In Memoriam: Marian Frances Sorenson, nee Lorance

 

In Memoriam: Marian Frances Sorenson, nee Lorance

January 31, 2022

 

Today would have been my late wife’s 75^th birthday. Her name was Marian Frances, nee Lorance, though we all knew her as Francie. We were married on November 25, 1972, in Eugene, Oregon. She died of breast cancer on July 31, 2002, in Lynnwood, Washington. Francie was from Boise, Idaho. We met when we were both students at the University of Oregon. Francie was bright, attractive, and (most of the time at least) fun to be with. When we were married I was a graduate student in Russian history at the University of Washington. Francie came to Seattle to be with me on June 2, 1972. It was the happiest day of my life. Francie and I had two children together, Matthew, born on January 2, 1974, and Mary, born on October 5, 1977. They’ve both turned out to be wonderful adults who are still a joy to me all these years later. I attribute any parenting success we had with them mostly by far to Francie.

When Francie came to Seattle in 1972 she thought she was marrying a future college professor of Russian history. But there were no, or nearly no, such jobs to be had in 1977 when got my degree. I spent the next year not knowing what I would do professionally, but eventually I decided to go to law school. Francie always said I just sprang that decision on her without our having talked about it at all. That’s not quite how I remember it, but she was probably right. Sorry about that, dear. In any event she was married not to a future college professor but to a future lawyer. Much later in life it turned out that she was married to a seminarian who became a church pastor. She took all those changes in my professional life in stride with very good grace. Thank you dear.

In 1975 I was awarded an IREX/Fulbright Fellowship to spend the 1975-76 academic year in Russia doing dissertation research. Francie knew I had applied, but we hadn’t yet gotten an acceptance. Then I got the phone call. I got it. At the time Francie was working as a secretary in the Oceanography Department of the University of Washington. I’ll never forget calling her and saying, “Hi. Want to go to Russia?” Thank God she said yes. It was a very courageous yes. Russia, at that time Soviet Russia, was a very foreign and somewhat frightening place. I had been there for five weeks on a Russian language program from Indiana University in the summer of 1968, so I knew a little of what it would be like to be there. Francie had learned some Russian by this time, though not much. Russia was my thing not hers.

That year in Russia became the greatest adventure of our lives other perhaps than rearing children. We lived in a couple of small rooms in a dormitory wing of the big Moscow State University building south of downtown Moscow. Fortunately there were other Americans living in the same wing. Francie became friends with some of them, especially with one family from Alaska who had a son about the same age as Matthew. It was not an easy year for Francie. Doing anything in in Soviet Russia took easily twice as long as it would at home. The Russian winter was as ferocious as it is reputed to be. Soviet dairy products made Matthew horribly sick. Thank God we could get Finnish milk at the American embassy. Francie had to deal with all of the hardships of raising a toddler under very difficult circumstances mostly by herself. I spend all of every weekday at the Lenin Library or at some archive or other doing my dissertation research. In the spring for four weeks I spent four days a week in what was then Leningrad working in an archive there. I had a room at Leningrad State University, but we’d been told Francie and Matthew shouldn’t go with me because that university didn’t have the housing available that the Moscow university did and because the drinking water in Leningrad was contaminated with giardia. It was there that we started to attend church for the first time in our adult lives. We were active in the Anglo-American Church attached to the British and American embassies. Francie was such a trooper. She handled it all so very well. Thank you dear.

Five years later, as I was graduating from law school, I received two job offers. One was in Eugene, where I was finishing up my time at the University of Oregon School of Law. The other was from one of the major downtown Seattle law firms. In the year between the time I got my PhD and the time we went back to Eugene for law school, Francie had taken a class in American Sign Language offered by a Seattle church. She was hooked. We knew that at that time one of the best ASL interpreter training programs in the country was at Seattle Central Community College. Francie wanted to enroll in it. Her preference for Seattle and the interpreter training program at Seattle Central CC made the decision of which job to accept easier than it otherwise would have been. I accepted the offer from Seattle, and in the early summer of 1981 we moved back to the city where we had previously spent something like nine years of our lives, less one for the time we were in Russia.

Francie did indeed attend and graduate from that interpreter training program. I was an AA program, but it felt more like graduate school. When she completed the course after a couple of years she became a certified, professional sign language interpreter. That would be her profession until near the end of her life when she got too sick to work. She was by all accounts a very good sign language interpreter. She developed something of a specialty in interpreting for Deaf-Blind clients, which involves holding the client’s hands so that they can feel the signs the interpreter is making. It became routine at our house for Francie to spend time nearly every evening filing her fingernails. Fingernails interfere with interpreting for Deaf-Blind clients. After she had been working as an interpreter for a few years she and a few of her interpreter colleagues with whom she had become friends formed a joint interpreting practice they called SignOn. It became quite a success and an important institution for the Deaf in western Washington.

Beginning about in early 1994 Francie and I entered what would be the most difficult time of our relationship except of course for her terminal illness. I had left the downtown law world, where I had become a good if not a great trial lawyer. I was trying to conduct a solo law practice in Edmonds, Washington, where Francie and I had bought a house several years earlier. By 1994 I had begun to burn out on law. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t attracting clients. One day Francie and our daughter Mary, who was still in high school at the time, sat me down in our living room. Mary said, “Dad, you’re depressed.” She meant I had clinical depression; and though it had never occurred to me that I did, she was right.  I started on anti-depressive medication shortly thereafter. Still, I know that for the next three plus years I was difficult to live with. I still wasn’t making any money. I suppose I was less clinically depressed than I had been before I went on antidepressants, but I was still sour and frustrated most of the time. I know I was no fun to live with at all. As I look back on those years I can’t figure out why Francie didn’t leave me, but I thank God that she didn’t. Her commitment to me and to our children was so strong that she stuck it out with me. She took over making family decisions that I was in no condition to make. She decided we had to sell the boat we had purchased a few years earlier that I really loved. She decided that we had to sell our house in Edmonds and move into something smaller and cheaper. It was good that both of the kids were off on their own by then. She took over when I couldn’t, and she did it brilliantly. She certainly was right about selling the boat and the house, painful as doing so was.

Early in 1997 I learned the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University, a Jesuit, Roman Catholic university, was creating a way for Protestant students to earn an MDiv or other ministry degree. The School had offered a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree form some time by then. (I always find the name of that degree to be odd. I have the degree, but I certainly have not mastered divinity.) They’d had a few Protestant students before; but now, in cooperation with several non-Catholic denominations, including my United Church of Christ, they were gearing up to receive a much greater number of those non-Catholic students. Somehow I just knew I had to go. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what I would do with an MDiv. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that parish ministry was my calling. Thank God the Holy Spirit knew me better than I did. I told Francie I had to do it. I don’t think she understood why I had to, but then neither did I. She raised only one, perfectly appropriate question. How are you going to pay for it? I said I didn’t know but that I would go into debt if I had to (and it turned out I had to). I don’t think she liked that prospect much, but she never tried to stop me.

Now the really hard part. In the early 1990s Francie was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had to undergo a mastectomy. As they were taking her in for the surgery she said to me, “I don’t want to do this.” I said, “It’s OK. We have to get you well.” After the surgery her oncologist said it was up to her whether or not to do follow up chemotherapy. The statistics the doctor gave us made it sound like the chances of the cancer recurring were low because they’d gotten it early. The statistics said that chemo wouldn’t reduce those chances some but not all that much. Francie decided not to do it.

