How Is This All Right?

 

How Is This All Right?

March 13, 2023

 

First, a disclaimer. I mean no disrespect by anything I say here for the men and women who serve or have served in the US military. My father served in the US Navy aboard an aircraft carrier that took a kamikaze hit off of Okinawa in World War II. My mother did legal work for the Department of the Army during that same war. Jesus said, judge not lest ye be judged. I do not judge those who have served in the military and received an honorable discharge. I have my opinions about the morality of war and about my nation’s military-industrial complex. I have opinions about the higher ups, both military and civilian, who order our soldiers into battle. I do not judge the women and men who obey those orders, and I mean them no disrespect here.

 

Here's something that absolutely escapes me. Two nations create massive military institutions. They train everybody in those institutions in the art and science of killing. They give them the most sophisticated, technically advanced, efficient instruments of death available. Then one day these two nations, for reasons that seem adequate to them, send their institutions and instruments of death out into a field, or a desert, or a jungle, and the two sides start killing each other. Most of the people who actually do the killing convince themselves that what they do is morally acceptable though they are killing other human beings. After all, they’re wearing their country’s uniform. Their country has trained and armed them to do precisely what they’re doing. Their superior officers have ordered them to go kill. They’ve been told their whole lives long that what they’re doing isn’t just necessary, it is honorable. Everyone calls them heroes before they’ve done anything heroic. Everyone thanks them for their service. So they believe that when they kill the other side’s highly trained and equipped instruments of death they are doing a good, honorable, heroic thing. Sure. They know that they might be killed themselves as they do it. They resign themselves to that possibility and think that at least they’d get a hero’s funeral.

The huge, sophisticated, highly trained killing machines of the two nations go about killing and maiming each other until one of the killing machines can’t take it any more and surrenders. Then the two sides stop killing each other. They may then express respect for those who a short time before were enemies they were trying to kill. After all, they’re both doing the same thing for the same reasons, and professionals tend to respect other capable people in the same profession. After the passage of a long, or sometimes only a short, time, the former enemies may become friends and allies. All of us who have studied history or even just lived more than a few years have seen nations play out this scenario again and again.

Can someone tell me why humanity thinks this scenario of death and destruction is all right? Can someone tell me why we accept and support if over and over again? We accept the premature death and permanent mental and physical disability of huge numbers of our people almost as if there were no loss involved in the tragedies of war. The loved ones of those killed and maimed certainly feel a great loss, but we assuage their grief, or at least try to, by calling those who suffered and died all heroes. We call the mothers of those killed “Gold Star Mothers” as if that could somehow make up in even the smallest way for their tragic loss. We make all this killing and dying the patriotic duty of every one of us, and we revile those who resist or refuse to go along. We make conscientious objectors support the violence they abhor by making them serve as medics or in other roles in which they will not personally kill anyone but in which they support those who do kill other people. We don’t just accept all this horror. We make everyone we can participate in it or at least finance it with their tax dollars. And I just don’t get it.

War and other varieties of violence are the way of the world. They are today. They always have been. Tragically, there is no reason to believe that they won’t be far into the future. A small percentage of a nation’s population does the actual killing, and, at least when they win the war, we give them medals and victory parades and put monuments to them all over the place. Most people alive today can’t imagine living in a country with no military, and very few people actually do. The little town where I live calls itself a “Purple Heart City” in honor of its citizens wounded during military service and flies flags representing each branch of the US military in a prominent public place. War and violence are the way of the world, and all but a few of us have bought into them as though there were no reason not to.

Well, there is plenty of reason not to. The unacceptability of war was driven home to me many years ago when I was on a business trip to central Pennsylvania. I had some free time, so I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park, located where one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War had been fought. It was a bright, crisp February weekday, and I had the place nearly to myself. As I stood at the top of the bluff that had been the site of the disastrous Pickett’s Charge in the Battle of Gettysburg, it struck me in a way it never had before, that war is madness. War is mass insanity. There is no way to justify the slaughter that war produces, slaughter that both sides of a war are trained and equipped to inflict on each other. I have thought ever since that war is simply madness with no rational justification.

