness....” He considered doing so entirely unacceptable. He wrote, “Anyone who does this must shut his eyes to the injustice around him.” That’s something Bonhoeffer could not and would not do. He thought no true Christian could or should do it either. Rather, true Christian faith calls people into the world and into action in the world, and let me add that it doesn’t have to and shouldn’t be action to try to assassinate someone. Bonhoeffer wrote that “only at the cost of self-deception can [a Christian] keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action.”[1] Though we may not belong to the world, our faith calls us into the world not out of it. That’s why Jesus sent his friends who did not belong to the world into the world, not out of the world.

He does the same with us. Of course, we’re all at different stages of life, and we’re all our own people. So just what it means for Christ to send us into the world is different for each of us. Jesus understands if we are unable actually to go act in the wider world because of physical or mental disability. Still, out in the world is where the church belongs. It’s where at least most of us belong. The church is of little or no use to the world or to God if all it does is call people inward to concern for their own virtue and their own souls as so much of the church does. Yes, Jesus sought sabbath time for himself as a spiritual virtue and necessity, and we should too. But Jesus never withdrew from the world. His ministry had him constantly out in the world healing the sick, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and condemning all structures of injustice and oppression of all people but especially of the poor. He calls us to do the same. Maybe we like to think of our country as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and compared to much of the rest of the world it is. Yet our land is far from perfect. I named some of the crises we face at the beginning of this sermon. They aren’t going to be resolved on their own. God and Jesus Christ call us to tackle every one of them, though some of us are called to work on a particular crisis the way Meighan is called to work on the climate crisis and others are called to work on other crises. It is easy and largely just to condemn most Germans of Hitler’s time for going along with the Nazi madness, but some Germans resisted. Our call is to be not of the world but in the world resisting all of the forces that denigrate, oppress, or destroy God’s earth or any of God’s people. It’s not easy. It cost Dietrich Bonhoeffer his life. Still, it is our call. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] All Bonhoeffer quotes are from Elizabeth Seton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State (New York, New York Review Books, 2013), p. 101. The male exclusive language in the quotes is Bonhoeffer’s, not mine.

Will God Take Care of You?

 

Will God Take Care of You?

May 10, 2021

 

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.

 

Yesterday the recorded worship service of the church to which I belong, First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bellevue, Washington, USA, included the hymn “God Will Take Care of You.” It’s first line is “Be not dismayed whate’er betide, God will take care of you.” I couldn’t help but think, “Really? God will take of us no matter what happens? I’m not so sure of that.” That line raises a question with which I have been wrestling lately. Does God intervene in our lives to help and protect us? My first answer to that question is no, God doesn’t work that way. I have written quite complex theology that concludes that God is in creation as presence but not as cause of what happens. I have called God’s presence solidarity with God’s people in all that happens, but I have not meant that God will prevent bad things from happening to us or our loved ones. Just take an honest look at life. Bad things happen to everyone. Bad things happen to good people all the time. We suffer economic hardship, maybe even homelessness. We become ill and suffer pain or the loss of physical or mental abilities. Loved ones suffer though they have done nothing wrong. Loved ones die, sometimes far too soon. Sooner or later we all die. God prevents none of those things from happening. Just look at Jesus, God the Son Incarnate. Really bad things happened even to him. What makes us think that bad things won’t happen to us? I want here to examine the rather complex relationship between what we experience as God’s providential help and what we can actually know about whether or how God helps us. This is a long post. I hope you’ll fine it worth reading.

I have had experiences in my life that look and feel to me exactly like God intervening in my life in powerfully helpful ways. One of them happened in connection with my studies for my M.Div. degree at Seattle University, which I began in 1997. I had closed my private law practice the month before I began those studies, but I knew I would need a job while I was in seminary. Through an ad in the help wanted section of the Seattle Times I found a halftime lawyer job with an organization called the Legal Action Center, a program of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. We provided free legal representation to low income clients in eviction cases. For the first time in a long time it felt to me like I was doing law worth doing. That job provided health insurance and a 25% reduction in my tuition at Seattle University. When I completed my studies at Seattle University I told my boss at the Legal Action Center that I would have to start looking for a fulltime job. He said how about we make this job full time for you. Sometime later when I got my first call to serve as the parttime pastor of a church that required me to be at that church one day during each week, the Legal Action Center cut my time back to four days a week so I could take that call. Only when that call went fulltime in 2003 did I resign from the Legal Action Center. I cannot prove objectively that God found that job for me and made it accommodate my needs so well, but it sure felt then and feels now like God did precisely that.