Our lives went on pretty much as before. I don’t think either of us thought about Francie’s history of cancer much. Then, in 2000, just as I was finishing my MDiv studies, Francie started to complain about pain in her hip. She wanted to ignore it, but I finally prevailed on her to go see her doctor. When we got the diagnosis the news was not good. Francie’s hip hurt because the breast cancer from years earlier had metastasized to her bones. She was referred to an oncologist. He put her on some medication the name of which I don’t remember. It had few if any side effects, but it was supposed to keep the cancer in check at least for a while. The doctor said we could probably manage the cancer with that medication for many years. It is of course never good to have cancer, but we felt somewhat relieved.

Francie went in for periodic checkups. After one of them the oncologist’s office called and said Francie needed to come in. We feared that that meant bad news. I went with her of course. I’ll never forget standing with her in the parking garage of the oncologist’s building waiting for an elevator. Francie said, “I’m scared.” I said, “So am I.” The news we got was indeed very, very bad. Francie’s cancer had spread to her liver. It had grown there quite substantially. I won’t go into all the details here, but we knew that now Francie’s cancer was terminal. We went home, and both of us cried.

Shortly thereafter I went to a worship service that included the hymn “Won’t You Let Me Be Your Servant.” I went home from that service and typed out two of the verses from that hymn. They were:

 

I will hold the Christ-light for you

in the shadow of your fear;

I will hold my hand out to you,

speak the peace you long to hear.

 

And:

 

I will weep when you are weeping;

when you laugh I’ll laugh with you.

I will share your joy and sorrow

till we’ve seen this journey through.

 

I gave Francie those verses as my pledge to her for the difficult journey we both knew lay ahead and that we both knew we had to see through. In all the years thereafter when I served as a parish pastor I never used that hymn in any service. I couldn’t. It doesn’t much enhance a worship service to have the pastor up there sobbing. I tear up even now as I write these words.

In early July, 2002, Francie entered hospice care in our condominium home in Lynnwood. I had been a parish pastor for only a few months by then. Before she got too sick to say much of anything Francie said a couple of powerful things to me. She said that I would be the one who would still be here and that I shouldn’t let any thoughts of her interfere with my living my life. That sentiment is the greatest gift a dying person can give a loved one, and Francie gave it to me. About my being a parish pastor she said, “I am so glad you finally are who you really are.” That is the best affirmation of my decision to go into ministry I have ever received or ever could receive. Thank you, dear.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 31, 2002, I sat in our bedroom where Francie was in her hospice bed clearly very close to death. Our daughter Mary was with us. Our son Matthew was at work at the Everett Fire Department, perhaps a twenty or thirty minute drive away. Either Mary or I called him and said you’d better get down here. At 10:45 pm Francie stopped breathing. She was gone. It was over. Matthew hadn’t made it there yet but arrived a short time later. Francie was enrolled in a pre-paid mortuary plan. After a while I called them. They put Francie’s body in a zipper cover. I will never forget watching them wheel her lifeless body in that cover out of our home. I was devastated. To some extent I still am.

Francie wasn’t particularly religious, but in her way she was more spiritual than I am. During her last hospitalization, when she was having a very, very bad time, she had a vision. She saw herself and me held in God’s hands, and she knew that we were safe there. When we buried her ashes at a local cemetery we put on the grave marker, “Safe in God’s Hands.” She was, and she is. One day my ashes will be buried beneath that marker along with hers.

What more can I say about Francie? Her love for me enriched my life in ways and to an extent I cannot even begin to express. I hope that my love for her enriched her life too. She was a wonderful mother to our children. Nothing either of them could have done would have diminished her love for them in any way. They lost her far too soon, and they still miss her horribly. She devoted her professional life to serving Deaf and Deaf-Blind persons, helping them make their way in an uncomprehending and to a large extent uncaring world. She was the first love of my life. I can’t even imagine how poor my life would have been without her. Rest in peace, dear. Of course I will never forget you. I hope and pray that we will meet again in a life beyond this life. May it be so.

God as She

 

God as She

January 30, 2022

 

Today the Rev. Patty Ebner, a pastor of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, of Bellevue, Washington, gave a wonderful sermon on the importance of our using female language for God. She reminded me that in the summer of 1998 I took a Christology course from the great Roman Catholic feminist theologian (yes, there really are such people) Elizabeth A. Johnson, who was a visiting scholar that summer at Seattle University, where I was in seminary. She goes by Beth not Elizabeth, and ten years later she wrote a very flattering endorsement of my first book, Liberating Christianity. One of Beth’s major themes is that what became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth was the feminine manifestation of God Sophia who appears in Proverbs in in books that are Apocryphal in the Protestant tradition but canonical in the Catholic tradition like Sirach and The Wisdom of Solomon. By New Testament times a sexist culture had changed the feminine noun Sophia into the masculine noun Logos, the Word, although the early Roman Christians did name the great cathedral church in Constantinople Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. In her great book She Who Is (if you haven’t read it, please do), Beth says repeatedly that “the image of God functions.” She means, quite correctly, that the way we think of God influences every aspect of our lives. She also says that the image of God as feminine works as well, and as poorly, as the image of God as masculine. She taught me that changing our words for God from masculine to an impersonal neuter is better than nothing, but it’s not enough. Calling God Creator is better than calling God Father, but if we are ever to get beyond our faith tradition’s androcentrism and even misogyny we must start calling God she and Mother.

It is undeniable that the Judeo-Christian tradition has given us a male God. Oh sure. We all say we know that God isn’t male, but look at the language we use. We call God Father not Mother. We call the second person of the Trinity the Son. We worship a male human being who we say is God Incarnate, not a female one. Our tradition calls him Lord, definitely a male term. We begin the prayer we say he taught us, “Our Father” not “Our Mother.” In my particular tradition we sometimes change that second word to Creator, but we rarely if ever change it to Mother. How did we get here, and what are we going to do about it?

The simple answer to how we got here is that our Christian faith has roots in and grew out of ancient Judaism. Scholars tell us that the stories in the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) go back at least to 1200 BCE and probably much farther back than that. Ancient Judaism differed from the other religions of the ancient world, though not in the way most people think it did. Except for Judaism, all of the religions of the ancient world were polytheistic. They worshipped multiple gods. Many if not all of them also worshipped goddesses. The religion of the people the Bible tells us occupied what would become Israel, the Canaanites, had as their main god the very masculine god Baal, but Baal wasn’t the only deity in that tradition. Baal had a divine female consort named Ashera. Around the time of Jesus a cult developed in the Mediterranean world around the Egyptian goddess Isis. You may well have heard of ancient Greek goddesses like Athena. The ancient world was full of female images of the divine.

Israel wasn’t. Hebrew faith differed from other ancient faiths, but not for a long time because it was monotheistic. Until the mid-6^th century BCE it wasn’t monotheistic. It was what we call henotheistic. Israel’s henotheism did not deny the reality of other people’s gods and goddesses the way monotheism does. It said only that the Hebrew people were to worship only one god. That god’s name was YHVH. Hebrew was spelled without vowels, which is why there are none in that name. The name is usually transliterated into English as Yahweh (w not v because we use the German transliteration. Don’t ask me why) though some still transliterate it as Jehovah. The Old Testament of ten refers to Yahweh as “your” or “our” God. Yahweh was at first and for a long time the people’s war god, and he was definitely male. For an ancient Bible verse that sees Yahweh as a war god see Exodus 15:20-21, where the prophetess Miriam leads the women of the tribe that has just escaped from Egypt in singing praises to Yahweh, who, she says, has just defeated the Egyptian army for them. (Your English translation may say Lord here not Yahweh, with Lord typed in what are called small caps. In the Old Testament, when you see the word Lord printed that way you know that the Hebrew word being rendered into English is YHVH. And by the way, Lord typed that way in the Old Testament never means Jesus.) Ancient Israel had no god but Yahweh, and Yahweh was aggressively male. War gods usually are. In the mid-sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian exile, an Israeli prophet developed true monotheism for the first time in human history. For an example of a biblical text that expresses that monotheism see Isaiah 45:1-7. The “Cyrus” the text refers to is Cyrus the Great, King of Persia. Yet that one and only God was still Yahweh, and in the Jewish tradition Yahweh never ceased to be male. The Israelites referred to Yahweh using only masculine language. They always called God he. They certainly never called God she.