That experience perhaps explains why the most important part of Jesus’ teaching for me is his teaching of nonviolence. He didn’t teach passivity. He taught creative, assertive, nonviolent opposition to evil, but he rejected all use of violence. He wouldn’t let his disciples use violence in an effort to free him from Roman captivity and certain crucifixion. He said “Love your enemies.” I’ll mention again what I’ve mentioned in writing before. Years ago the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches, put out a bumper sticker that said “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them” Indeed, that is a big part of what he meant. He meant stand up for peace and justice, but always, without exception, do it nonviolently.

The Christian tradition has compromised, misinterpreted, and ignored Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence since the fourth century CE, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians have slaughtered other people, including other Christians and people of other faiths, as much as anyone else has, or more. None of that changes the truth of what Jesus taught. None of that changes the truth that violence begets more violence. None of that changes the truth that violence can’t overcome hate, only love can do that, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Jesus taught nonviolence in part, I suppose, because he knew that Jewish violence against the Romans would have disastrous consequences, as indeed it did a few decades after Jesus’ death. More importantly, he surely taught nonviolence because he knew that God is nonviolent. He knew, as scripture tells us, that God is love, and love can never be violent.

Look. I know that resisting all use of violence is extremely difficult at best in our world today. I get it when people say they have a right to self-defense. I get it when people say a nation has a right to defend itself militarily. I know that there was no way to stop Hitler other than through military force, Yet none of that makes violence moral. We may well feel ourselves compelled to resort to it in any number of different situations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt compelled to join a conspiracy to murder Hitler though he knew full well that killing is immoral. God forgives our failures to live up to God’s standard of nonviolence, but God calls us to live up to that standard nonetheless. The world will never function the way God dreams that it ought until violence becomes simply unacceptable to most people. Will that ever happen? I don’t know. I know I won’t live to see it. I also know, however, that nonviolence is God’s way. I know that nonviolence is the only way to genuine, lasting peace. Maybe someday enough people will understand that truth that war and violence really will not be all right. May it be so.

A Reply to Timothy J. Keller

 

A Reply to Timothy J. Keller

March 10, 2023

 

My wife just bought me a copy of Eric Metaxas’ book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.[1] The book includes a very brief forward by Timothy J. Keller.[2] Keller is a best-selling author and was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. He is Chairman and Co-Founder of Redeemer City to City, an organization that works on new church starts. His forward to Metaxa’s book is less than two pages long. In it Keller makes some theological points with which I strongly disagree. I want here to set out what Keller says and to explain why I so disagree with the theology he presents.

Keller first asks how it was possible for the German church to capitulate to Hitler, as most German churches did in the 1930s. His answer to that question is “that the true gospel, summed up by Bonhoeffer as costly grace, had been lost.” This loss led to two developments Keller considers to have been negative. One is what he calls “formalism.” He says that this formalism “meant going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live.” He calls this formalism cheap grace. The other bad consequence is what Keller calls “legalism,” which he defines as “salvation by law and good works.” It meant “that God loves you because you have pulled yourself together and are trying to live a good, disciplined life.”

Keller then develops these thoughts this way:

 

Both of these impulses made it possible for Hitler to come to power. The formalists in Germany may have seen things that bothered them, but saw no need to sacrifice their safety to stand up to them. Legalists responded by having pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies. But as one, Germany lost hold of the brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded—‘We are saved by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone.’ That is, we are saved, not by anything we do but by grace. Yet if we have truly understood and believed the gospel, it will change what we do and how we live.”[3]

 

Keller is able to give only the briefest statement of his theology in this Foreword of course. Since I don’t know his work except for this very short piece, I can only assume certain things about his theology that what he says in the Foreword suggests. He seems to accept the classical theory of atonement. He says: “But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially  as we serve others.”

Cheap grace is his bête noir. He writes: “Anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life. That’s the gospel, not salvation by law or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.” Then comes one of Keller’s most important and most problematic statements:

 

[M]any Christians want to talk only about God’s love and acceptance. They don’t like talking about Jesus’ death on the cross to satisfy divine wrath and justice. Some even call it ‘divine child abuse.’ Yet if they are not careful, they run the risk of falling into the belief in ‘cheap grace’—a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just loves and accepts us as we are. That will never change anyone’s life.[4]

 

In his Foreword, Keller asserts a traditional Christian theology that I have preached, taught, and written against for many, many years. He simply dismisses the notion that God loves and accepts everyone. I’ve said many times that I cannot understand or accept God any other way. Keller’s theology unavoidably leads to the conclusion that God saves some people and doesn’t save others. Insisting that God loves and accepts only some unavoidably makes God far too human, far too small. The way of the world is to require that a person do something (or refrain from doing something, which amounts to the same thing) in order to receive some reward or compensation. Making God’s grace less than universal reduces God to that human way of operating. Yet God infinitely transcends the human. As we read at Isaiah 55:8-9, God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.

