Nor Anything Else

 

Nor Anything Else

for

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Bellevue, Washington

July 30, 2023

 

Scripture: Romans 8:38-39

 

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 one of the things I love about church is the way it can be a refuge, a shelter in a world that often seems to be filled with nothing but storms. Storms of violence. Storms of hate. Storms of injustice. Storms of environmental degradation. The world can and, frankly, usually does, seem simply overwhelming in the ways it falls short of Jesus’ vision of the realm of God. The ways it falls short of a world of peace and of justice attained through creative nonviolence that would follow if we all truly lived the ways of nonviolence and justice for each and every one of God’s people—and that truly is every single human being anywhere and everywhere.

I can’t possibly mention every way in which our world falls short of the realm of god. After all, we don’t have all afternoon here, but here are a few of them. In our country today hatred and violence are rearing their ugly heads in ways they haven’t, publicly at least, in a long time. We Americans seem to think that violence is the way to solve problems. Personal problems and world problems. White Christian nationalism is perverting our sacred Christian faith into an instrument of hatred and oppression. The largest Protestant denomination in our country, the Southern Baptist Convention, disparages, diminishes, indeed even dehumanizes women with its policies of male domination in the church, the home, and the world. People calling themselves Christians call for, and indeed enact, hateful legislation against the bodily autonomy of women and against God’s people of alternate gender identity and expression. Scientists have been warning us for decades about the perils of climate change. Yet we’ve sat on our hands and done nowhere near enough to address the climate crisis we’ve helped create. And now the world is paying the price of our inaction.

So I have to say that there are an awful lot of people in the world I find it impossible to love. And I am sorely tempted to think that God doesn’t love those people either. I mean, how can God love people who commit horrific acts of violence against others of God’s people? How can God love people whose hearts are filled with hate not with love? How can God love people who degrade God’s good earth through their greed and unconcern for others? How can God love Vladimir Putin? Left to my own devices I would never be able to figure out how God could do that.

Indeed, left to my own devices, I couldn’t even figure out how God could love even me. I’m far from the worst person who ever lived. All of you are far from the worst people who ever lived. In fact, we’re all good people who try to do our best in the world. But none of us is perfect. We’ve all made mistakes. I know I sure have. I think Paul was right when he said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.

But here’s the great good news: We people of faith are never left to our own devices. We have the Gospel of Jesus Christ as our aide, our guide, our backup in everything we do. There are many facets to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but they all come down to one thing. They all boil down to love. The love of God for God’s creation. The love of God for every one of God’s people—and all people are God’s people. The love that we see made human in Jesus Christ. The love Jesus calls us to show for each and every other person and even for ourselves. The love of God that truly does pass all human understanding.

Now, I know that I certainly have my favorite Bible passages. Perhaps you have yours too. Here’s one of mine. It’s Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my says, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” It’s never right to reduce God to a human way of being. God’s just a whole lot bigger than that. God transcends our human ways of doing things absolutely. I think far too many of us forget that truth far too often.

And there’s one more biblical passage that means more to me than do any others. It is for me the Gospel in a nutshell. Everything else flows from it. Everything else is commentary. We’ve already heard that passage this morning. It’s Romans 8:38-39. Here it is again:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Amen! Was it providence that my favorite passage in the Bible was in the lectionary for this morning? Who knows. In any event, this passage is Paul at his finest.

But I have to ask myself, and I have to ask you: Do we really understand these verses? Do we really understand how radical they are? They say that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God, and we have to understand Paul’s “us” as meaning everyone who ever was, is, or ever will be. Can anyone really believe that nothing in all creation can separate anyone from the love of God? I mean, just think of that parade of horribles with which I began this sermon. None of that separates anyone from the love of God? Really?

The question arises on a personal level for most of us too. We all make mistakes. At some point in their lives everyone does things they should not have done and not done things they should have done. We’ve all said things we should not have said and not said things we should have said. Can we really believe that God loves us anyway? I mean, I can’t say I always love myself all that much. It’s easy to think that God feels the same about me as I sometimes feel about myself, and love does not always describe that feeling. Can Paul really be right when he says that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God?

Well, yes he can; but how he can probably needs some explaining. For us humans, love is usually (though mercifully perhaps not always) conditional. We may fall in love, but we can also fall out of love. Almost all of our human relationships are reciprocal. In the musical Chicago the character Mama Morton sings a song in which she says, “Got a lit tle motto. Always sees me through. You do one for Mama, she’ll do one for you.” And there is of course there the necessary implication that if you don’t do one for Mama, she won’t do one for you. That’s how it is with us humans almost all the time. Doesn’t God function the same way? When we screw up, when we sin, doesn’t God feel something toward us other than love? How can God possibly love absolutely every human being who has ever lived or ever will no matter what like Paul says God does?