The earliest Christians may not have called God Yahweh, but they inherited the Jewish conception of God as male nonetheless. Search the New Testament for a reference to God as female. You won’t find it. It isn’t there. Many of the earliest Christians believed that God, expressed as the masculine noun Word, became incarnate in the male human being Jesus of Nazareth. The earliest New Testament documents are the authentic letters of Paul. Paul called God Father never Mother. All of the New Testament documents were writen in and for a Greek-speaking culture that was patriarchal and androcentric if not downright misogynist. None of the New Testament authors saw any reason not to call God he. That, after all, is what their mother faith of Judaism called God. Also, when the New Testament refers to scripture it means the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that retained the Hebrew Bible’s exclusively masculine language for God. Except for a few lonely voices like Beth Johnson that cry out for us to use female images for God, Christian language for God has been almost exclusively male ever since.

So. Is God male? Of course not. God transcends all human characteristics including gender. Most Christians today will acknowledge the truth of that statement. Yet we relate to God using terms that come from our lived human experience as human beings that are almost exclusively male. But if God transcends us absolutely, and God does, and we relate to God using human terms, why can’t we use feminine terms to refer to God? The answers is, there is no reason whatsoever that we can’t. We can. As Beth Johnson says, female terms for God work as well, and as poorly, as male ones do.

Some Christians today get it. The feminist theologians both Protestant and Catholic do. My favorite modern hymn does too. The second verse of the hymn “Bring Many Names” by Brian Wren goes”

 

Strong mother God, working night and day,

planning all the wonders of creation,

setting each equation, genius at play.

Hail and Hosanna! Strong mother God!

 

Not only does Wren call God mother, he turns our usual gender stereotypes upside down. His next verse is about “warm father God, hugging every child,” for which we should all give him our most sincere thanks.

So what are we doing to do about it? Let me suggest something as a way to begin. Try thinking of God as Mother not Father. Start the Lord’s Prayer “Our Mother,” not “Our Father.” Try thinking of God as Mother of all creation. Call God she not he. I’ll tell you that when I do that I feel very differently about God. Yes, it’s hard to get beyond our gender stereotypes the way Brian Wren does, but what images does thinking of God as feminine bring to mind? Certainly not vengeful anger, judgment, and eternal damnation, things our tradition has so frequently (and so wrongly) attributed to God. When I call God Mother or she I think first of all of maternal love. I know that not all people are lucky enough to have human mothers like this, but when I think of God as Mother I think first of all of maternal love. Unconditional love that never gives up on anyone and is always more than happy to welcome her children home. I think of a hospitable God always happy to have us drop in for a visit. I think of birth, of all creation being born from God. I do get a very different sense of God indeed than I get when I think of God as male. I know that thinking of God as feminine isn’t easy for most of us. We’ve all been thoroughly conditioned by our tradition to think of God as male even when we say we know that God isn’t male. But give it a try. You may find that doing so opens up a whole new and wonderful way of relating to God for you. May it be so.

On Two Problems from the Bible

 

On Two Problems from the Bible

January 29, 2022

 

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.

 

Both when I was an active pastor and now in retirement I’ve spent a lot of time with the Bible. I’ve written nearly seven hundred pages on it, now available in three volumes. I have some rather unorthodox, but I’m convinced totally correct, ideas about the Bible. I don’t believe that it comes from God. It is a human document not a divine one. It is however the foundational book of our Christian faith. It is, among other things, the source of our information and beliefs about Jesus Christ. Christianity is inconceivable without it. The Bible contains a lot of error, but it also contains some of the deepest wisdom we have available to us. I love the Bible in many ways. Yet these days the more time I spend with it the more I find things in it that seem to me just to be wrong. I use a Presbyterian daily lectionary. Today it gave me two readings I want to discuss here. They are Galatians 3:23-29 and Mark 7:1-23. I find significant problems in both.

I’ll start with Paul’s letter to the Galatians. It is the earliest of Paul’s letters in which he develops his theology of justification by faith through grace. It is therefore one of the most foundational documents of the Christian religion. Yet Paul, for all his deep theological insight, is nothing if not inconsistent. His letter to the Romans is considered to be his most thoroughly considered and developed statement of his theology. It is that indeed, but it will also drive you nuts with its many inconsistencies. Contradictions even.

Here’s the contradiction in Galatians 3:23-29. In this passage, as he does so often, Paul is trying to explain his understanding of the relationship between Torah law and faith. In our passage here he tries to explain that relationship this way.

 

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. Galatians 3:23-26.

 

The problem I have with this statement is that Paul seems to be saying that people had no faith until Jesus came. But of course the Jewish people had had faith in God for well over one thousand years at least before Jesus came. They didn’t have faith in Jesus Christ, who after all hadn’t come yet. They still don’t have faith in Jesus Christ, but they had and have faith in God, and isn’t that what really matters? We Christians live out our belief in God through Jesus Christ. Jews don’t, but so what? Two thousand years of destructive Christian claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Christianity is not and cannot be the only valid way of faith in God. The claim that it is never made any sense, but it is particularly absurd to proclaim that it is today in a world we know to be full of good, loving people who practice their faith in God through some other faith tradition. So, sorry Paul. Jesus coming was not the beginning of faith. Of faith in Jesus yes, but not faith in God.

Consider this. If justification (Paul’s notion here) or salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, it means that before a specific time, in a specific place, and before some event took place, no one was saved. Then all of a sudden God decides, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to save people, so I’ll incarnate myself in a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. Then people, unlike anyone who lived before him or anyone who lives after him but doesn’t believe in him, can believe in me through him.” It makes absolutely no sense that God would do such a thing. I am sure that God in fact never did such a thing. So no, Paul. There was indeed faith before Jesus.

Then we have Mark 7:1-23. In this passage some Pharisees see Jesus’ disciples eating without having washed their hands. We’re told that Jews wash their hands, food, and utensils before they eat. Jesus’ disciples weren’t doing that. So these Pharisees ask Jesus, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” Mark 7:5. It seems a legitimate question in its original context, but Jesus’ reply isn’t exactly civil. He starts his response by saying, “Isaiah prophesized rightly about you hypocrites….” Mark 7:6a. He quotes Isaiah at them this way:

 

‘This people honors me with their lips,

     But their hearts are far from me;

In vain do they worship me,

     Teaching human precepts as doctrine.’ Mark 7:6-7.

 

The quote is of the Septuagint version of Isaiah 29:13. Jesus adds, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human precepts.” Mark 7:8. Jesus goes on to say to the people present, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Mark 7:14b-15. He repeats this point to the disciples alone later on.

Jesus is simply inconsistent here. First he accuses the Pharisees of abandoning “the commandment of God.” Then he throws out the Jewish dietary laws. But Judaism considered in Jesus’ time and considers in ours that the laws of kosher diet in the Torah are commandments of God. So first he criticizes others for abandoning what he calls the commandment of God and calls them hypocrites. Then he abandons what his faith tradition considered and considers to be important commandments of God. I want to say to him, “Jesus, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t call others hypocrites for doing what you do yourself.” Yet that is precisely what he does in this passage. I’ve read commentary that says this passage is attacking legalism. I suppose it is, but it seems Jesus here attacks legalism he wants to attack and  attacks the Pharisees for not being sufficiently legalistic because they abandon the commandment of God. Sure sounds like a contradiction to me.