The temptation to make God too much like us is strong. We give in to it frequently, but that we do is a theological mistake with destructive consequences. It divides people into the ins and the outs, the saved and the condemned, the loved and the damned. If there is one thing the world does not need today it is more division. Division invariably creates strife, and human strife almost always becomes violent. We do a fine job of dividing people into antagonistic groups on our own. We don’t need God dividing us even more.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did indeed criticize what he called cheap grace. As I understand it, Bonhoeffer insisted that true grace is not cheap because it cost a man his life. Jesus Christ suffered and died to bring God’s grace to us. Grace also costs another human life. It costs the life of the faithful Christian. When we truly grasp God’s amazing grace, we will give up the old ways of our life, the ways of judgment, antagonism, and violence. We will live into God’s ways of love, reconciliation, and peace. Keller thinks that a grace that does not distinguish between those who are in it and those who are out of it cannot produce that transformation. He’s wrong about that, something I’ll discuss further anon.

Keller ties two things together that don’t necessarily go together at all. One of them is talking about Jesus’ death on the cross. The other is what Keller calls “divine wrath and justice.” It is true that progressive Christians don’t like talking about Jesus’ crucifixion. Though to me it is the most important service of the year, few of them attend Good Friday services.[5] Crucifixion is ugly. Suffering and death are ugly. Of course it is more pleasant to talk about resurrection, about new life, and about God conquering death. Far too many Christians (and one is too many) never enter into or seriously contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death.

All of that, however, is not true of all of us who understand the universality of God’s grace. Keller has either never heard of theology of the cross, an alternative soteriology to that of the classical theory of atonement, or has considered it and rejected it. The cross is absolutely central to that soteriology, about which I have written at length elsewhere. Theology of the cross is a demonstration soteriology. It says that in the life, suffering, and death of Jesus, God has demonstrated to us how God relates to human life. In Jesus God entered into the worst that human life can bring, unjust suffering and state-ordered murder. We see that God does not intervene in the world to stop bad things from happening. Rather, God is present in solidarity with us in everything that happens in our lives. In the good things, yes. More importantly, in the bad things. In Jesus on the cross theology of the cross sees the divine paradox of God’s presence even in the human experience of the absence of God.

Keller is both right and wrong when he says, or at least implies, that the theology I present here and elsewhere says that it doesn’t matter much how we live. How we live has nothing to do with the presence of God’s grace. God’s grace is there always, everywhere, and for everyone. We all live in it. Our problem isn’t that we don’t have God’s grace, our problem is that we don’t know that we do. How we live does, however, have a lot to do with the authenticity of our Christian faith. If we really know that we live in God’s universal, totally unconditional grace, we will respond. There are countless ways we can respond. I responded by going to seminary (although it wasn’t entirely clear to me at the time that that was what I was doing). The specifics of how we respond don’t matter. We all are at different stages of life. We all have our own gifts and shortcomings. What matters is that we do what we can to express God’s love in the world. That doesn’t matter because we’re damned if we don’t. We aren’t. It matters because God calls us to respond to love with love. We gain satisfaction, contentment, and peace when we do. That’s why it matters.

Theology of the cross does not tie the cross to divine wrath and justice the way Keller does. God’s wrath never enters into God’s way of relating to creation. God cares about justice, but not justice for God as it appears in the classic statement of classical atonement theory, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo from the early twelfth century CE. God cares about distributive justice for God’s people, especially the ones Jesus calls “the least of these.” Jesus does not suffer and die on the cross to satisfy God’s wrath. Nor does he suffer and die on the cross to pay God a price for human sin. Jesus was not any kind of sacrifice. Indeed, he rejected the whole idea of sacrifice as what God wants from us, so we really shouldn’t be turning him into one. What Keller’s traditional theology says God did in Jesus is truly divine child abuse. I, and a great many of us today, cannot and will not love a God who is a child abuser, indeed, a child killer, which is what the classical theory of atonement makes of God.

