What Is to Be Done?

 

What Is to Be Done?

June 28, 2022

 

My country, the United States of America, is in trouble today in a way it has not previously been, at least not in my rather long lifetime. Of course, we’ve never been a perfect democracy. The monied special interests have almost always controlled our nation’s politics and economy is their own, usually shortsighted economic interest. Still, even those special interests have for the most part acted within the framework, flawed as it is, of the nation’s constitution. They have at least paid lip service to the value of the rule of law. The arc of our history has bent slowly, but in significant ways it has bent toward justice. We’ve had bad presidents before. Richard Nixon was one of the worst (although his domestic policies were a whole lot better than those of today’s Republican party). He’s the only president whose misdeeds forced him to resign. Yet even he was to some extent an American institutionalist He acted outside the law, but he never tried to overthrow our constitutional system of government. Our Supreme Court, which has the final say on what the Constitution actually means, has at times made horribly bad decisions. Dred Scott and Plessy are examples from the nineteenth century. More recently, Citizens United opened the floodgates for money to pour into our politics like never before. The Supreme Court has also made horrible decisions in recent years when interpreting the Second Amendment. No, we’ve never been a perfect democracy. Still, we have been a democracy. We’ve had people in positions of power who broke the law, but we have been a country that has embodied the rule of law perhaps better than any other country ever has.

Today our constitutional system of government and the rule of law are threatened as perhaps they never have been before. In the recent Dobbs case evil forces had a tragic success in bending the arc of our history away from rather than toward justice. The court did something it has never done before. It took away what had been established as a constitutional right of the American people. When he lost his bid for reelection in 2020, Donald Trump did not accept his loss and facilitate the transfer of power the way George H.W. Bush did in 1992 and Al Gore (the sitting vice president) did in 2000. Instead, he tried to overthrow the Constitution of the United States so he could hold onto power though the American political system had made Joe Biden the president-elect. Both our constitutional system of government and the rights of the American people are under attack in a most alarming way.

Two men, Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas, are primary actors in those two threats. They are the human faces of the danger we face today. No, Donald Trump is no longer president; but he will try to become president again, and tens of millions of Americans, blind to the threat he poses, still support him. Yes, Clarence Thomas is only one of the nine justices on the Supreme Court; but he has said out loud (or at least in writing) what a majority of those justices certainly think about the court’s precedents that have, at least since 1954, expanded our country’s concept of freedom and equality for all. He thinks, and other justices very probably think too, that many of those precedents should be overruled the way the court recently overruled Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas represent a threat to America like no other president and few supreme court justices ever have.

When Vladimir Lenin was attempting to overthrow Russia’s tsarist government he wrote a little book titled in Russian Chto Delat’?, which means literally “what to do?” but that is best translated “What Is to be Done?” Lenin of course is no model for what is to be done, and I don’t mean to suggest that he is. He did, after all, initiate the system of secret police and state terrorism against its own people that culminated in the 1930s with Joseph Stalin. Lenin gave the wrong answer, but he asked the right question, and the title of his book poses the question that all Americans who value liberty and the rule of law must ask today. What is to be done? What are we to do? I don’t have any novel answers to those questions, but they have raised for me a moral question that I thought I had answered for myself quite some time ago. I have long been an advocate of Christian nonviolence. I have enthusiastically endorsed Jesus’ teaching of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. I must admit, however, that the threats to my country’s core values that Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas represent have raised the question for me of whether violence in the defense of freedom is ever appropriate. My answer to that question is still no, but I think feel the need to examine that answer carefully to see if it is valid in today’s context.

From 1933 to 1945 Germany was ruled by one of history’s great monsters, Adolf Hitler. He set out to kill every last Jewish person in Europe, and he was making horrific progress toward that diabolical goal. In 1939 he plunged Europe into the most brutal and destructive war in that continent’s violent history. A German Lutheran pastor and theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was faced with Lenin’s question: What is to be done? Bonhoeffer knew that the one he confessed to be his Lord and Savior had taught nonviolence as the way of God. Jesus, Bonhoeffer knew, did not allow his disciples to use violence even in an attempt to save him from execution by crucifixion by the brutal, oppressive regime under which he and his people lived, the Roman Empire. Yet Bonhoeffer saw the immense evil of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. The only way he could see to stop that evil was to kill Hitler. So, despite his commitment to Christian nonviolence, he joined a conspiracy to do just that to that personification of evil. He knew that murder, even the murder of Adolf Hitler, was a sin which he would have to beg God to forgive, but he saw no other solution to the catastrophe that Hitler was. The conspiracy he joined never made much progress toward that goal, and Bonhoeffer paid for his participation in it with his life. His importance for me today is the way he asked the question of what was to be done and the way he answered it.