Elsewhere of course Jesus tells us what the most important of God’s commandments is. We call it the Great Commandment:

 

“The first is this, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31.

 

The Great Commandment is I suppose Jesus’ ultimate rejection of Torah legalism. Jesus wants us to love, not to be legalists. So let’s not worry too much about Jesus’ inconsistency in our passage from Mark. The Gospel of Mark is a human document not a divine one. We can, I hope, live with that truth.

The Whole Armor of God

 

The Whole Armor of God

January 23, 2022

 

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.

 

There is simply no denying it. There are passages in the Bible that are just offensive and contradict the Bible’s broader messages. John Dominic Crossan characterizes the way the Bible both speaks divine wisdom and worldly sin by saying that first the authors get what God’s truth is but then fall back into advocating the worldly ways of the cultures in which they lived. At best the Bible takes two steps forward toward God’s truth, then takes one step back toward the world. At times it’s more like the Bible takes one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes the Bible speaks God’s truth of justice and peace achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil, but it also has God telling King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites and getting angry with him when he doesn’t quite do it. It has God freeing the people from bondage in Egypt, then it has that same God kill thousands of God’s people in retribution for some offense. It has God as the One seated on the throne and Jesus as the Lamb that has been slaughtered kill off a good third of the people on earth, then it gives a beautiful, beatific vision of a world reconciled with God where God wipes away the tears from the people’s eyes. It’s enough to give you whiplash you get tossed back and forth so much.

Then there is at least one rather odd passage that proclaims divine values in very worldly terms. It’s at Ephesians 6:10-24. Verse 6:11 tells the people to “Put on the whole armor of God.” Armor is of course a piece of military equipment in the ancient world in and for which Ephesians was written. Today the author may have said put on the Kevlar vest of God to convey the same idea. The author of Ephesians (who claims to be Paul but almost certainly isn’t) isn’t done with the military imagery with that statement. He’s jut getting started. He tells his audience to put on a belt, shoes, and a breastplate (a piece of armor). Then they are to take a shield and a helmet. Finally the text tells the people to take a sword, a weapon for killing and maiming. The text here is giving us an image of an ancient soldier preparing for battle.

The military, both in the ancient world and ours, is of course a very worldly thing. While they may at times do other things, militaries ultimately exist for only one purpose, to inflict death and destruction on people identified as the enemy. The world often makes heroes of people who have been particularly good at inflicting death and destruction on other people. Militaries directly contradict Jesus’ teaching of nonviolent resistance to evil. Ephesians’ imagery of military gear is purely worldly and not at all divine.

Yet there is more in this passage from Ephesians than worldly military imagery. The text connects each piece of military battle gear with much more divine concepts. They are:

 

·        The belt we are to put on is “truth.”

·        The breastplate is “righteousness.”

·        The shoes are to make us “ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.

·        The shield is “faith.”

·        The helmet is “salvation.”

·        The sword is of “the Spirit.”

 

We see that our author has done something a bit odd or at least interesting. He has used military imagery to introduce spiritual values.  It is particularly striking that he included in the midst of his imagery of war “the gospel of peace.”

So what are to make of this odd combination of military metaphors and spiritual virtues? To answer that question let’s go back to John Dominic Crossan. Recall that Crossan tells us that one of the principal dynamics in the Bible is that it will express some divine truth, then fall back to embracing the ways of the world that are anything but divine. Clearly in the passage from Ephesians we are considering here we have contrasting images. We have physical equipment of war and spiritual values of peace. How do we know which image is worldly and which is divine?

It is easiest, I think, to start to discern which images are which by asking which of the images most come from the ways the world works. When we do, it seems obvious that the military images are worldly and the spiritual values are not. The nations and empires of the world conduct warfare. They did in the world of Ephesians, and they still do in our world. They always have. I hope they will stop warring one day, but I fear that they never will. Ephesians was written in the first century CE somewhere in the Roman Empire. The author surely knew the way Rome operated. The first century CE is part of what the Romans called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, an extended period of at least relative peace throughout the empire. Rome did not create that peace through kindness and justice. It created it by militarily crushing anything and anyone who they thought threatened the peace. The Roman Empire grew to the extent that it did through liberal application of military might. Our author surely intended his military metaphors to represent the military ways of the world in which he lived.

Which leaves us with the other things he mentions as divine. Whatever the author’s intention was, those other virtues he mentions are certainly more divine than any military imagery could ever be, the old hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” to the contrary notwithstanding. The virtues in these verses are indeed quite the opposite of the ways of the world. The first one mentioned is “truth.” Today we live in a nation in which one of our major political parties subsists almost entirely on lies. Rare has been a worldly power that always told the truth. The next virtue we come to is “righteousness.” The term righteousness  can mean various things in the Bible. I always think of it meaning “being in right relationship with God.” Is the world in right relationship with God? Well, in a sense it is, but that’s only because God forgives the myriad ways the world would not otherwise be right with God. The next virtue is being prepared “to proclaim the gospel of peace.” I’m going skip that one for now and return to it shortly. Then we come to “faith.” Surely the text means faith in God. In our world a great many people say they believe in God, but true faith in the sense of trusting God with our lives and our souls is actually quite rare. Then there’s “salvation.” The world always gets salvation wrong. It mostly relies on itself not on God to save it. Yet true, existential salvation comes and can come only from God. The last virtue  the text mentions is “the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Our call is always to listen for the Holy Spirit present in our world and in our lives, which is something the world mostly doesn’t do. All of the virtues Ephesians mentions here are gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Then there the bit about the “gospel of peace” that I skipped above. Our author put the gospel of peace in the middle of his list of divine virtues. I would have put it either at the beginning of those verses or at the end, for everything else the author mentions here constitutes an element that makes for that peace. The gospel of peace means peace in God’s world and peace in our souls. It doesn’t mean the Pax Romana. It means real peace, true peace, existential peace. It means peace achieved through nonviolent justice for the world and the peace of true faith for our souls. If Ephesians’ image of “the whole armor of God” has any positive meaning it surely  means all that leads to true peace. Real peace is the greatest blessing we humans can have. It is the greatest blessing that God wants for every one of us. It isn’t God who keeps us from such peace, it is the world with its ways of materialism, deceit, oppression, injustice, and violence. So let’s take Ephesians’ military imagery here not as a call to war but as a call to the opposite of war. Let’s take it as a call to peace, to real, deep, lasting peace, the peace that we can only find in God. May it be so.

The Known Unknown

 

The Known Unknown

January 17, 2022

 

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 my time as a seminarian and as an ordained minister I have noticed something about many of the people of the church. Many Christians are quite sure that they know all there is to know about God, but here’s the truth. They don’t. They can’t. None of us can. One of the things that follows from people’s conviction that they know all there is to know about God is that they try to limit God to human ways of thinking and doing things. That, after all, is the only way they can believe that they know everything there is t know about God. They are uncomfortable with the idea there is more to God than we can we can ever know. They find it hard to accept that God is not merely humanity writ large and that God’s ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts. I once heard someone say that the main thing she had learned in seminary was that she had made her God too small. She has lots of company in that regard. Most Christians make God too small, and they do it by making God too human and too human, too knowable.

At least in a few places the Bible knows that God in finally unknowable, we just know that God doesn’t think and act in merely human ways. At Ephesians 3:19 the author prays that the recipients of his letter may “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” At Isaiah 55:8-9 we Read:

 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

     so are my higher than your ways

     and my thoughts than your thought.