Though he doesn’t use these terms, Keller contends that Christian universalism and theology of the cross do not have the power to transform human lives. About that he could not be more wrong. My theology has the power to transform lives, but it does it in a different way and for a different reason than does classical atonement theory. Classical atonement theory works to transform lives through fear. Adherents of that theology strive to act in Christ-like ways because they fear eternal damnation if they do not. Once when I was teaching universalism a parishioner of mine said, “Tom, you’ve taken away every reason to be good!”

Well, no I hadn’t. I had however changed the reason to be good. My theology does not frighten people into proper behavior. Rather, when we really know the free gift of God’s grace and the power of that grace in our lives, we respond not with fear but with gratitude. We respond to God’s unconditional love for us with our own love for God and for God’s people. We make our love as unconditional as we possibly can. Not love as a sappy emotion. Rather, sacrificial love, something Keller says my theology cannot create. My theology does create the drive to live into such love, but it doesn’t do it by frightening people into behaving themselves. It grounds the Christian life not in fear but in love. Its doing so makes the Christian life much more Christ-like than is a life grounded in fear.

I haven’t read Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer yet. I know of Bonhoeffers concept of cheap grace. I know a little bit about his contention that people of faith must now learn to live without God, though I don’t understand that contention at all. Perhaps I will after I read this book. I have no idea what Metaxas’ theology is or even if he has one, so I make no comment on it. Keller gives us at least hints at his traditional Presbyterian theology of sacrificial atonement. I disagree with that theology profoundly. I’ve presented some of the reasons for my disagreement here. I mean none of it personally. I do not know Rev. Keller. Faithful Christians can disagree about theology and still acknowledge one another as faithful Christians. I have nothing against Keller personally. I do have a lot against what appears to be his theology. Perhaps you do too.

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[1] Metaxas, Eric, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010).

[2] The Foreword is on pages xv and xvi.

[3] I don’t know that Keller’s formalism and legalism are “urges,” but never mind. Also, I have no idea what he means by “pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies,” but his meaning there doesn’t matter for my purposes here.

[4] I have no idea what Keller means by “un-holy God.”

[5] Years ago I preached a Good Friday sermon on theology of the cross, which I discuss below. Afterwards, a man came up to me and said that for the first time in his life he felt like wearing a cross. Things like that make all the work we do as pastors worth the time and effort we put into it.

This Grace in Which we Stand

 

This Grace in Which We Stand

March 6, 2023

 

At Romans 5:2 St. Paul refers to “this grace in which we stand.” With Paul it is never quite clear, to me at least, whether we have to do anything to acquire God’s grace or not. Sometimes he seems to say yes, we have to have faith. Other times he seems to say God’s grace is always there for everyone. Paul, it seems to me, lands on both sides of what I believe to be a defining issue in American Christianity: Do we have to do something in order to be saved or do we not? There is no question that an enormous majority of Christians will answer that question, “Yes, we do. There’s something each of us has to do in order to be saved.” For most Christians the thing they think they must do in order to be saved is believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We so often hear Christians asking people, “When were you saved? By which they mean when did you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. A late, great friend and mentor in ministry of mine once told me he answered the question of when he was saved by saying “About two thousand years ago.” It’s about the best answer to that question I’ve ever heard. I once had a few parishioners mad at me because, as they put it, I never told them what they had to do to be saved. Those who ask that question, and those who get mad at their pastor for that reason, all make the same assumption. We must do something in order to be saved. If we don’t do whatever it is we must do in order to be saved, we won’t be saved. Christians traditionally have said that if you aren’t saved by doing whatever it is they say you have to do, your soul will spend eternity in the agonies of hell.

Well, there’s a reason I didn’t tell those parishioners of mine what they had to do to be saved. I didn’t tell them that because they didn’t have to do anything. I’m sure I said words to that effect dozens of times at least in sermons in the three years I was pastor of that church, but these folks didn’t grasp the truth that they didn’t have to do anything. Like most Christians, they surely had been told their whole lives that they had to do something, probably in believe in Jesus Christ, in order to avoid spending eternity in hell. Unfortunately, nay tragically, that has been Christianity’s main message from the beginning of the faith two thousand years ago.