To answer that question I want to go back to that favorite Bible passage of mine that I gave you a minute ago, Isaiah 55:8-9. There the prophet has God saying “my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways. My thoughts and ways are as much higher than yours as the heavens are higher than the earth.” One of the most common mistakes Christians (and I suppose others) make about God is that we make God too small. We make God too human. Of course we can relate to God person to person, and I certainly hope that all of us do. But it is true at the same time that God utterly transcends our ways of being human. We are finite. God is infinite. Our love is finite. God’s is infinite. Our love, mostly at least, is conditional. God’s is perfectly unconditional.

It has to be unconditional because God utterly transcends our ways of being. The great good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that no matter what you may have done wrong in your life, God loves you unconditionally. No matter what you may do wrong in the future, God will love you unconditionally. We all know the tragedy of the way Christians have told some people that God doesn’t love them because of some aspect of their humanity. Perhaps some people claiming to be Christians have told you that God doesn’t love you because you’re gay, or divorced, or have doubts about your faith, or for some other alleged reason.

Well, folks that just isn’t true. I don’t mean to suggest that God loves you despite anything about your humanity or your life. Not at all. “Despite” has nothing to do with it. God loves you absolutely. Unconditionally. No matter what. Why? Because each one of you is a beloved child of God. So am I, hard as I sometimes find that to believe. Everyone is. Always. No matter what. God can love absolutely everyone unconditionally precisely because God is so much more than human, so far above our petty human ways of being.

And, my friends, that is the best news there ever was or ever could be. We are all fallible, mortal creatures. There’s no way we can earn God’s love. Saints of the Christian tradition have known that truth for millennia. The great good news is that we don’t have to.  God’s love is always there for every one of us. God is always there with us whether we’re aware of God being there with us or not. God is always there with us loving us in a way that simply transcends human understanding. God is always there with us, and God can be our rock and our solace when we are in despair, in deep grief, or in any other human emotion or situation.

Our problem is never that God isn’t there. Our problem is often that we don’t open ourselves to God’s loving, healing, saving presence with us. We don’t turn to God for the help God is there to give us. Sometimes we’re so convinced that we don’t deserve God’s love that we can’t believe that God loves us. We’re wrong about that, and that’s our failure not God’s.

Now, God’s unconditional love for us doesn’t mean it’s OK for us to go do just whatever we want without worrying about whether it’s right or wrong. See, once we really get it how much God loves us and everyone else, we can do nothing but respond to God’s love with love. At the very least, we can try to do that anyway. God forgives human sin, but human sin still hurts God. It still disappoints God. How can we, whom God loves so much, want to do anything to hurt and disappoint God? Paul puts it this way: “How can we who have died to sin go on living in it?” Romans 6:2. The answer is: We can’t, or at least we’ll do everything we can not to. God’s love is not permission to do whatever we want. It is a call to live as best we can the way we know God wants us to live.

Neither does it mean that a church has to include absolutely anyone. Christian churches are Christian. God loves people who aren’t Christian and calls us to love them too. But a Christian church has every right to remain Christian and not include people who adhere to some other faith or to no faith at all. God loves people who disrupt the working of a church and calls us to love them too. But that doesn’t mean a church has no right to insure the safety of its members and the effective functioning of its various expressions. So once again, God loving everyone doesn’t mean anything goes.

So, friends, the next time life gets tough (and if it hasn’t been or isn’t now, it will be sometime), let’s do what the great Joseph Campbell suggested we do. Take the scales from our eyes. Open ourselves to the reality of God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us, God’s love of us no matter what. Let us open ourselves to God’s infinite, unconditional love for each and every one of us, and for everyone else, personally, just as we are, no matter what we’re doing or what’s happening in our lives. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Thanks be to God! Amen.

On Living With Mystery

 On Living With Mystery

From Liberating Christianity, Revised Edition

 

I was just rereading my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition. I read this paragraph. My own writing sometimes surprises me with how good I think it is. That’s how I reacted to this paragraph, so I share it here.