 

So Christ’s love, which of course is God’s love, is beyond our knowing, and God’s thoughts and ways are not our ways. Why? Why do we have to live with a God we cannot fully know? Why can’t God think and act our way so that we can fully comprehend what God is up to? Here’s my answer to those questions.

Who is God? Christianity answers that question at the deepest level, as it answers all question of faith at the deepest level, with a paradox. God is a reality that is two things at the same time that cannot both be true but are true. God is both utterly transcendent and immediately present with us on earth at the same time. God is Spirit that is infinite in every aspect of God’s being, which means that in God’s transcendence God is other than us in very way. Theologians say that God is totaliter aliter, Latin for totally other. Isaiah gets it exactly right here. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and God’s ways are not our ways.

There is however also the other side of the paradox of God. God is utterly transcendent, but God is also immediately immanent with us here on earth. Is it possible for God to be both utterly transcendent and yet immanent? No, as I have said many times, things like that about God aren’t possible, they’re just true. One paradox of God (there are others, like the Trinity) says that God is both known in God’s aspect as presence and unknown in God’s aspect as totally other. That’s not possible, it’s just true.

I can hear some people saying, “OK, but you just said that God was totally other than us. How can we know anything that is totally other than us the way you say God is? Well, it certainly isn’t possible for us humans to be here and there at the same time. (Many of us have wished that our seminary had had a class on how to be two places at once, but of course it didn’t.) It’s not possible for us humans to subsist in two totally different natures at the same time. But what is impossible for us is not impossible for God. What we’ve done when we say that something  isn’t possible for God is make God too small. We have made God too human.

One of the primary ways many Christians make God too small, too human, is by making God’s love, that is, God’s grace, conditional. I have taught, preached, and written for years that God’s grace is entirely universal and entirely unconditional. It always has been universal and unconditional, and it always will be. Our problem is not that we aren’t saved, out problem is that we don’t know that we are saved. St. Paul can be maddeningly inconsistent, but at times he recognizes the universal and unconditional nature of God’s love. At Romans 8:38-39, for example, Paul says:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

To say as Paul does here that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God is to say that God’s love is truly universal and unconditional. It is always there for everyone no matter what.

Yet Christians almost always insist that there is something we must do before God will extend God’s grace to us. They don’t all say that it’s the same thing we have to do. Some say we must lead a sinless life (as though that were possible, which it isn’t). Some say we must do good works in the world. Most Protestants say that we must have faith in Jesus Christ. Some say he have to have had a once for all conversion experience in which we take Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. We make God’s love conditional and specific to us in so many ways.

And every time we do, we make God too small and too human. See, our human ways of doing things is to say, at least most of the time, that to receive some benefit we have to earn it. Sometimes we may donate time or money to a charity that helps people who haven’t earned anything (or at least that  think haven’t earned anything). For most of us though our primary point of reference for the relationship between benefit and reward is that we work, or at least someone in our immediate family works, to earn a paycheck. In our human world, for the most part, we work in one way or another, and then someone gives us money in return for our work. Our receiving money from our employer, or customers, or clients is conditioned on our doing work of a certain kind and amount. This dynamic so conditions to see reward as conditional that we apply that standard to God all the time.

But look again at what the scripture passages I’ve quoted here say. The love of Jesus Christ is so vast that it is beyond our knowing. There is no way for us to know all of it or fully to understand it. God’s thoughts and ways are so much not our thoughts and ways that we cannot fully know them either. We can never truly get our heads around how vast God’s love is because God’s love exceeds our love infinitely. God’s ways are so unlike our ways that when we actually discern them we think we’ve got to be wrong. Here’s an example.

At Matthew 20:1-16 Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven (which is the same thing as the kingdom of God) is like this. Early in the morning a landowner who has a vineyard hires workers to work on his land that day. He promises to pay them the usual day’s wage. A bit later in the morning he hires more workers to work his land that day. He tells these workers that he will pay them whatever is right. He does the same thing at noon, at mid-afternoon, and late in the afternoon. Some of his workers have therefore worked many more hours than others of his workers have. At the end of the day the landowner has his manager pay the workers their wages for the day. Those who worked the entire day receive what they were promised, the usual daily wage. Then all of the workers who worked fewer hours, including those hired only at the end of the workday and who therefore did relatively little work, also receive a usual day’s wage, the same amount as those who worked all day received. Those who had worked all day are upset because those who had worked fewer hours had received the same amount as they did. It seems they thought they should have received more because they had worked all day and the others hadn’t. The landowner says to them you received the wage I promised you when I hired you. Take it and go. He says, “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” I have never had a parishioner who read or heard this parable think that what the landowner does is right. No, they say. Those who worked more hours should receive more compensation than those who worked fewer hours.

Why do these good folk think that? They think it because we’re all so conditioned by the worldly way of earning and reward. We live with that way every day of our lives. That’s how it is with us, so we think that’s how it should or even must be with God. But remember what Isaiah’s God says through him: My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts. Because God’s ways so transcend our ways, much of the time we just can’t understand them. With God in God’s nature as transcendent there is much about God that we simply cannot know.

Then we run smack into the paradox of God. Christians and people of other faiths have long confessed that God is a real, known presence here on earth with us in our earthly lives. We Christians even say that in Jesus of Nazareth God came to us as one of us precisely to make God’s nature and ways known to us. People in the Judeo-Christian tradition have long believed that God sometimes reveals Godself to us humans. The prophets of Hebrew scripture all believed that they had received a commission from God to reveal to the people what God had said to them. Paul believed the same thing about himself.

We Christians confess that God’s most complete revelation of Godself is found in the life, teachings, suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In him we see who God is when God becomes human. Belief in Jesus Christ as a true revelation of God is a wonderful thing; but, as there is in all good theology, there is a trap here. Far too many Christians believe that Jesus Christ reveals to us the fullness of God, that in and through him we know God in God’s very essence. Believing that is a trap because it dispenses with the transcendence side of the paradox of God. In Jesus we know God, yet God remains ultimately unknown. Even in the Incarnation God remains the Known Unknown.

In Jesus Christ God has revealed Godself in a way and to the fullest extent that we humans can comprehend. Yet our comprehension is finite, and God is infinite. The man Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnation of God that he was at the same time notwithstanding, was finite. Matthew and Luke (though no one else in the Bible) say that Jesus’ conception was virginal and through the Holy Spirit rather than through the usual biological processes. But even for those two evangelists Jesus was a human being who was born, lived, worked, suffered, and died just as we all do. That’s the paradox of Jesus as the Christ. He was fully God, but he was not fully all there is to God, for he was also fully human. As with God being both transcendent and immanent at the same time, so Jesus being God and human at the same time isn’t possible, it’s just true. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice says to the White Queen that you can’t believe impossible things. The White Queen answers, “That’s just what we Christians do every day of our lives—believe six impossible things before breakfast.” I don’t know if Lewis Carroll meant that as a sendup of Christianity or not, but to me the statement rings true. Well, maybe we don’t believe six impossible things before breakfast, but we believe at least three impossible things all the time—the paradox of God I have described here, the Incarnation in Jesus Christ, and God as Trinity, as three and as one at the same time. None of those is possible, they’re just all true.

So I urge you. Do not believe that you will ever know all there is to know about God. You won’t. None of us will. That’s because there is an existential chasm between God and us. God is infinite, we are finite. Many of us yearn to cross that chasm and have direct experience of the fullness of God. We never will. But God both subsists on one side of the chasm and reaches across it to reveal Godself to us—reveal Godself that is in ways our finite human minds can comprehend. There is of course a danger in all faith. What we believe about God may be wrong. We can’t avoid that danger. We can however live in trust that what we believe God has revealed of Godself will not fail us. God is the Known Unknown. God is immediately present and revealing Godself to us, and God remains ultimately unknowable mystery at the same time. That is all we know or ever can know of God, and it is enough.