Folks, it just isn’t true. Each and every person who has ever lived has stood completely in God’s grace their entire lives. Unless God is not a God of grace, it has to be that way. Scripture tells us that God is love. 1 John 4:8. The love that God is must surpass human love absolutely. If it doesn’t, it is human love not divine love. God’s grace is God’s love, which is God’s very essence, poured out endlessly on all of creation. We humans live our lives always surrounded by God’s love, God’s grace. It is like the air we breathe. It is to us as water is to fish. We live in it. We’re surrounded by it. We can’t and never do live without it. It even permeates our very being. Our souls are filled with it. They never lose it. Mystics and contemplatives of all faith traditions come to that truth. It is the ground of our being. We are never, ever, separated from it.

In his book What the Mystics Know the great Christian sage Richard Rohr says that we are spiritually starving in the midst of plenty. We just don’t get it that, as Rohr says, “We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God.” If we are already totally in the presence of God, and we are, then we are already totally in God’s grace because God is love. God is therefore also grace. Rohr also tells us what our problem really is. He follows his words about our being in the presence of God by saying, “What’s absent is awareness.” Joseph Campbell says, metaphorically of course, that we don’t see the spiritual dimension of reality because we have scales over our eyes. God and God’s grace are around and within us every moment of our lives, but we just don’t see them.

Which, when you think about it, makes no sense. If God is always everywhere, even inside of us, how can we not see God present everywhere? Put another way, just what are those scales we have over our eyes? I believe that there are at least two causes of the spiritual blindness from which so many of us individually and our culture collectively suffer. One is the philosophical materialism of so-called Western culture. The way most people of Western culture think has been strongly conditioned by Enlightenment rationalism and the Scientific Revolution. Reason alone leads to the conclusion that only the material, that is, the physical, is real. That’s why Karl Marx preached dialectical materialism. Science addresses questions about physical reality brilliantly and convincingly. These two related developments in Western culture, rationalism and science, have reduced truth to fact for nearly everyone in our context. Even most people who self-identify as people of faith believe that truth consists only of facts.

Yet the rationalism and science that lead us to so many facts are incommensurate with spiritual reality. To understand the spiritual as mere fact is badly to misunderstand the spiritual. The spiritual is not less than factual. It is so much more than factual. Most people in our culture just dismiss the spiritual as irrational, unscientific, and therefor not real. We aren’t likely to experience the reality of something we deny is real. That denial is one of the scales we have over our eyes.

The other is the way the supposed teachers of Christianity have told people for centuries that God’s not mostly down here with us. Rather, God is mostly up there in heaven staring down at us. These authorities have mostly told people that God is angry and wrathful. You’d better believe in “Him” they say, this God always being masculine, or He’s gonna get you but good. And don’t look around here for Him. Look up. Way up. To a different level of existence and certainly not down here with us. We aren’t likely to experience the presence of something or someone we don’t believe is here to be experienced. The conviction that God is there not here is another of the opaque scales over our eyes.

Well folks, the spiritual, that is, God, is real and really is present all around us. Some of us know that truth because we have had personal encounters with God. I know I have. We can all know it because we can see that every human culture there has ever been, even, at least to some limited extent, ours, has known the reality of the spiritual. They have all sought to live connected to it through a system of symbols and myths, in other words, through a religion. Human beings over the millennia and across cultures haven’t all, independently, just made up a spiritual dimension of reality. They have experienced it, or at least some of them have. They have experienced the reality we call God because God is real and God is here. We believe that God is there too, but what’s important is that God is definitely here.

Here, and full of love and grace. Nothing but love and grace. And that means we don’t have to do anything to be saved because we already are. We are saved not because of anything we’ve done or not done or believed or not believed. We are saved because God loves what God has created. God relates to what She has created not in judgment and wrath but in love and grace. God, who is love, is not about to damn anyone because God loves everyone. So do we have to do anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to avoid doing anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have not to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved.

The function of religion is not to create anything for anyone that wasn’t already there. Faith does not create a salvation that wasn’t already there. Religion’s function is not to create, it is to reveal what is already there. There always and everywhere. And it is to give us a way to live into God’s amazing, omnipresent Grace. We do not stand in God’s judgment. None of us does. We stand in God’s grace. Every one of us does. We do indeed, to use Paul’s phrase, stand in grace. The world will be a much better place when masses of people realize that divine truth.

On the Love of Enemies: A September 11 Meditation

 A former parishioner of mine just sent me this text of a meditation I gave on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. I read it, and I think it isn't bad. So here it is.