 

The most profound, the truest varieties of religious experience do not make that error. They live not with dead form but with living mystery. They live not with smug certainty but in awe before the grandeur and enormity of God, knowing all the while that that grandeur and enormity eternally transcend all human knowing. They know that we can and are called to live with wonder and humility before and with that which we can never fully understand but toward which we are inexorably drawn and with which our souls long to connect. Mere facts do not draw us. Longing to connect with dead facts is not part of being human. Transcendent mystery draws us. Longing to connect with spiritual reality that is so much more than fact inheres in our very nature as created beings. It is not possible for us finite creatures ultimately to know the fullness of God. It is possible for us to allow symbol and myth to draw us into the wonder, majesty, and mystery of God. To live in wonder and awe before the ultimately unknowable God is to become more fully who God created us to be, mortal creatures whose fullness lies in connection with the immortal. We are finite beings created to live intimately with ultimate being. Mere fact will never make us who we really are. Understanding God as so much more than mere fact can. The mythic and symbolic understanding of the faith therefore has not only the potential to save the faith for non-Christians. It has the potential to save the faith even for a great many Christians. It can allow those Christians to give up untenable literalist positions without giving up their faith

 

If We're So Great, Why?

 

If We’re So Great, Why?

July 7, 2023

 

So we’ve just passed another July 4, America’s national holiday. Of course there was all of the usual Fourth of July stuff, fireworks mostly, but also a great deal of proclaiming that this is the best country in the world. All of it reminded me of an incident that took place in 1969 in Stuttgart, Germany. I was part of a new student exchange program between three Oregon universities and the University of Stuttgart. I lived in a foreign students dorm. For a time one of my roommates was from Columbia. He didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish; but we communicated quite well in German. One day he introduced me to a friend of his from Peru. Of course, they both spoke Spanish as their native language, but the common language the three of us had was German. My roommate introduced me as his roommate, then he said: “Er ist Amerikaner, hat sich aber entschuldigt”—He is an American, but he’s apologized.”

I had never actually apologized for being American, but I think one young man from South America introducing an American to another young man from South America that way says something very important about the United States of America, and I don’t think what it says has changed much in the many years since 1969. Why would these young men think being an American was something for which one had to apologize? The only conceivable reason is that from their perspective the United States of America was not something for anyone to be proud of. Quite the contrary. You apologize for making a mistake. You apologize for having done something wrong. These two young men clearly thought the United States had done enough wrong that I, as an American, really should apologize for it.

It's not hard to understand why people from South America (or several other parts of the world for that matter) would think about our country that way. Our history of actions in South America is indeed shameful. Mostly what we’ve done there is exploit the people and the land for our own economic benefit. To secure that economic benefit we have supported ruthless, dictatorial rulers in many different countries. Our interest in that part of the world has never been the welfare of the people who live there. Rather, we have acted to perpetuate dictatorship and poverty because large American corporations made more money when we did than they otherwise would have made.

Is that the way a nation that truly was the greatest nation on earth would act? Of course not. A great nation, especially a rich one like us, would use its resources to promote freedom and economic wellbeing in every other country in the world. We might say that’s what we do, but when we do we lie. That is not what we have done anywhere in the world perhaps since the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s. And we even did that one out of self-interest as a way of stopping Communism in western Europe. No, we have rarely if ever acted like the greatest country in the world in our relations with other nations. We haven’t done that internally either. If we’re the greatest country in the world, why do people around the world think being American is something for which one must apologize? Because we have always acted in the past and act in the present in our own (usually short-sighted) self-interest, the people of other countries be damned. That’s why.

So go ahead and terrify animals and people with PTSD with your fireworks every July 4. Most Americans think that’s fun, I guess. Every nation has its national day, and I suppose we’re entitled to ours too. My wife, our dog, and I flee to Canada every year to get away from it, but that’s us. (We’re lucky to live just a couple of hours south of the US-Canada border.) It doesn’t have to be you. I ask just one thing. Please give up the nonsensical notion that we are the greatest country in the world. There are so very many ways in which we just flat aren’t. We have an immense number of things for which we do indeed need to apologize, exploitation of foreign people being just one of them. The greatest nation in the world? No. Not even close.

July 4: The Powers Rejoice

 

July 4: The Powers Rejoice

 

July 4. Independence Day. The big national day in the United States. We “celebrate” the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 (more or less), 1776. American flags fly everywhere. The military struts its stuff. Military jets zoom over baseball stadiums. Bands play martial music. Towns, especially small town, have July 4 parades. On July 4 we’re all supposed to be patriots celebrating the country most of us just happened to have been born in. Hurray for the red, white, and blue! (Those are also the colors of Russia’s flag, but never mind). Pointing out anything that’s wrong with this country is gauche. On this day it’s just not done. Today we act like this country actually were what it claims to be, and we don’t stop to realize that it has never been what it claims to be at all.