On the Fall of the Republican Party

 

On the Fall of the Republican Party

January 14, 2022

 

For well over one hundred fifty years there have been two major political parties in this country. The Democratic Party arose in the decades before the Civil War. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 after the collapse of the Whig party. Anti-slavery former Whigs formed the new Republican Party specifically as an anti-slavery party. Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was the first Republican president. He was not originally strongly against slavery. At first to him the Civil War, which began very shortly after his inauguration in March, 1861, was not about abolishing slavery. It was about preserving the union. But on January 1, 1863, using his power as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Though we call Lincoln the Great Liberator, his Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery everywhere in the country. It said that enslaved persons in states or areas of states that were then in rebellion against the United States shall be, as of January 1, 1863, “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, done by a Republican president, the Civil War came to be about the abolition of slavery everywhere in the country. After the north won the Civil War there followed in the former Confederate states a period known as Reconstruction. During that period the Republicans generally supported the rights of formerly enslaved persons while the Democrats generally opposed federal intervention into the internal affairs of those states.

Reconstruction continued until shortly after the presidential election of 1876. In that election the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden got more votes than did the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes; but the electoral votes of some states were contested, and it was not clear who actually won the election. In the Compromise of 1877 the Democrats conceded the presidency to Hayes in return for the Republicans agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the southern states, thereby effectively ending Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln had sold out the Black people of the south in order to get their man Hayes elected president.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century the Republican Party had become a conservative party of big business and the wealthy. But in 1901 Republican vice president Theodore Roosevelt became president upon the death of president William McKinley. Roosevelt, though he was a war-loving imperialist, was in some ways more progressive than were most Republicans. In particular, he set out to bust the large trusts that controlled the country’s economy for the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the country’s working population.

Roosevelt served as president until 1909. He was succeeded by the Democrat (and horrible racist) Woodrow Wilson. After Wilson a series of colorless Republicans served as president. When the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began in 1929 Republican president Herbert Hoover’s response was tepid and ineffective. He ran for reelection in 1932, but he lost to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, an distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt.

The next Republican president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was of course a war hero, having commanded American troops in Europe in World War II. He was a moderate conservative. He sent federal troops into Arkansas to enforce the racial integration of the public schools, but still his eight year presidency was relatively uneventful. During his term of office the marginal tax rate on great wealth was as high as 95%. Under Eisenhower the (mostly white) middle class grew and prospered.

The next Republican president was Richard Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s vice president. He lost the 1960 presidential election to Democrat John F. Kennedy, but he was elected president in 1968. We can date the decline and fall of the Republican Party to Nixon’s term in office. The Democratic Party had been the party opposed to Reconstruction after the Civil War while the Republican Party supported it. From Reconstruction through the presidential election of 1964 the southern states had been the “solid south,” always voting for Democrats because the Democrats had ended Reconstruction. The Democrats accepted their presence and support despite every last southern Democrat being a racist and segregationist. However, in 1948 that situation began to change. The Democratic Party was slowly morphing into the champion of civil rights for Black Americans. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those federal laws were aimed precisely against the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow south.

Nixon won the presidency in 1968 by doing essentially two things. He lied to the American people about having a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and he adopted what he called the “southern strategy.” Nixon saw that he could flip the states of the solid south to the Republicans by exploiting the disaffection of southern whites with the Democrats for supporting the civil rights of Black people. Though he was certainly personally a racist, Nixon did not publicly say overtly racist things. Instead he advocated “states rights.”  States rights was a dog whistle for allowing the southern states to continue their discrimination against Black people without federal interference. Southern whites heard Nixon’s advocacy of states rights as meaning he would interfere in their efforts to keep Blacks as second class citizens less than the Democrats would. The 1968 election was complicated by the third party candidacy of George Wallace, the overtly racist and segregationist governor of Alabama. In that election Wallace won the formerly Confederate states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Nixon won the formerly Confederate states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. The only formerly Confederate state the Democrats won was Texas.

Nixon’s presidency of course ended in the disaster of the Watergate affair. Nixon was a deeply flawed man, and some of us knew that he was when he ran for president in 1960 and again in 1968. His paranoia and hatred of his political opponents led to the scandal that forced him to resign the presidency in August, 1974. Nixon had managed to turn the solid south from the Democrats to the Republicans using dog whistles that said he would let the southern states continue to discriminate against Black people. For the most part the southern states have been solidly Republican ever since. The growing partisanship of the American people and American politicians was evident in how long it took virtually any Republican politicians to turn against Nixon. Vice President Ford, who became vice president after a different scandal had forced Nixon’ vice president Spiro Agnew to resign, succeeded Nixon. He was a decent if not a particularly visionary or charismatic man. He made a great many people angry when he gave a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon.

The decline of the Republican Party began with Nixon, but all appearances at the time to the contrary notwithstanding it gained speed during the presidency of former B-movie star and governor of California Ronald Reagan. Reagan defeated incumbent president Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. George H. W. Bush was his vice president. With Reagan the federal government became even more the tool of the wealthy than it had been before. Reagan began the series of deep cuts to the tax rates of wealthy Americans that has continued under Republican presidents ever since. Under Reagan greed became socially acceptable. Reagan gave Americans permission to care only about themselves and perhaps their closest family members. Selfishness, always a problem for Americans because of the strong tradition of individualism in our culture, became a civic virtue. Many foolish Americans think Reagan was one of our best presidents. In truth he was one of the worst. The country still has not recovered from the “me first” culture he created or at least encouraged.

After Reagan and before 2016 there were two other Republican presidents, Reagan’s vice president George H. W. Bush for one term and Bush’s son George W. Bush for two. Reagan had set the Republicans on a course of advocating what was called supply side economics. Its advocates liked to use the metaphor “a rising tide raises all boats.” When he ran against Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 H. W. Bush had called Reagan’s economics “voodoo economics.” Yet he knelt and kissed Reagan’s ring to get his party’s vice presidential nomination after it was clear that Reagan would head the Republican ticket in 1980. We heard no more from him about “voodoo economics,” though as president he did once sign a bill that raised the tax rate on wealth at least a little bit. That he did is probably the reason he was not reelected in 1992. That’s how deeply the country had bought Reagan’s lie about a policy that supposedly raised all boats but that in reality only raised all yachts.

H. W. Bush lost the 1992 election to conservative Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas. As president Clinton signed welfare reform and other legislation that Republicans loved and many Democrats despised. He was succeeded by George W. Bush, who besides making himself a war criminal with his totally illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, continued the Republican way of slashing taxes for rich people, thereby driving the up the federal debt and assuring that there would be no money for truly constructive domestic programs. After W. Bush there was the eight year presidency of Barack Obama. During his term of office a Republican controlled Congress, and especially a Senate led by obstructionist Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, stopped Obama from doing much of anything constructive.

Whereupon we come to the presidency during which the Republican Party truly ceased to a legitimate American political party and became a cult of personality for a man who was arguably the worst president this country has ever had. The once great Republican Party became the cult of personality of sleazy New York real estate speculator and television personality Donald Trump. Trump has always been a shameless self-promoter. He claims to be immensely wealthy and to be a great businessman, but he has filed for bankruptcy many times. Three of his properties filed for bankruptcy in 1992. Three other of his properties filed for bankruptcy individually in 1991, 2004, and 2009. He has a reputation for hiring subcontractors for his real estate ventures, then refusing to pay them. He appears at least to have benefitted from the investment of dirty money from Russia that has been laundered through his real estate holdings. It is unclear whether he knew the source of that money. He has defaulted on so many bank loans that now only Deutsche Bank, itself a somewhat questionable operation, will lend to him. He has been married three times and has cheated on all three of this wives. He paid off both a porn star and a Playboy model to keep them from talking about the sex he had had with them. He is misogynistic and racist. Before he ran for the presidency in 2016 he had never run for any office and had no experience in public service whatsoever.