Is violence against the likes of Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas justified in today’s context? Should we resort to Bonhoeffer’s answer to the question? Until recently it never occurred to me that I would have to ask that question about my own country, but I do have to ask it. I don’t mean to suggest that they are nearly as bad as Hitler was, but there simply is no doubt that our country would be better off if Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas (and the four other reactionary justices on the Supreme Court) were not part of its life. They have been nothing but destructive. The Supreme Court will certainly continue its assault on American liberty. Donald Trump will overthrow our constitutional government if he ever gets another chance to do it. The people I have named here are in all probability as much symptoms as causes of our country’s woes; but they have done evil things, and they will continue to do evil things. We would be better off without them.

Does that conclusion justify violence against them? I must admit that I feel a strong temptation to say yes, but I’m still going to say no. Jesus didn’t teach us to say no to violence except when we want to resort to it. He didn’t teach us to be nonviolent toward people we like but violent toward people we don’t. He didn’t even say it was permissible to use violence against evil. Though many have thought he did, he didn’t tell us passively to accept evil. That’s not really what “turn the other cheek” is about. He did say those who live by the sword die by the sword. Truly to follow Jesus means never reducing yourself to the level of the bad guys. If you behave like bad people, you’ll very probably become a bad person. Jesus didn’t tell us to use nonviolence only when it “works.” He told us to be nonviolent even when it doesn’t. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence though it cost him his life. He calls us to do the same.

So. Should we assassinate Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas? As tempting as it is to say yes, our answer must be no. Evil never justifies more evil. Those of us who believe in personal freedom and the rule of law must use other, nonviolent means to resist the evil that is so active among us. We must use the law and the constitution we are trying to save. I’ll propose two areas in which we can do that. One is to use our state’s political system to preserve individual liberties even when the Supreme Court takes them away at the national level as well as preserve the rule of law even when the president tries not just to avoid it but to destroy it. For example, the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade doesn’t make abortion illegal. It just allows the states to make it illegal, as awful as even that result is. States can still make abortion legal, and many, including my home state of Washington, did so a long time ago. Those laws are still in effect. If the Supreme Court does what Clarence Thomas and almost certainly other Supreme Court justices want, that is, overrule the precedent-setting cases that guarantee the rights to contraception, free private sexual acts, mixed race marriage (like Clarence Thomas’!), and same sex marriage, we can preserve those cherished freedoms at the state level, and preserve them we must.

The other arena for our nonviolent resistance to evil is national politics. We can mobilize people who believe in law and freedom to work against politicians who support reactionary policies. We can work against politicians like Donald Trump who don’t believe in the rule of law. Personally, I have no such politicians representing me except at the level of the Washington state legislature where, thank God, they are in the minority. We can work against them (though one of them is a neighbor of mine who at the personal level is truly a decent person). We can support efforts across the nation to convince people to stop voting against their own self-interest by voting for politicians not committed to law and to real freedom, and whose policies benefit only the wealthy. We can vow never to vote for a single Republican for at least as long as that party is in thrall to Donald Trump and big money. We can love what our country says it stands for and oppose with every fiber of our being today’s assaults on those values.

Will we end those assaults? Will we stop them from succeeding? Perhaps or maybe even probably not. Does that mean we may resort to violence? No, it doesn’t. A great people mobilized for nonviolent resistance to evil can work miracles. Look at what Gandhi did in India. We don’t have a Gandhi right now, and it isn’t at all clear where one could come from. Nonetheless, nonviolence must be our creed. We must ground all of our actions in a strong commitment to it. There is no other truly Christian choice. So let’s get on with it, shall we?

How Strong Is Our Faith?

 

How Strong Is Our Faith?