On July 4 our great tradition is to make things explode. Firecrackers mostly, and fireworks both legal and illegal. When we can’t get them elsewhere, we go to an Indian reservation and buy M80s, huge firecrackers that as near as I can tall are like a quarter stick of dynamite. They go bang real loud. We may go to a professional fireworks display. Many of us do, but mostly we like setting things off at home to terrify the neighborhood’s dogs and combat veterans with PTSD. We spend enormous amounts of money on things that are gone in a manner of seconds at most. We start fires, mostly inadvertently. We overwhelm medical first responders and fill our emergency rooms with our injuries. We love fireworks that make a high-pitched squeal as they go up, the more it hurts the ears of very person and every pet who hears it the better. Because our culture so glorifies the military, we celebrate America with fire crackers that sound like gunshots and fireworks that sound like bombs as though gunshots and bombs were good things of which our country can be proud, never mind that their only purpose is to maim or kill human beings.

And of course we never stop seriously to think about what it is we’re celebrating. We say we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but clearly that’s not all that we’re celebrating. Most countries have some day dedicated to celebrating themselves. In France it’s July 14. In Canada it’s July 1. In Russia it’s November 7, or at least it was in Soviet times. In the United States it’s July 4. On that date Americans celebrate their country more than they celebrate some event that happened once a long time ago for other people.

And of course we never stop seriously to think about whether our celebration is appropriate or not. Here’s the truth of our July 4 celebrations. We are celebrating not our country’s reality but our country’s foundational myth. Few of us realize it, but our country does indeed have a foundational myth. It is a story about the United States that functions to connect the country’s people with the country’s political and economic culture. That story says the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It says the country is a land of freedom and equality, the arsenal of democracy, a shining city on a hill, and a beacon to the rest of the world showing what a country should be. Our national myth includes the statement in the Declaration of Independence that it is “self-evident“ that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” It makes a great deal of the way the United States Constitution says that “WE THE PEOPLE” create our own government. It believes the words of the poem on the Statue of Liberty about our receiving huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Our national myth tells us that we are the free, blessed citizens of the greatest country the world has ever seen.

And as is true of all myths that connect people to something human, something finite, it just isn’t so. There are truths about this country that, if not quite self-evident, are certainly undeniable. This country, as diverse as it now is, was founded by white Europeans. Essentially every one of them was a racist. Essentially every one of them believed that people of color were less than white people, that they were indeed subhuman. The Europeans and ancestors of Europeans who founded this country believed that Black people and Native Americans had no inherent worth as human beings. They enslaved Black people. They drove Native Americans from land those people had occupied for millennia. They had no qualms about doing either of these diabolical things because they did not believe the people to whom they were doing them had any rights inalienable or otherwise. They took the word “Men” in the Declaration of Independence literally. Women had essentially no legal rights at all in the early centuries of this country. They couldn’t vote, and that was in some ways the least of what they couldn’t do. Yes, of course white men realized that women were necessary for reproduction and that they could be used for sexual pleasure. But the obvious, God-given moral equality of women with men wasn’t obvious at all to these founding “fathers.” By “Men” the founding fathers (there were no true founding mothers) didn’t even mean all white males. They meant white, landowning males. They meant white males with money or real property. The land of the free? Well, some of these men were free, but well over one half of the population was not because it consisted of women, indentured servants, and slaves, some of who were obviously not free and none of whom had what we would call true freedom.

All of those “original sins” of the United States have, in one form or another, characterized this country and its dominant culture from 1619 when white British men imported the first kidnapped and enslaved African human beings into this country to the present day. Sure. The forms of some of these sins have changed, and some of them aren’t as dominant among us as they once were. We no longer have slavery, and least not in any outright, legal form. But the dominant culture of this country is still rotten to the core with racism. Our benighted Supreme Court apparently thinks that we’ve outgrown racism and we need take no further affirmative steps to overcome it, but they couldn’t be more wrong. The statistics on imprisonment along with many others show that whites are still the dominant so-called race in this country. They show more particularly that white males are the dominant demographic in this country. Yes, women can vote, though there was no national law enabling them to do so until 1920, three hundred years after the first Europeans landed on what became the Atlantic coast of the United States and more than that after Spanish Europeans occupied what became the American Southwest.