 That Donald Trump was wildly unqualified for any public office much less the presidency was obvious to some of us and should have been obvious to everyone. But Trump is a showman. He played a successful business man on television for years. He can whip up a crowd of supporters more effectively than American politician since George Wallace, with whom he is sometimes compared. He will tell a crowd anything he thinks they want to hear or that he thinks will benefit not the nation but himself. He is an inveterate liar. He may be amoral, but he is certainly a-truthful, if I may use that neologism. He lies so much, sometimes in ways that can easily be found out, that I can only conclude that Trump does not operate within the categories true and false. The only categories he knows are “beneficial for me” and “not beneficial for me.”

As bad as Trump is personally, his policies, actions, and inactions as president are worse. He continued the Republican policy of cutting taxes for their wealthy donors damn the consequences. He rolled back every environmental regulation he could. He alienated our country’s long-standing allies and cozied up to the authoritarian Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose operatives had interfered in the 2016 on his behalf. He pandered to the murderous, despotic Kim Jong-un of North Korea. When a mob of white supremacists held a demonstration in Richmond, Virginia, that turned violent he said there were fine people on both sides. No, Mr. Trump, white supremacists of any sort are not fine people. He stacked the federal bench with right-wing ideologues, the ones on the Supreme Court apparently about to overturn Roe v. Wade. The one thing Trump did of which I can approve is actually something he didn’t do. He didn’t get us into any new wars. He holds the high honor of being the only president impeached twice. Sadly he was convicted in neither of his trials in the Senate.

As bad as nearly all of Trump’s policies were, the way he handled, or rather mishandled, the biggest crisis of his presidency was orders of magnitude worse. In late 2019 we began to hear about a new virus that was infecting people in China. That virus, now usually called COVID-19, COVID, or just the coronavirus, spread around the globe with astonishing speed. By March, 2020, the people of this country started to cease their usual activities. This country and the whole world were in the grips of a global pandemic unlike anything seen in this country since the Spanish Flu pandemic at the end of World War I. We isolated ourselves as much as we could. When we had to go out we wore masks and tried to stay at least six feet away from any other person. We were following the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s leading public health agency, an agency Trump would come to disparage and ignore. Nonetheless, the coronavirus spread through this country like wildfire. It wasn’t always lethal by any means, but it was lethal in enough cases that tens of thousands of Americans were dying of it. The nation’s hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients.

As all that was going on Trump cared only about how the pandemic would affect his chances of reelection. He said COVID-19 was just like the common flu. It isn’t. He pushed cockamamy  treatments for infection. He said use bleach. He pushed drugs that the experts said were useless against the virus. Trump’s response to the pandemic was as bad as Ronald Reagan failing to do anything to address the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It was shameful. It isn’t possible to say how many of the over eight hundred thousand American death COVID-19 has caused are his responsibility, but it must be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Even without his dereliction of duty when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was one of the worse presidents this country has ever had, probably the worse at least since the Civil War. Even if otherwise he had not been one our worst presidents, with his dereliction of duty when faced with the pandemic he certainly became one of them.

Yet, inexplicably at least in terms of decent explanations, Trump still controls the Republican Party. He has reduced it to being the personality cult of Donald Trump. It no longer stands for anything, good or bad, except Donald Trump. Republican politicians who spoke the truth about Trump when they ran against him for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination now grovel at his feet. They kiss his ass because they are terrified that he will support someone else the next time they have to run in a Republican primary. There is among us a significant number of fanatical Trump supporters whose proclivity for violence cannot be overestimated. Most of them are white men terrified that demographic changes in this country mean that white men are losing their control of the country’s economic and political mountaintops that they have nearly exclusively occupied since the country’s origins in the early seventeenth century.

Now we come to the disgraceful (at best) way Trump’s presidency ended. Even before the 2020 election Trump was telling what became his Big Lie. He said that the only way he could lose the 2020 election was if the election were “rigged.” When he lost the election he shouted again and again that he had really won it. He tried very trick in the book, and many that weren’t in any book, to overturn the results of that election. He sent hack lawyers, including the thoroughly disgraced Rudy Giuliani, into courts in swing states that had voted for Biden in an attempt to get the court to overturn or even reverse the outcome of the election in their state. Those lawyers could present not one shred of evidence in support of Trump’s claim that massive voter fraud had cost him the election. They were laughed out of court, sometimes being severely chastised by a judge for filing a frivolous lawsuit. He tried to get Republican controlled state legislatures, like the one in Michigan for example, to ignore the vote of the people and send Trump electors to Washington. None of them did. And through it all Trump kept repeating his Big Lie: I really won this election by a landslide and my victory has been stolen from me.

On January 6, 2021, Congress met in joint session to carry out its constitutional duty of receiving and counting the electoral college votes of the various states. Trump saw that action of Congress as his last chance to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He knew that Vice President Pence would preside at that session in his capacity of president of the Senate. He pressured Pence incessantly, saying that Pence had the legal authority to reject the electoral college ballots of the states, that he could declare the election invalid and send the matter either to the Supreme Court or to the House of Representatives for resolution as the constitution provides for cases in which no candidate has a majority of electoral votes. Pence had no such authority, and he knew it. Reports suggest that he very nearly caved in to Trump, but in the end he did the proper, legally correct thing, and did not try to stop Congress from accepting the electoral votes as the states had submitted them.

Trump was not about to leave the decision about electoral votes up to Congress alone, not giving a damn what the constitution says. He and his people announced a rally in Washington on January 6, to be held not far down Pennsylvania Avenue from the US Capitol. Trump told people that the rally would be “wild.” Several people spoke to that crowd, including Rudi Giuliani; but Trump’s speech was the corker. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy, repeating his Big Lie over and over again. He told them that if Congress approved Biden’s election they would not have a country. He said he thought Pence would do the right thing, by which Trump meant the wrong, thing, but left hanging what the mob should do if he didn’t. He sent the frenzied crowd down Pennsylvania to the Capitol to, as he and his supporters said, “Stop the Steal.”

They very nearly succeeded. They stormed the Capitol, overwhelmed the grossly outnumbered Capitol police officers on duty there. They broke windows and smashed doors. They rifled through legislatures desks. Someone stole a laptop computer from the office of Speaker of the House Pelosi.  They physically injured Capitol police officers who tried to stop them and left some of them with PTSD. In one of the most appalling scenes from that day, one of the rioters paraded through the building with a big Confederate battle flag, a symbol of armed rebellion against the United States. The rioters terrified the senators, representatives, and everyone else who was legally in the building at the time. Elected public officials cowered in fear in the Senate gallery. Police told them to up on the gas masks that were kept under the senators’ desks. Who knew that there were gas masks under the senators’ desks? I sure didn’t. The January 6 insurrection was the first time the US Capitol had been occupied since the British did it during the war of 1812. Not even the Confederate army did it. There is simply no doubt that on that day Trump unleashed a mob to attack the government of the United States of America, the country of which he was supposedly the elected leader. He sent them to nullify the US constitution that he had sworn to protect and defend. Trump did the most shameful things any US president has ever done, violating his oath of office in so many ways they’re hard to keep up with.