June 12, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained here 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., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

I say I’m a Christian. I’m even an ordained Christian minister. I suspect that if you’re reading this blog you say you’re a Christian too whether you’re ordained or not. I know that some conservative Christians in this country say they are persecuted because they are Christians, but they aren’t. Having people dislike and even avoid you because you’re Christian or because of the sort of Christian you are isn’t persecution. People are free to dislike you for any reason, although of course the law prohibits discrimination against you in various areas of life because of your religion. That it does is another reason no one is truly being persecuted because of their Christian faith. Public schools not being permitted to lead prayer in school isn’t persecution, it’s American constitutional government. Actually, it is quite easy in this country at least to say that you’re a Christian. Certainly no one is going to throw you to the lions for making that claim as happened to some of our earliest forbears in the faith. At least claiming to be a Christian in this country is easy, safe, and mostly without negative consequences.

Which raises an important question. How much of a commitment does it take to be a Christian in America today? Is just saying that you are one enough? Or does it take more than that? I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, but I do know this. Over the course of Christian history there have been people who have said that being a Christian, or at least being a good one, takes the kind of commitment few of us are called on to make today. I’ll give you two examples here from very different times and contexts in that history. Saint Paul is one of them. The great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard is the other.

Saint Paul could at times boast about how humble he was, but it is true that he suffered a great deal because of his Christian faith. Here’s a passage from 2 Corinthians in which Paul lists some of the hardships he has suffered. He begins by asking if other people are ministers of Christ as, I guess they claim to be. Then he says:

 

I am a better one: with far greater labours, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from the Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters, in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. 2 Corinthians 11:23-27.

 

Paul certainly believed that all of these hardships made him a better Christian.

Then there’s Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).[1] He may well be the founder of existential theology and therefore important to the likes of Paul Tillich and me, but I’m interested in him here for just one of his ideas, an idea about the nature of faith commitment. In is book Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard considers the story from chapter 22 of Genesis of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. At Genesis 22:1-2, God tells Abraham to take his son, go to the land of Moriah, and there offer him as a burnt-offering, that is, to kill him and burn his body as a sacrifice to God. In this story God really does tell Abraham to commit child sacrifice.

Abraham obeys. He takes Isaac, the wood he would need to do a burnt-offering, and heads off for Moriah. Isaac, who has no clue what’s really going on, asks his father where the lamb is for the burnt-offering. Abraham replies, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering.” Genesis 22:8. Was Abraham lying to Isaac? Or did Abraham really believe that God wouldn’t actually make him kill his son? We don’t know. When Abraham and Isaac reach Moriah, Abraham builds an altar and arranges the wood. Then he “bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the alter, on top of the wood.” Genesis 22:9b. Abraham takes his knife and seems about to kill his son. Would Abraham really do it? We don’t know.

We do know that he didn’t have to. At the last instant God calls to Abraham and says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” Genesis 22:12.[2] God seems to assume that Abraham would have killed Isaac had God not intervened. but would he have? I guess that we must assume that Abraham would have done it if that’s what God thinks. Still, the story is better literature if the question is left open.

I and most people I know find the story of God supposedly telling Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God to be repugnant and morally repelling. The God that I know and seek to serve would never command anyone to kill anyone else, much less tell a father to kill his son. I, and most people I have discussed this story with, say that even if we were sure God had ordered us to kill one of our children we wouldn’t do it. I think I’d be more likely to seek psychiatric help than to obey any such command. When I read this story I just want to shout, “No!”

Not so Søren Kierkegaard. He can be as obscure and difficult to understand as any other nineteenth century Germanic philosopher, but we know that In Fear and Trembling he makes one major point. Abraham would have killed his son, and we must consider him justified in his willingness to kill Isaac and not just in his willingness to do it but even if he had actually done it. That’s because, Kierkegaard says, faith, if it really is faith, demands that kind of commitment. We are either committed to God or we aren’t. For Kierkegaard there’s no in between. Abraham’s supposed willingness to kill the only son he had through whom God’s promises to him could come true necessarily follows form Abraham’s faith.[3] The whole story is a test of that faith. It even says that it is. It begins, “After these things God tested Abraham….” Genesis 22:1a. Abraham passed that test, or at least God said that he had. God let Abraham off the hook at the last second, but God still says Abraham had passed the test by not withholding Isaac from God.