Women can vote, and some have broken through the glass ceiling that privileged white males construct to keep women down. But women are still paid less than men for the same work. There are women in positions of authority and responsibility in government at all levels, but the percentage of the people who are in those positions who are women is much lower than the percentage of the population that women make up. Today we have a woman vice president, and that is a very good thing. But we’ve never had a woman president, and the fact that it took until 2020 for the country to elect a woman to the second highest political position in the land is simply appalling. Male privilege is still very much with us. It is a big part of what makes American culture so appallingly sinful.

Yes, we have laws intended to protect the environment from the ravages human beings keep inflicting on it. Those laws have done some good. People are exposed to fewer toxic chemicals than they were even thirty or forty years ago. The air in our major cities is significantly cleaner than it used to be. But nearly one half of our population supports politicians who want to repeal most if not all environmental regulations because those regulations, these people believe, interfere with their making more money. Everyone with a brain knows that the earth’s atmosphere is warming and that we humans are at least part of the reason, if not the entire reason, that it is. We know what’s causing it—greenhouse gases. We know how to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we put into the atmosphere, but we don’t do it in any truly meaningful way. We don’t do it because whenever some governmental agencies tries to do it, it gets hit with cries of socialism (supposedly a bad thing), government overreach, and governmental authoritarianism all because stopping or even reducing our emission of greenhouse gases into the environment means some people could not continue to make money the old fashioned way, by exploiting the hell out of the earth and to hell with whoever comes after us.

The so-called “American Revolution,” to the extent that it was a revolution at all, was a capitalist revolution concocted and run by men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slave owners both. The American rebellion against the British was to a certain extent a fight for political autonomy. The desire for political autonomy, however, arose from Americans’ disgust with British taxation of various sorts. That taxation kept people with money from earning more money, so those people led the country into war against a power they believed was responsible for limiting their ability to make more money. Money has been the driving force in American history and culture ever since. Today we say we are a democracy in which everyone has an equal vote. But then the Supreme Court voids a congressional attempt to limit the role of money in American politics. It says giving money to politicians is a form of free speech that cannot be prohibited or severely restricted. The result? It’s easier today than it has been at times in the past for the wealthy to control the United States government, and control it they do. Money makes American democracy a sham. It aways has, and it always will.

Then there’s our country’s glorification of the military. This country’s history is soaked in blood. The blood of enslaved Africans. The blood of Native Americans. The blood of Americans of all sorts shed in our country’s seemingly nonstop wars. The Declaration of Independence that we celebrate on July 4 was part of a war thirteen British colonies fought against the British with an unknown but high number of people killed and maimed. In 1860 the country started to fall apart as southern, slave-owning states seceded from the union to preserve slavery. The North and the South fought what is still the American war with the highest number of casualties, something like 750,000 dead. Wars waged by the white United States government against Native Americans existed from the very beginnings of European settlement until the end of the nineteenth century. We have not fought a war against a foreign power that invaded our country since the War of 1812, over two hundred years ago. Yet we fight an endless string of wars in other parts of the world supposedly to “defend American freedom.” Never mind that the country has fought no such war since at least the end of Civil War one hundred fifty-eight years ago. The United States spends nearly as much on its military annually as the rest of the world combined, and fact that truly is obscene. We live in the most military-crazy country on earth or at least in one of them.

I paint quite a horrendous picture of the United States, don’t I? Yes I do, but the question that arises for me out of that picture is not “am I right?” which I know I am, but “How did things get to be this way?” How can so many Americans not see that on July 4 they are celebrating a satanic myth not the truth? How can so many Americans celebrate on July 4? All that celebrating just doesn’t make sense. Sure. There are some things about this country to celebrate. We certainly are freer and better off in essentially every way than are the people of North Korea and various other places in the world. As much as Donald Trump would like to become one, we are not ruled by a dictator for life the way places like Turkmenistan are.

None of that, however, obviates any of the truth of the things I have said here about my country. So I return to my foundational question: How did things get to be this way? There is, I am convinced, only one profound answer to that question. That answer is, “The powers.” I’ve written about the powers before, and every time I have I have gladly acknowledged that my understanding of them comes from one source, the late Walter Wink. I gladly acknowledge my debt to Wink again here. By “the powers” I don’t mean the US and China. I don’t mean any human person or institution. Rather, the powers are the spiritual force behind everything that is. Every institution has its power. There is a spiritual power behind every institution that makes the institution behave the way it does. Institutional racism is a good example of the work of the powers. The statistics make it abundantly clear that the American criminal law system treats Black defendants worse than it treats white defendants who are charged with the same crimes. It convicts them more often. It sentences them to longer jail terms. Yet few if any people who work in the criminal law system consider themselves to be racists, nor do they intentionally treat defendants differently because of the defendant’s race. The disproportionate outcomes are there nonetheless. How can that be? The answer is that each institution is controlled more by its “power” than it is by the people who appear to control it. The institution’s spirit exists apart from any people who staff the institution.