Which brings me to a second event of my life that I experienced as providential. I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again here because it fits the theme of this essay so well. It happened much more quickly than did my experience with the Legal Action Center. On Wednesday, July 31, 2002, at about 11:45 pm, my wife of thirty years, the mother of my two children, died of breast cancer at the relatively young age of 55. We had known for many months that her cancer was terminal and that her death was coming. I thought I was ready for it. I wasn’t. I thought I could handle it. I couldn’t. I completely fell apart emotionally. I couldn’t stop sobbing. I felt an emotional pain I hadn’t known I was capable of feeling. The first and at the time the only love of my life was gone far too soon, and grief overwhelmed me.

On the morning of Saturday, August 3, 2002, three days after my wife’s death. I stood in the shower crying in grief. I started to sink to my knees. The weight of my grief was just too much to bear. As I did, without thinking about it, I muttered the prayer “Lift me up, Lord!” Immediately, with no time for me to have thought a thing about it, some force I did not control lifted me up and put me back on my feet. I didn’t do it, not consciously at least. I couldn’t have. When it happened my first thought was, “O yeah. All that stuff I’m always talking about really is real!” I meant of course all the God stuff I talked about as a church pastor. I experienced what happened as God breaking into my life in response to my prayer and doing what I had asked God to do. To me that experience was and remains purely providential.

So I have had experiences in my life that I have experienced as God taking care of me. My marriage to my current wife Jane is another of them. Yet the question is unavoidable: How do I reconcile my subjective perception of those experiences with my reasoned theology that says God is here with us as presence in solidarity but not as cause of the things that happen? My immediate answer to that question is, I can’t. Those experiences seem simply to contradict that theology, and perhaps that’s all there is to it. On further reflection, however, I do have a couple of things to say that to some extent at least reconcile my experience with my theology. They go like this.

First, it seems to be true that our subjective experience of things can, at least on occasion, contradict our rational consideration of things. Our experiences are not bound by our theology Our explanations of those experiences are not limited to what our conscious minds say is possible. Our minds function on at least two levels, the emotional and the rational. Both of those levels have their place and their truths, and those truths can contradict each other because they arise from different levels of our psyche and are quite different kinds of truth. Rational truth is precisely that, rational. It is thought-through truth. We arrive at it through observation of life and reality that is as objective as we can make it. It can and should take in all the information that is available to us about any question we are considering. It is the product of our rational minds working on what we know of reality. It is a perfectly valid type of human knowledge, of human truth, because it is a product of what it is to be human, that is, to be a creature with the gift of rational thought. It is or at least can be a consequence of a consideration over much time of large amounts of experience and information. It is truth persons other than the one who produced it can contemplate, critique, and either accept, modify, or reject. Within its own sphere, its own aspect of human consciousness, it is or at least can be valid and vitally important truth.

Emotional truth is different. It arises from the unconscious part of the psyche. It is more immediate than rational truth, and it is not thought through the way rational truth is or at least should be. It is felt more than thought. It arises unbidden. It presents itself to us whole. It calls us to feel it more than to think it. It cares not at all if it contradicts our rational thought. It is personal, private even. No one can analyze its truth or critique it from the outside.[1] From the outside it may seem a-rational or downright irrational. Yet to the person experiencing it, emotional truth is every bit as true as rational truth can be. The rational truth is that God is present in solidarity with us in whatever happens but is not the cause of whatever happens except in the sense that God created creation, a sense so broad and vague that it cannot support the conclusion that God is a direct cause of the things that happen in our lives. Our emotional truth can be quite different. We can feel its truth, but we can never know that it is more than a feeling. We can perhaps trust that it is more, but we cannot know that it is more. When we sense an emotional truth that contradicts what we know to be rational truth we just live with the cognitive dissonance between the two. We accept that that is just how it is with us humans. This conception of different types of knowledge is perhaps one way to understand how we can arrive at and live with contradictory truths. We can accept internally that God has done something for us even though rationally we deny that we can know that to be true.

I began this essay by referring to the hymn “God Will Take Care of You” and its first line “Be not dismayed whate’er betide, God will take care of you.” I raised the question of whether God really does intervene in our lives to take care of us. Like I said, rationally I do not think that God does, but before I end this essay let me suggest a different way of answering our question. This way of considering the matter has to do with what we mean when we say God will take care of us. Our answer to that question depends entirely on what we mean by “take care of.” A great many Christians understand “God will take care of you” in a way that is utterly untenable. They take verses like Matthew 21:22, “Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive,” and John 14:14, “If in my name you ask me for anything I will do it,” literally. They convince themselves that God will take care of them by doing whatever they ask God to do for them. I even heard once of a woman who swore that every time she asked God for an on-street parking spot in a crowded city center where such parking simply was not to be found, she found one. Far more significantly, far too many Christians pastors (and one is too many) have told their people that if their faith is strong enough and they pray hard enough nothing bad will happen to them or to someone they love. When a loved one for whom someone has prayed for recovery from a terminal illness dies, far too many Christian pastors (and one is too many) tell their grieving parishioner, “Well, I guess your faith wasn’t strong enough or you didn’t pray hard enough.”