On the Love of Enemies: A September 11 Meditation
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2011

On September 11, 2001, extremists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam but who were actually betraying several core principles of Islam attacked the United States of America. They brought down the two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York. They crashed an airplane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Another plane they had hijacked, that they apparently intended to crash into either the Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers overpowered the terrorists. The United States responded with a massive military invasion of Afghanistan, the country whose Islamist government we believed (with some but not solid justification) had harbored the terrorists as they planned and trained for their breathtaking act of terrorism. The United States then responded further with a massive military invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today, ten years later, American troops are still engaged in combat in those two countries, especially in Afghanistan, where we are bogged down in an unwinnable war that has no end in sight. The United States responded by passing laws and adopting supposed security measures that severely restrict the valued civil liberties of all Americans.

On July 22, 2011, a crazed terrorist set off a bomb outside the office of the Prime Minister in Oslo, the capital of Norway. A few hours later he opened fire and killed 69 people at a youth camp run by the ruling political party of Norway. The Norwegian Prime Minister responded by saying that Norway would react to the attack by being more loving and more democratic. He apparently meant that strengthening the values that the terrorist hated would be the surest way to punish that terrorist.

 

St. Paul said “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:20-21 By saying we would heap burning coals on the heads of our enemies by loving them he surely meant that returning good for evil is the surest way to lead the evildoers to repentance. Jesus said “Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Matthew 5:38-42 He also said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:44 He meant do not resist evil with more evil. Do not resist evil with violence, but resist evil with creative, assertive measures of nonviolence.

 

Our country suffered a terrible wrong on September 11, 2001. Of that there is no doubt. Nothing we say here today is intended in any way to excuse what those terrorists did. They committed a monstrous crime against humanity for which there is no conceivable justification. That truth is undeniable. Yet here’s another undeniable truth. We had no control over what people filled with hate and bad theology did. We did have, and we do have, control over how we respond to what they did. And, my friends, we responded very badly to what they did. We repaid violence with violence. We repaid hatred with hatred. We responded to an attack on our way of life by making changes to that way of life through measures like the so-called Patriot Act and in other ways that have diminished our freedom and handed the terrorists a victory they could never win on their own. Our invasions of two Muslim countries fed the terrorists’ cause of fanning hatred of our country and created more terrorists than it eliminated.

 

I don’t know if the Prime Minister of Norway is a Christian, but his response to the terrorist attack on his country was far more Christian than was, and is, our response to the terrorist attack on ours. Yes, the attack on us killed a lot more people than the attack in Norway, but then we’re a much bigger country than Norway. Jesus calls us to respond to hatred with love. We didn’t do that. Jesus calls us to love our enemies. We don’t do that. The Church of the Brethren puts out a bumper sticker that reads: “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” It seems such an obvious truth, but it is one we Americans have never learned.

 

Today we remember the terrible events of ten years ago. We remember the pain, the fear, and the anger that we felt. We remember the lives that were lost, and we grieve with the families whose innocent loved ones died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We remember and give thanks for the countless acts of heroism of that day. We remember and give thanks especially for the members of the New York City Fire and Police Departments who rushed into those blazing buildings trying to save lives and who lost their lives because they did. We remember and give thanks for the heroism of the airplane passengers whose bravery prevented another completed attack on another symbol of our nation. We remember and give thanks for the service of the American men and women who chose to respond to the terrible events of that day by serving in the American military. The decisions on how to use them were not theirs, and so many of them serve out of a true sense of loyalty to their country.

 

As we remember the terrible events of that day we remember the power of forgiveness. That day so demonstrates the need for forgiveness. Forgiveness for those whose hearts are so filled with hatred that they would do such terrible things. Forgiveness for ourselves and our nation for the ways in which our actions contributed to and created not a justification for that hatred but a pretext, a rationalization for it. Forgiveness for the ways in which we have perpetuated violence in the years since that violent day.

 

On that terrible day we suffered an act of extreme violence. And we responded to that violence with more violence. Far more people have died in the violent aftermath of 9/11 than died on that dreadful day. More Americans. More Iraqis. More Afghanis. Our violence has not made us safer. It has merely perpetuated the hatred that led to those acts of terrorism. Our great faith tradition teaches that nonviolence is God’s way and must be our way. God’s dream is of that day when we shall beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, when nation shall not lift up arms against nation, and we shall learn war no more. If that day is ever to come someone must break the cycle of violence. Someone must respond to hatred with love.