And here’s a most important truth about the powers that be. They are part of God’s creation, and they are “fallen.” That is, they work not for the divine purposes for which God created them but for more destructive ends. They are responsible for everything that is wrong in the world. That truth doesn’t relieve all of us of our duty to do God’s work in the world. It just means that as we do we are resisting not just obvious things like national governments but the spiritual powers behind everything that is. Transforming the world involves transforming the world’s institutions of course. More importantly and profoundly, it means countering the fallen spirits that move every one of the world’s institutions. The powers that be always work toward death. That’s because they do not function the way God intends them to function any more than most of us humans do. The powers, however, are more powerful than any human. We all do their work, most of us totally unaware that that’s what we’re doing.

The United States of America has its power in this sense, or rather, it has many of them. They all work against life. They all work against the things that this country says it stands for—democracy, justice, equality, peace, and so on. They are responsible for the way this country’s reality is so radically different from its myth. They are why we insist we are a land of equal opportunity for all when in reality we are nothing of the sort. They are why we say we stand for peace when we have an enormous military that engages in violence and the threat of violence all over the world. Our country’s powers are as fallen as are any other powers, and they work to move our country in the direction of violence, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, and all of the other ills that so plague us. They are why a man as completely unqualified politically and despicable personally as Donald Trump could become president. The whole phenomenon of Trumpism makes little sense if we look at it only from a materialistic perspective. Seen from the perspective of the powers, however, Trumpism is not hard to explain. It represents the victory of fallen powers over the good that God calls us to do.

So, on July 4 each year, the powers rejoice. They rejoice in their victory over decency, justice, and peace in the way this country actually operates. They rejoice that nearly all Americans fall into their trap of patriotism, where they celebrate that which the powers make them believe is real but that in truth is not real at all. They rejoice that our celebrations are so militaristic, for the dominance of the military in American culture is one of their biggest victories. They rejoice in the way most Americans think that racism is conquered when they just say they’re not racist when in fact our claim not to be racist works to hide our true racism not to overcome it. They rejoice that Americans think Trumpism arises from grievances privileged Americans have and do not realize that it isn’t the supposed grievances that are the problem, it is the disordered reaction to material conditions that the powers create that is the problem. They rejoice that so many Americans operate out of fear not out of rational thought. They rejoice that so many Americans think violence solves problems, be it the personal violence of gun ownership or the national violence of the military. They rejoice as they see nearly every American come into step with them, celebrating a false myth of American reality and being oblivious to actual American truth.

A few of us get it. I believe that I get it. I can’t tell you why I and others get it when the vast majority of Americans don’t. I just know that it has always been true that a few people have gotten it in every age in every place. The true prophets of ancient Israel got it. Jesus of course got it. Paul got it. The saints of every culture and every faith tradition have gotten it. None of us gets it perfectly. We are all human after all, and we all function within a world dominated by the powers. I say we get it, but I must admit that we get it only partially. Most of us stand for some things that are right from God’s perspective, but none of us truly stands for everything that is right.

Those of us who get it, mostly at least, must speak out. We must cry out. We must shout it from the rooftops. Your Independence Day celebrations are a farce! They are the work of the powers getting you to celebrate what isn’t true and ignore what is. They have you thinking that the American myth is American reality, and they have you celebrating that which they make you think is true rather than what actually is. The powers rejoice that our July 4 celebrations reenforce our commitment not to American reality but to the American myth. They rejoice that through our July 4 celebrations we perpetuate that demonic myth. It’s not demonic because what it says is bad. What it says is actually very good. It’s demonic because it leads Americans by the hundreds of millions to live in a land of false beliefs about their nation and to ignore all of the shortcomings of their nation’s reality.

So this year on July 4, I will not celebrate. I will not claim to be a patriot, not because I am not one but because the powers have so corrupted the concept of patriotism. I will not set off fireworks. In fact my wife, our dog, and I are fleeing to Canada to get away from them. On this July 4 I will meditate on the functioning of the powers in my country. I will mourn the way they work for evil and keep most Americans from seeing the evil they create. I will mourn the way the powers work for death not for life, for oppression not for freedom, for white straight male privilege not for true equality. This July 4 the powers will rejoice. I will not.