Paul claims that all his hardships make him a better Christian minister, and, I suppose, a better Christian. Kierkegaard says Abraham must be justified in his willingness to kill his son. Both of these stories, Paul’s of his suffering and, as Kierkegaard has it, Abraham’s willingness to kill Isaac, raise a question of vital importance. How much commitment does faith require? Does it require a willingness to endure protracted and severe physical suffering because of one’s faith? Does it require a commitment so radical that you would agree to kill your own child if your faith or the One in whom you have faith required you to do it? Paul, Genesis, and Kierkegaard all answer those questions yes. If you really have faith you must be ready, willing, and able to do both of those things though one of them is committing infanticide.

Is that right? Must we concede that we have no faith if we say no, I wouldn’t do either of those two things even though I was convinced my faith required me to it? I must confess that those questions make me quite uncomfortable. See, while I might be able and willing to endure physical suffering for my faith, there is no way I would ever kill either my son or my daughter or anyone else for that matter. Does that truth about me, which I suspect is a truth about you too, mean that my claim to be a Christian is a lie? Good Lord I hope not! And I don’t believe that it does. Here’s why.

I know in my heart through Jesus Christ that God neither wants anyone to suffer nor wants that anyone kill anyone else. It makes no sense to me to say that because of my faith I must be prepared to do things I am convinced my faith would never require me to do and God would never want me to do. Moreover, any object of faith that would require the faithful to suffer horribly or even to commit murder is nothing I could ever believe in, love, or seek to follow. My Christian faith and the God I know in and through Jesus Christ do indeed make demands on me. They demand that I live as much as I am able according to the ways of God not the ways of the world. They demand that I love people it is much easier for me to hate. They command me to eschew violence even when violence looks like the most effective solution to a problem. For me, and I suspect for you, those demands are plenty hard enough. I comply with them as best I am able. Would I be willing to suffer physical torment rather than forsake my faith? I like to think that I would, but I don’t think any of us knows the answer to that question until we are face with and have to make that dreadful decision. Would I kill one of my children or anyone else? No, I wouldn’t.

All of which leaves me, and I suspect you, with an unanswered question: How strong is my faith? I am proud enough to say that it is at least strong enough to help me get through this life. It has done that so far, and I trust that it will continue to do that until I shuffle off this mortal coil. But is it stronger than that? I hope so, but I have to confess that I don’t know whether it is or not.

All of which leads me to the great good news that I know in the depths of my soul. As far a God is concerned, my faith doesn’t have to be stronger than it is. See God, the God I have known in my life, is a God of limitless love, grace, and forgiveness. I know in the depths of my soul that God loves, accepts, and saves me no matter what my failings are, and God knows I have at least my own share of them. God loves you in exactly the same way. God loves everyone who lives, who ever has lived, and who ever will live in exactly that way too. So while the question I have raised here about the strength of our faith is, I am sure, and important one that we should all consider, I don’t lose any sleep over it. I trust my God to love and save me though my faith may not be all I or God would wish it to be. How strong is our faith? I can’t answer that question for you. I’m not sure I can answer it for myself. I do know this. I can trust my God of love and forgiveness. So can you. Thanks be to God!

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[1] Because our last name is Sorenson, originally Sørensen (the Danish spelling of the name), my father once said he thought he was a reincarnation of Søren Kierkegaard. He was a brilliant man, but still, I rather doubt it.

[2] The only explanation for God calling Isaac Abraham’s only son when God knows that Abraham’s other son Ishmael is still alive but Abraham does not is that the priestly editor of Genesis has combined two different stories of Abraham, one that includes the story of Ishmael and one that does not, apparently not being too concerned with narrative inconsistencies.

[3] Islam says that God’s promises to Abraham were fulfilled through Ishmael not Isaac. The Judeo-Christian tradition says the promises were fulfilled through Isaac. Either way, God’s promises to Abraham were fulfilled.