 

We are the most powerful nation on earth by far, and that means that we are the ones who must break the cycle of violence. We can’t leave it up to others. So today let us remember. Let us grieve. Let us celebrate the heroes of that day. But mostly let us learn. Let us learn that violence only begets more violence. Let us at long last learn the lesson that Jesus taught so long ago. Love your enemies. It is the only way to peace. Amen.

 

Being On Call

 

Being On Call

March 3, 2023

 

Many people of faith believe that, at some time in their lives, they have heard a call from God for them to do something they weren’t doing when they heard the call. God calls people to a great many different kinds of activity. Perhaps it’s a call to help a particular person. Or to work for some nonprofit agency on an important cause. Or to take up a particular profession. Or to go to seminary. Or to do a great many other things as well. People have attributed any number of things they’ve done to a call from God. I’ve done so myself. Yet the understanding that God is calling you to do something raises a lot of questions. They include, how do you know it is God calling and not just your ego trying to justify your doing something you want to do anyway? Have you heard a voice? Or had a dream? Or just had a sense you couldn’t explain but of which you have been as sure as you have ever been sure of anything? How does what you think God is calling you to do relate to you and your life as they are now? Does the thing you think you’re being called to do make sense to you? It’s not necessarily that there are right and wrong answers to these questions. They do however point to a truth about calls from God The notion of divine call is unavoidably complex even if the person claiming to hear the call doesn’t realize the complexity of what is happening.

There is a solid biblical foundation for the notion of God calling specific people to specific tasks. Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah all have call stories. Abraham’s is the tersest. We read that the Lord, that is, the Hebrew God Yahweh, “said to Abram [later on called Abraham], ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Genesis 12:1. God promises Abraham that if he does God will make of him “a great nation.” Genesis 12:2. So Abraham “went as the Lord had told him….”

That’s all Genesis tells us about Abraham’s call, but it’s not hard to imagine how more of the story would go if Genesis told it. There are questions about this call we’d like to have answered, but Genesis doesn’t even ask them. Our text says that the Lord “said” to Abraham to pack up and go. Does that mean Abraham heard a human-like voice speaking to him? Or, did he just have an inner sense that God was calling him to go, so he expressed that sense by saying the Lord “said?” Was the call really from God, or was it just Abraham’s ego wanting to get out of Haran to find something new? Did he argue with God about the call? The text doesn’t say he did, but prophets often did when they heard God’s call. All of these are valid questions that Genesis doesn’t answer. They also are questions many of us who believe God has called us have asked. Let me use my own call story as an example.

Back in 1994 I was a practicing attorney, but I wasn’t doing well at it. I was burning out though I didn’t realize it at the time. One day I did a psychological exercise I knew about to see if I could get some clarity about what was going on with me and the practice of law. I asked myself why I was having so much trouble practicing law. As I did that exercise, a voice either completely outside of me or from deep, deep within me said, “You’re not a lawyer!” I was surprised to say the least. I said of course I’m a lawyer. I am, after all, sitting here in my law office. The voice said again, “You’re not a lawyer!” I thought that voice, whatever it was, was nuts. Still, I asked, “OK. What am I?” Immediately the voice said, “You’re a preacher!” At that point I knew the voice was nuts, so I ended the exercise. I know now but did not know then that this experience was the beginning of God’s call to me to quit law and go into ministry.

In the spring of 1997 I learned that the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry had worked with representatives of several Protestant denominations, including mine, to set up something called the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies as a way for that Roman Catholic university to train Protestants like me for ministry. We would be able to earn a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree without having to travel to Berkeley, California, or Vancouver, British Columbia, which were the closest alternatives at the time. We’d never been able to do that before.

I knew I had to go. I just knew I had to do it. I was still miserable trying to practice law, but I had no idea why I had to go get an MDiv degree. It didn’t make a lick of sense. I didn’t, and don’t, know how I knew, but I knew. I didn’t hear a voice speaking words to me. I hadn’t a clue why I should earn an MDiv or what I would do with one once I earned it. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. Yet it all felt like more than a call. It felt like I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it, and I did. I entered the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry in the fall of 1997. I got my MDiv at the end of 2000. I got my first call as a parish pastor in March 2002. I was ordained to the ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ in June of that year. After I started my work as a pastor my wife (now sadly passed away) said to me, “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.”