And while all this was going on Trump sat safely in the White House watching the riot on television. He had told the crowd that he would be at the Capitol with them, but of course he wasn’t. By all accounts Trump watched the television, I assume tuned to the right-wing propaganda machine posing as a news organization Fox News, for something like three hours doing nothing even to try to stop the violence he had unleashed on the Capitol. The House of Representatives impeached him (his second impeachment) for instigating the insurrection of January 6, though he wasn’t tried in the Senate on that impeachment until he was out of office. Though every senator knew that Trump was guilty as charged, only a few Republican senators voted to convict Trump, and he was not convicted.

Now the entire Republican Party, at least at the national and state levels, is controlled by no one but Donald Trump. He has turned the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower into the Donald Trump Cult of Personality. How did he do it? He did it the way authoritarian and dictatorial leaders always do it, by telling a Big Lie over and over and over. Hitler’s Big Lie was that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems. Stalin’s Big Lie was that the Communist Party worked for the benefit of the country’s workers. I don’t mean to suggest that Trump is as bad as either of those two monsters were. Far from it. It’s just that he used the same technique that they used. Trump fed his Big Lie to disaffected people who were ready to lash out against what they considered to be a repressive and illegitimate government. Those people bought the Big Lie hook, line, and sinker. Though it is impossible for any half-way intelligent person to understand it, Trump’s supporters seem to believe that the Big Lie is true. At least they keep repeating it over and over again as though it were true, which of course it isn’t.

On January 20, 2021, former vice president Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States. Trump and his thugs had tried to prevent the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. They failed, this time. The Department of Justice is busy indicting and trying people who broke into the Capitol that day or who in some way conspired to commit sedition against the United States in connection with that insurrection. Trump continues to repeat his Big Lie. Republican politicians genuflect  in his direction because they fear the political power of his supporters. The most fanatical of those supporters speak of starting a new civil war if Trump is not returned to power. Trump controls the once great Republican Party. Because of him it is no longer a legitimate American political party, though of course it still has immense power both in Washington, DC, and in the states. As the Donald Trump Cult of Personality it remains a serious threat to American democracy. Those of us who believe in democracy must do everything we can to stop Trumpism before it is too late, assuming that it isn’t too late already.

 

Coming Home

 

Coming Home

January 14, 2022

 

I am seventy-five years old. I have various chronic health problems, but none of them is life threatening at the moment. Yet it simply is true that as you get up into your later years death, your death, comes to seem more and more real. Of course I’ve known my whole life except when I was very young that people are mortal, and unlike Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, I am people. When you’re younger you know death is a reality including your own death someday, but it seems more abstract and distant than it does as you age through your seventies, or at least it did for me. I suppose that thanks to modern medicine seventy-five isn’t as old as it used to be, but it isn’t exactly young either. For the last couple of years I have been struggling to come to terms with the reality that I will die and that that day is a lot closer than it used to be. I’m hoping that writing this post will help me do that.

People sometimes ask others if they are afraid of death. I am afraid of the process of dying. Of course unless we have received a terminal diagnosis we don’t know how we will die. Death can come quickly and relatively painlessly. It can also come at the end of a long, miserable process of dying. I’ve never had perfectly healthy lungs, and I’ve heard a physician say that pulmonary deaths are the worst. Of course I don’t know that I will die of pulmonary failure, but it is perhaps more of a possibility for me than it is for most people. I fear a long, slow, miserable process of death. I wouldn’t say that I fear death itself. Sometimes I resent it, but I don’t fear it. I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe that God, who is after all love, would ever sentence anyone to the kind of torment Christians have so often associated with hell. So I don’t think I fear death itself.

I want to ask, however: What is death? It is the end of life. Medical professionals can monitor bodily functions as they shut down—blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and so on. The most conclusive evidence of death is, I suppose, the cessation of a heartbeat. Yet it seems to me that there is something else that happens when a person dies. The body that once had life no longer does. More significantly, I think, the person’s spirit, once located in the body, is no longer in the body. I once walked into a hospital room just as a parishioner of mine died. The nurse who was there pointed up to the ceiling in a corner of the room and said, “There she is. Right up there.” He knew her lifeless body was in the hospital bed in the room, so surely he meant that her spirit or her soul is right up there. I can’t say that I have ever sensed the continuing presence of a deceased person’s spirit like that. I was present when my first wife died, and I was present when my mother died; but I can’t say I ever experienced their spirits continuing on the way that nurse did that day.

From the very beginning the Christian faith has asserted that there is life after death. It has been a core Christian belief for a long time (though not at the very beginning of the faith) that a person’s soul survives the person’s physical death. I tend to be a bit of a skeptic by nature. I’ve always said that I am agnostic about life after death, which doesn’t mean I’ve ever tried to talk someone out of a belief in an afterlife, especially not when that person is saying that they or a loved one is going to be with deceased loved ones, as people often do. People speak of having had a “near death experience,” but those are near death experiences not death experiences. I’m not convinced that they prove the reality of life after death.

And yet. There are a couple of “and yets”. Once, when I was an emotional wreck driving to the vet’s office to have my beloved but dying Irish terrier put down, my late first wife appeared to me. That terrier had been her dog too before she died. As I drove, for just a very few seconds I knew that she was there in a way I find hard to describe. I had sensed her presence with me a couple of times before closer to her death, but this was different. It wasn’t that I could see or hear her in the usual way, but there she was. She was a slight disruption in my field of vision. She spoke, though not in the usual human way. I heard her say, more with my spirit I think than with my ears, “It’s all right. I’m here waiting for him.” Then she was gone. I had that experience over ten years ago, but it feels to me like it happened yesterday.

Do that experience and similar experiences other people have had prove that there is life after death? I wish I could answer that question yes, but I can’t. I can’t because I can’t explain the experience. It felt as real as any experience I’ve ever had although it was of a different kind than any other experience I’ve ever had. All I can say that it proves is that the experience felt as real to me as any other experience I’ve ever had. I can’t prove the reality of life after death, but I can live trusting that there is life after death. I can and do say to God, “I don’t know what happens when we die, but I know that whatever happens, even if nothing happens, it is right because it is what you have ordained.” I live in trust that that is true, and it is enough for me.

Here's the other “and yet.” I’ve titled this piece “Coming Home.” I mean by that title that the image of death as coming home to God works for me. When I think of death as coming home I remember an exegesis I once did of the story of Jesus calming the storm on the sea of Galilee. You’ll find that story at Mark 4:35-41. Here are a couple of paragraphs of that exegesis taken from my book Liberating Christianity.[1]

 

Like all great Bible stories however this story comes to life and gains power to change our lives when we see that it isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago to other people in a place far away. The story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives when we see that it is also about us, right here, right now. In other words the story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives when we see it as myth, as a story about God and God’s relationship not just to Jesus but to us. To demonstrate that point let’s take a closer look at this story.

This journey begins where all journeys begin—at the beginning. Jesus initiates the journey. He says to his disciples “Let’s go.” He invites them to leave the place where they are and move across an open expanse of water to another place on the distant shore. That’s how it is with our life journeys too. Our life journeys begin with God, who in the story Jesus clearly represents. God starts us and sends us out across the open expanse of our lives headed toward the far shore of return to God.

 

I didn’t use the image coming home in that piece. I did say that life is a journey that begins with God and ends with our returning to God. That’s what I mean when I call death coming home. In his great hymn Bring Many Names, one of the images for God composer Brian Wren uses is “everlasting home.” To that image I say an enthusiastic “Yes!” That is exactly who God is, our everlasting home. I take more comfort from that image and from the thought of death being returning to that everlasting home than I do from any other image of death. Is that image factually correct? I don’t know. I do know that it is mythically correct. It correctly indicates our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. I may struggle some with the reality of my death; but can face my death in peace when I think of it as coming home to God, and that is enough.

 

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[1] If you want to see everything I said about this story in this exegesis you’ll find it at Sorenson, Thomas, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, 46-49.