This Grace in Which We Stand

This Grace in Which We Stand

For

Eastgate Congregational UCC, Bellevue, Washington

June 12, 2022

 

Scripture: Romans 5:1-5

 

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 rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Saint Paul may well be one of the founding figures of our Christian faith, but, honestly, sometimes he drives me nuts. It’s not because he’s a sexist as he is often accused of being. The sexist verses attributed to him are not by him. It’s not because he somehow distorted the gospel of Jesus Christ as he is often accused of having done. Without him we probably would never have heard of Jesus of Nazareth. No, he sometimes drives me nuts because he is so inconsistent in his presentation of his core theology. That core of his theology is that we are justified, that is, we are put right with God, by grace through faith. But then, as in the passage from Romans we just heard, he puts it differently. Here he says that it is faith that justifies us not God’s grace. Those two versions of Paul’s theology are very different, and the difference is hardly insignificant. If we are justified by God’s grace, our justification is God’s doing not ours. If we are justified by faith, it is our doing not God’s. We put ourselves right with God by having the correct faith. That’s a big difference indeed. Paul can indeed be quite maddening in his inconsistency.

But then sometimes he will deliver a short, concise statement about God and our relationship with God that is simply wonderful, that is powerful and profoundly true. You can find one of those passages at 2 Corinthians 5:19 where Paul says that in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself not counting our trespasses against us. There’s another at Romans 8:38-39, where Paul says that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And there’s yet another one in the passage we just heard. In those verses Paul says, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” Romans 5:1-2 NRSV. This grace in which we stand! What a wonderful thing to say! It is as good a concise statement of our relationship to God as you’ll find anywhere in the Bible, or anywhere else at all for that matter. We stand in God’s grace. And if grace is truly grace—and with God it is—then we stand in that grace always, everywhere, no matter what. Thanks be to God!

OK, but of course really to understand our relationship of grace with God we must understand what grace is and what its consequences are. So, what is grace? To answer that question we must start with the question, “Who is God?” Here’s the best short answer to that question I know of: “God is love.” 1 John 4:8 NRSV. Now, we must understand that in that statement love does not define God. Rather, God defines love. Just as God is so much bigger than we are, so God’s love is enormously bigger than any love we can imagine. Any love we can imagine surely has its limits. But God’s love is not our love. The love that God is has utterly no limits. Anything less than that is less than God.

But Paul uses the word “grace” here not the word “love.” What is grace? Grace, I believe, is the unconditional, limitless love of God extended to us. Because as Paul says we stand in God’s grace, and grace is God’s love extended to us, we stand in God’s unlimited love. And here’s a truth that many people have trouble accepting: So does everyone else! If God’s grace is truly grace it must be that way. See, God’s love, God’s grace, is utterly unconditional. We Christians find access to God’s grace through our Christian faith, but faith in Jesus Christ is not a condition of God’s grace. If God’s love and grace are conditional, that is, if some people stand in them and others don’t, then God’s love and grace are limited to those who somehow earn or deserve them. But conditional grace is not grace! We can’t and don’t have to earn God’s love, God’s grace. God’s grace in which we stand is God’s free, unmerited gift to all of creation, including to all of us humans. It has to be God’s free and unmerited gift to all because if it isn’t, it is a reward. It is given only to those who somehow have earned and deserve it. But grace as a reward is not grace! It’s more like payment of a debt God somehow owes us because we have passed some kind of test. But of course while we owe everything to God, God owes nothing to us.

So each one of us, each one of you, stands forever in God’s love and grace no matter what. So do I, as hard as I sometimes find it to believe that truth. Have we sinned? Of course we have, for we are fallible creatures not gods. No matter. God holds us in love and grace anyway. Have we harmed ourselves and others? Of course we have, for we are fallible creatures not gods. God holds us in love and grace anyway. Have we doubted the reality of God? Of course we have, for doubt is part of the dynamic of faith. No matter. God holds us in love and grace anyway. Folks, perhaps the greatest error people, including unfortunately a great many Christians, make is to believe that they have to earn God’s grace. To believe that we have to earn salvation. Here’s the truth: We don’t! As Paul says, we stand in God’s grace, and God’s grace is unconditional and unearned or it isn’t grace!

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s OK for us to go do whatever we want no matter how harmful it is to other people, to God’s good creation, or to ourselves. See, God calls each and every one of us to respond to God’s love with love. Jesus, after all, told us to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves—and everyone is our neighbor. Paul puts it this way, “how can we who died to sin go on living in it?” Romans 6:2b NRSV. If we truly understand God’s grace as grace and truly understand that God extends that grace to us unconditionally, we will avoid sin as much as we can, not that any of us can do it perfectly. God extends to us unconditional love and grace. We respond to that love and grace by living lives of love as best we can. That’s how our relationship with God is supposed to work. That’s how it does work when we truly understand God’s grace.