This way of understanding “God will take care of you” surely has destroyed the faith of countless Christians over the centuries. It destroys faith because it is simply and undeniably false. Prayer doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work that way. This theology says that we mere mortals can get God to do things God would not otherwise do just by believing and praying hard enough. Perhaps the Deuteronomist could believe that ancient Hebrews could manipulate God that by way by zealously obeying Torah law, but anyone today with open eyes and an open mind can see and understand that this way of understanding faith and God simply isn’t true. Bad things happen to everyone, ourselves and our loved ones included. Bad things happen to us because we are finite creatures not gods. That means our lives are not and cannot be perfect. No amount of faith and prayer will ever change that reality. God does not take care of us in that sense.

Moreover, we cannot rely on God to stop bad things from happening to everyone. Time and time again people pray to God for something to happen, but it doesn’t. Or they pray to God that something bad not happen, but it does. If we believe that God will take care of us in the simplistic way we have been discussing, how do we explain the cases in which some bad thing happens despite our faith and our prayers? The only way to explain those occurrences is to say either that we failed on our faith and our prayer or that some bad thing happened to someone because that person was bad and unworthy of God’s care or even deserved what happened because they were so evil. That’s the notion that lay behind Job’s friends trying so hard to convince him that he must have sinned because he was suffering. Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The first one makes bad things that happen to others for whom we have prayed our fault though we had no actual part in what happened. The second one forces us to believe that people we have known to be good, faithful people really weren’t good after all, all the evidence of our experience of them to the contrary notwithstanding. The notion that God will take care of us by doing what we want and by preventing bad things from happening will not survive even minimal critical scrutiny.

Yet there is a very real way in which God does indeed take care of us. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the verses of “God Will Take Care of You” points us toward that way. The second verse of that hymn goes:

 

No matter what may be the test,

God will take care of you.

Lean, weary one, upon [God’s] breast,

God will take care of you.

 

That’s how God takes care of us. No matter what happens in life we can lean on God’s breast. In whatever we must face in life God is there with us offering us assurance of God’s grace, God’s compassion. Many of us know how comforting and supportive it is to have a human shoulder to lean on and to cry on when life gets tough. God’s shoulder is as big as the whole universe, and it is always there for us. God is bigger, stronger, and more compassionate than we can possibly imagine. God can take whatever we put on God, even our anger or rage at God if we have any. Our prayers won’t get God to do something God wouldn’t otherwise do. Like I said, that’s not how it works. Our prayers in times of trouble can though bring us closer to God. They can open our hearts, our souls, to the very real care God does offer. It is the care of concern, compassion, forgiveness, and love. We must reject the common understanding of God’s care that is so simplistic and false. We can instead enter into and give God endless thanks for the spiritual care God does offer. When we do that we can truly say yes, God will take care of us. May it be so.

 

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[1] I am not talking here about psychological issues. We sometimes tell ourselves unhealthy stories about ourselves, our abilities, how lovable we are or are not, or other stories that arise from psychological issues that result from the way we were raised or some other psychological element of our lives. Of course if a capable, lovable person tells herself that she is neither capable nor lovable those who know better need to counter those harmful stories with the truth. That however is a different issue than the one I am addressing here.

To Have the Son

 

To Have the Son

May 8, 2021

 

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.

 

Chapter five of the First Letter of John has some challenging lines in it. We read:

 

If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. 1 John 5:9-12.

 

This text raises a host of questions. I want to address only two of them here. First, what does it mean to “have the Son?” Second, what is this “eternal life” that we supposedly have if we have the Son?

First, what does it mean “to have the Son?” The traditional Christian answer to that question surely is that to have the Son means to believe in Jesus Christ. You have the Son by accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. You trust that by doing so in this life you will gain a blissful heavenly life in the life after death. Most Christians would surely say that having the Son in this sense gives you eternal life, with eternal life understood precisely in that way, unending life with Jesus Christ in heaven after death.