There are several things about this call story of mine that are common to many call stories, and a few that aren’t. I heard a voice. It was in my head not my ears, but I heard a voice. I thought that what the voice said was crazy, so I ignored it. For three years I ignored it. After those three years I knew I had to go to seminary. I just knew. When I finally did what I knew I had to do, I became who I really am.

The call was for me to do something that made no sense. I’d already spent more years in post-graduate studies than most anyone I’ve ever met what with my PhD in history and my JD degree. I had a profession, though I was struggling mightily with it. I was a person of faith of a sort, I guess. I had read a lot of good Christian theology. I had given one sermon at the church I attended, filling in for the pastor one Sunday when he was away. It was well received, but it didn’t lead to anything. I’d never thought of myself as a cleric.

It made no sense. Yet along the way, after I said yes, God did some things for me that really helped me out. When I entered seminary I closed my law office. I knew I would need a parttime job while I was in school. One day I looked in the help wanted ads in the Seattle Times. I knew the experts say that’s not how you find a job, but I looked anyway. There I found a listing for a halftime attorney to work with a legal services agency. I applied. It turned out to be the Legal Action Center, an agency of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. The pay wasn’t great, but the job came with full medical coverage and even a small retirement benefit. I got the job. And I learned after I took the job that because I worked at least halftime for a Catholic agency, I would get at 25% reduction in my tuition at Seattle University. I don’t think the Legal Action Center ever expected to hire an attorney who had been a senior litigation associate at the fourth largest law firm in the country like I once had been. I sure never expected to find such a perfect job. We represented low income tenants in eviction cases. I was finally doing law that felt worth doing. I still thank God for that job that fell into my lap twenty-six years ago. That job is the closest thing I’ve ever had in my life to proof of divine providence.

My getting that job probably isn’t typical of most call stories. That the call made absolutely no sense to me is. God’s calls frequently make no sense to the people God is calling. People usually resist accepting the call. In the new student orientation I went to at the School of Theology and Ministry it became a joke how many people said, “God called, and I hung up.” Moses tried to get out of his call. He said I can’t speak well. Exodus 4:10. Jeremiah resisted too. He said he was only a boy and therefore couldn’t speak well. Jeremiah 1:4. Yet Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and those fellow students of mine eventually said yes. They conceded the point and followed God’s call. So did I. Perhaps you too have heard a call from God and are resisting accepting it. Don’t despair. You’re in good company.

There are some questions we all need to ask when we think we’re receiving a call from God. They include: Is the thing I think God is calling me to something I’ve always wanted to do? Did I want to do it when I first heard the call? Do I want to do it now? Sometimes the answers to those questions can be yes, and the call can still be authentic. I had a parishioner who had always wanted to be a high school science teacher, but she’d never become one. She was sure God was calling her to that sacred work, and, after working with her a bit, so was I. She resisted her call harder than anyone else I’ve ever known. Finally she gave in, got her Master of Teaching degree, and has now been a high school science teacher for many years. Like I did, she became who she really is only after she accepted God’s call.

Far more often, however, our answers to those questions about wanting to do what God is calling us to do are going to be no. It seems that most of the time God calls people to situations and work they had never thought of doing on their own. Situations and work they had never thought they wanted to do and couldn’t imagine doing. That was true for Moses and Jeremiah. It was true for me too. We all said no. God kept saying yes. God was right. God knows us better than we know ourselves. When God calls, God is always right.

There is at least one great danger we face when we think we are hearing a call from God. It is the risk that what we’re hearing isn’t God at all. Sometimes people think a call is from God when it really is only a call from their ego. Discerning the authenticity of a divine call isn’t easy. There are some things you can do to help. Pray. A lot. Talk to your pastor if you have one. Get one and talk to them if you don’t. Talk with sympathetic friends and family members. Don’t try to make a final decision about a call on your own. Discussing the call with others who will actually listen to you and not jump to quick conclusions can only help.

So if you think you’re hearing a call from God that makes no sense, don’t let that reaction of yours lead you to shut God out. Keep listening. Keep praying. Keep discerning. God may indeed be calling you to something that makes no sense to you but makes perfect sense to God. God’s always right, of course. If what you’re hearing is an authentic call from God, God will be right about you too. If that call is authentic, you’ll be right when you stop saying no and finally yes. I pray that those of you who are hearing a call from God but resisting it will find the wisdom and the courage to say yes at last.