But that’s not all. What else does it mean that we stand always and everywhere in God’s unmerited love and grace no matter what? One thing I think it means is that we are free, or at least we can be free. If we will open our hearts and souls to this grace in which we stand, we can be free from many things. We can be free from guilt over our mistakes, and we all make mistakes. We can be free from fear, and we all at least at times fear something or other. We can be free of fretful, fearful concern for the ultimate fate of our souls, for, as Paul says at Romans 8:38-39, not even death can separate us from the love of God.

That, folks, is the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ in a nutshell. We stand in God’s free and unconditional grace. We can know that we do or not, but we do either way. God’s grace can set us free from whatever the burdens are that we carry, and all of us carry burdens. Set free in the knowledge of God’s grace we can live as the free, loving people God intends and calls us to be. God offers freedom in grace to each and every one of us, indeed, to every person now living, or who ever lived, or who ever will live.

So this morning, and not only this morning but always, let us open our hearts and souls to God’s grace. Let us live into that grace. Let us celebrate it with joy and thanksgiving. I ask you this morning, please understand and accept this greatest of all truths: Each and every one of you stands in God’s unconditional grace, God’s unconditional love. So do I. Each of us stands in God’s free and unmerited love no matter what. That, my friends, is the best news there ever was or ever could be. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Ground of Our Hope

 

The Ground of Our Hope

June 7, 2022

 

This is a sermon I wrote for a preaching gig but decided not to give, not because it isn’t good or important but because I found something else I was more excited to preach about.

The Scripture quotations contained here 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., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8

 

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

 

I don’t know about you, but I know that I and a lot of other people are simply appalled and even angered by the state of the world today. The list of things wrong with this world and with us humans would be very long if I were to list everything I know of that deserves mention, and I’m sure there are many things wrong today that I don’t know of. Each of you may have particular issues in today’s world that especially disturb you. If so, good. I have lots of such things, and I can organize them under three categories of concerns that I borrow from the World Council of Churches. They are justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. It certainly seems to me and to a lot of other people that there are enormous issues facing us in all three of these categories.

Under justice I would put first of all American racism. We’ve made significant progress in combating our country’s legacy of hate-filled and hate-fueled racism, but we still have an awfully long way to go. Black Americans have been the main targets of our racism since the first of them came here enslaved to white people in 1619. However, they aren’t the only ones we have hated because of what we call their race. Asian, Latinx, and Native American people have been targets of our racism too, most significantly perhaps Native Americans, against whom we did nothing less than commit genocide. Today we have laws against racial discrimination, and few of us, in this part of the country at least, are overtly racist. Yet the effects of America’s original sin of racism are still active among us. If you doubt that, go look up the disparity between Blacks and whites with regard to prison sentences. The numbers are truly appalling. We have lots of other justice issues in this country as well. I won’t take the time to go over more of them here. I’m sure you already know about most of them.

There are immense justice issues in other parts of the world too. China may well be planning or even committing genocide against its Uyghur minority. Burma is doing the same thing to its Rohingya minority. President Putin of Russia, a place particularly close to me from an earlier era of my life, has virtually eliminated the freedoms of speech and the press that Russia enjoyed from the end of the Soviet Union and rule by the Communist Party in late 1991 until Putin’s more recent crackdown on them. There are of course far too many other justice issues in the world for me even to begin to list them all here.

The same is true of the world’s issues around peace and the closely related issue of violence. Russia’s invasion of and war against Ukraine is the best known breach of peace today. It is an unprovoked war of aggression. It is a moral outrage, and the way the Russians are conducting the war just makes it worse. I hope and pray that someday some in the Russian military and perhaps even Putin himself will face prosecution for war crimes, not that I have much hope that that will actually happen. Then there are the violent breaches of the peace from guns in our own country. The heartbreaking and soul-crushing murder of nineteen young schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and the murder of ten grocery store shoppers in Buffalo, New York, because of their race are recent and well-known instances of such violence. Tragically, there are other killings with guns in our country every day, and we don’t even hear about most of them.