There is however a colossal problem with understanding having the Son in that way. Far too many Christians both today and across the broad sweep of Christian history have seen Jesus as the one who punches their ticket to heaven after they die. These Christians typically pay little attention to Jesus’ moral teachings except perhaps to attribute to him things he never said like hate gay people and oppose all abortion. Often they support violent actions by their nations. In the United States at least they probably own guns and are quite prepared to take a human life just to protect their property. They may give some money to charitable organizations that seek to alleviate the plight of the poor, but they vote for politicians who will preserve the existing economic and political structures that produce so many poor people in the first place. They oppose politicians who pledge to reform those institutions so there will be fewer poor people who need charitable assistance. Many of these Christians believe that sexism, racism, and homophobia are God’s way, which in Christ Jesus we know that they most certainly are not. Do these Christians “have the Son” in any meaningful way? No, I’m afraid they do not.

I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again here to illustrate my point. It is said that a Christian missionary in India was speaking with a holy man of the Hindu faith. The Christian missionary quoted John 14:6 to the Hindu holy man: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” The missionary asked the Hindu how he responded to that verse. The Hindu man said, “O yes. That is absolutely true.” The missionary was nonplussed. As far as he knew the Hindu holy man with whom he was speaking had no intention whatsoever of converting to Christianity. He asked the man how he could, as a Hindu, say that that statement was true. The holy man replied that to understand this statement we have to ask what the way is that Jesus is. It is, he said, the way of peace, compassion, forgiveness, and love. That, he said, is indeed the way.

What does this story tell us about what it means to “have the Son?” We must ask: Which of these two men “had” Jesus, the Christian missionary who surely understood having the Son as believing in Jesus or the Hindu holy man who didn’t believe in the person Jesus as Lord and Savior but did understand and agree with all that Jesus was really about? To me the answer is obvious. The Hindu holy man was a better Christian than was the Christian missionary. Having Jesus isn’t about taking certain supposedly factual claims about him to be true. We can believe in Jesus in that sense and have our belief amount to nothing more than a sense of assurance about the fate of our souls after death. Such faith may not affect how we live this life at all. You can believe in Jesus while paying no attention to what he has to teach us about how God wants us to live. Sadly, Christians do that all the time. Understanding what Jesus is all about the way the Hindu man of this story did is truly what it means to “have” Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate.

Second, the First Letter of John tells us that when we “have” the Son we receive something called “eternal life.” Here we encounter one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of Christianity. This misunderstanding is of immense, and unfortunate, significance in the history of the faith. Ask most any Christian what “eternal life” means and you’ll get an answer that amounts essentially to eternal life is the never-ending, blissful life of the soul in heaven after death. That surely is what the Christian missionary of our story thought it meant. Tragically, Christians have engaged in spiritual imperialism all over the world because they have thought that unless a person “believes” in Jesus Christ they won’t get that eternal life but will get its opposite, an unending life of fiery torment in hell. Most Christians with more than a thinly superficial understanding of the faith (though surely not an in-depth one) will tell you that that is precisely what the Gospel of John tells us. They will recite to you John 3:16, the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” Then they’ll tell you that this verse means that you must take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior to avoid having your soul spend eternity in hell after you die.

Now, my main text for this post is from 1 John not the Gospel of John, so you may think that nothing in the Gospel of John could much inform the meaning of a verse from 1 John. You’d be mistaken. Scholars tell us that the Letters of John were written either by the author of the Gospel of John or by someone else from the same theological tradition. So if the Gospel of John tells us what “eternal life” actually means we can apply that meaning to the phrase in 1 John without reservation. And the Gospel of John does indeed tell us precisely what it means by the phrase “eternal life,” and it doesn’t mean what most people think it means. In chapter 17 of the Gospel of John we read:

 

After Jesus said these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. John 17:1-3 (emphasis added).

 

Note that the text does not say this is how you get eternal life. I says this is eternal life. In both the Gospel of John and the Letters of John eternal life is not about the fate of our souls after death, all the Christian claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It is about our lives here and now. It is life lived in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. To have eternal life is to know, really know, Jesus and God. It is to know God in and through Jesus Christ.

That is what we receive when we “have the Son.” We have knowledge of how God wants us to live. We have knowledge of what God considers right and what God considers wrong. We don’t accept anything in the Bible uncritically, for God gave us minds and never told us not to use them. We know, however, where to look for such knowledge. We look to the Son, to Jesus Christ, the fount of our knowledge of the Divine. That’s what happens when we “have the Son.” Let us always look to him for knowledge, insight, and wisdom. If we will do that we will know the blessings of the true eternal life, life in the knowledge of the one true God and of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. May it be so.