I’ll mention just the big issue under the heading of the integrity of creation—climate change also known as global warming. We are on the verge of making much of the only planet we have utterly uninhabitable. That’s because we lack the courage and the will to do what would  be needed to stop our human contribution to that deadly phenomenon. Certain forces with vested economic interests in the way things are today have convinced far too many of us that global warming is a hoax, and the spread of that pernicious lie has definitely hindered our efforts to respond to the climate crisis in constructive ways. So yes, it’s easy to see our world as nearly nothing other than a disaster.

And then we read in Proverbs about a female character named Wisdom. There is a lot of literature about Lady Wisdom by women theologians, but I won’t lead you into the complicated issues they have raised about her. Suffice it to say that Proverbs gives us a woman named Wisdom as having been at God’s side helping God in the massive work of creation. She says that as she was doing that she was “rejoicing in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” Proverbs 8:30. When I reread that line recently it brought me up short. Rejoicing over and delighting in humanity? Are you kidding me? I just l listed here some of the horrors we humans are creating today, but human life has never been perfect. There have always been atrocities going on somewhere. We humans prove ourselves again and again to be selfish, greedy, violent, sexually irresponsible, and a whole bunch of other bad things all the time. We always have. Frankly, humanity rarely seems to be anything to rejoice over or delight in. Yet I’m a Christian, and I assume that you are Christians too. We Christians are supposed to be people of hope, aren’t we? We believe in resurrection, don’t we? But where in God’s name are we supposed to find reason for hope given the deplorable state of the world we live in?

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, I believe we can begin to discern an answer to that question in our other scripture reading this morning, Psalm 8. This psalm begins with praise to God: “O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” It then gives at least a passing reference to God as Creator of all that is: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established….” The psalm then acknowledges that God didn’t just create a universe. God created us too!

There’s a lot to unpack in Psalm 8. I’ll just say that it gives us at least three vitally important points:

 

1.      God is Creator of everything that exists, including us human beings.

2.      God is mindful of us and cares for us.

3.      God has made us God’s stewards of the earth, that part of God’s creation where we live.

 

In these three points lies the basis of the only hope we can have for the future of this world. Let me explain.

The universe doesn’t just exist. It has a Creator, a source that brought it into being. It has a ground of its being, namely, God. We don’t just exist either. That same Creator God who created the universe created us too. And not only that. God cares about us. It’s easy enough sometimes to forget that wonderful truth, but God really does care about us and for us. Human beings aren’t God’s slaves. God doesn’t control everything that happens in our world. Part of that truth is that God has delegated care of God’s good earth to us and makes us responsible for how we care for our part of God’s creation. That of course includes how we care for one another.

So how does all that create hope? It creates hope because it tells us that no matter how big a mess we’ve made of God’s world, the world still matters to God. God still is mindful of and cares for us and for all creation. With knowledge of and trust in God’s care for us and our world we can have the strength and the courage to work with everything we have available to us to clean up the mess we’ve made of things. To make the world a realm of justice for all people. To rid the world of violence. To create a world of true peace, a peace grounded in and arising from the justice for all people we have to establish on earth. To finally do what we should have been doing for years, no, decades, to stop destroying the earth with our greenhouse gases and other forms of environmental degradation.

And one more thing: We can undertake  that sacred work of building the realm of God on earth with two miraculous bits of knowledge. The first is that God will be with us caring for us, inspiring our good work, and forgiving our failures. The second is that while we cannot avoid God’s call to do the work of redeeming the world, we needn’t be concerned that none of us will live to see the full completion of that work. It is ultimately God’s work that we are to be doing. God will do some of that work through us, but God will continue to call others to that work long after all of us are gone. Sometimes we get discouraged and want to give up. But, folks, please believe this divine truth: God will never give up on God’s earth or on us.

Therein lies our hope. Therein lies the possibility that good will eventually triumph over evil. The possibility that God and God’s people will prevail in the nonviolent struggle for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. So let’s get to work, shall we? Let’s continue whatever work we have already done. Let’s undertake the work we need to do but haven’t done. We won’t see the full fruit of that work, but we can know as we do it that we are doing God’s work. We can not just hope but trust that God and God’s people will one day prevail in that struggle. May it be so. Amen.