The Symbols of Holy Week: The Donkey

          This is the sermon I gave on Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011.  It was so well received by the people of my church that I thought I would post it here for others to take a look at.  I hope that you find it meaningful.

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Donkey

Scripture:  Zechariah 9:9-10; Mark 11:1-11

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.

It’s the beginning of Holy Week, that most sacred week of the Christian year, when we enter Jerusalem with Jesus in triumph, share his last meal, weep at his cross, and only then rejoice in his glorious resurrection.  Let me ask you something:  Have you ever noticed how each of those central events of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life has an object at its center?  Well, each of them does.  Today, on Palm Sunday, it’s the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem.  Mark just calls it a colt, but trust me on this one, it’s a donkey.  More about that donkey in a second.  For Maundy Thursday one central object is the table.  More about that on Maundy Thursday.  On Good Friday the central object is of course the cross.  For Easter it is the empty tomb.  Each of the named days of Holy Week has an object associated with it.

All of these things—the donkey, the table, the cross, and the empty tomb—are material objects (even if one of them is an animal), but the important thing about them for us Christians is that they are much more than mere objects.  They are symbols.  They stand for something.  They point beyond themselves to some profound meaning, a spiritual meaning, a meaning that tells us something about Jesus Christ and about God.  Through them we find our connection with Jesus Christ and with God.  So in our four Holy Week services this coming week (not counting the early service on Easter morning) I want to explore each of these objects, each of these symbols.  Today we start with the donkey.    

The background of the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is that after Jesus has spent perhaps about a year teaching and healing in Galilee to the north of Jerusalem he has made the fateful decision to go to Jerusalem.  It is hard to overestimate the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.  It was the site of the temple, the seat of the religious authorities of the day.  It was by far the biggest city in the region, and it was the city the Romans worried about most.  It had been the scene of violent rebellions against Roman rule in the past, and the Romans feared that it would be again in the future.  (They turned out to be right about that, by the way.)  It wasn’t where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hung out most of the time, but it was where he would go, bringing a whole lot of Roman soldiers with him, during the Passover, when the population of the city swelled dramatically because of all the pilgrims coming to the temple.  So when Jesus entered Jerusalem that fateful day he was entering the center of both the religious and the secular powers of his day.

Jesus could have snuck into the city unnoticed.  After all, it’s not like his face was all over the television the way it would be today.  No one in Jerusalem knew what he looked like.  He could have done it quietly, in a way that would not draw attention to himself.  He didn’t.  Instead he rode in on a donkey—why that would draw attention to him I’ll get to shortly—to the acclaim of the crowds who lined the road to hail him.  Why?  Why would Jesus come into Jerusalem that way?

To get at an answer to that question we need to go back several hundred years before Jesus and look at those two verses we heard from Zechariah, an Old Testament prophet.  There the prophet tells of a king who is to come.  He says that the king is, or will be, triumphant and victorious; but he comes not in a war chariot or riding a magnificent Arabian steed but “humble and riding on a donkey.”  The prophet says that this king will “cut off the chariot from Ephraim,” that is, from Israel.  He will cut off the battle bow and “command peace to the nations.”  This king of whom Zechariah prophesies is pretty clearly a different kind of king.  He is humble.  He comes in not on a symbol of war, not in a military chariot, but riding a symbol of peace, a simple donkey, a farm animal not a war animal. 

When Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem he is acting out this scene from Zechariah.  That he is doing so isn’t necessarily obvious to us.  I mean, who knows anything about Zechariah today?  I don’t, except for these verses.  Jewish people in Jesus’ time, however, would immediately have understood what Jesus was doing riding into town on that borrowed burro.  He was saying through his action rather than through words I am indeed a king, but I am a very different kind of king.

In their book The Last Week, Crossan and Borg imagine this scene this way.  On one side of town Pilate and his Roman legions are marching into the city.  Consider that scene for a moment:  The military commanders ride in war chariots drawn by grand horses with magnificent tack.  They are animals of war, animals of might and oppression.  They make a fearful sight.  The troops follow wearing their armor that flashes in the sun.  They carry shields and spears, the implements of war.  It is a grand procession, and a fearful one.  It is Rome saying we have the power, and we’re not afraid to use it.  It is Rome saying do not dare to defy us, for we can and will crush you. 

On the other side of town Jesus is riding into the city on a donkey.  Now consider this scene:  It is a parody of the Roman military procession.  There are no implements of war.  Instead there is a humble animal from the farm.  A useful animal to be sure but hardly a grand one, certainly not a frightening one.  The donkey is a symbol of the peaceful life of the ordinary people.  His time is the time of peace, the time of plowing, the time of pulling a cart taking the produce of the field to market.  He is Zechariah’s donkey.  He symbolizes the beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.  He symbolizes a world in which everyone sits under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one makes them afraid, to use the words of the prophet Micah.

None of that may be obvious to us, but it would have been obvious to the people who saw Jesus engage in this prophetic act of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.  Certainly Jesus must have intended people to understand what he was doing in this way.  The parallel with that passage from Zechariah is too strong to be mere coincidence.  Jesus didn’t sneak, or even just walk, into Jerusalem unnoticed precisely because he wanted to be noticed.  He had come to Jerusalem to make a proclamation.  He had come to Jerusalem to proclaim to the powers of his world that their way is not God’s way.  During the week that lay before him he would do that with words.  Upon his entry into Jerusalem he did it with his actions.

Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was nothing less than a provocation.  It was a provocation directed to the powers of the place, to the Romans and to the Jewish temple authorities.  Later on Pilate will ask Jesus if he is the king of the Jews.  Jesus has already answered that question.  He answered it when he acted out the prophecy of Zechariah.  Yes, he said with his actions, I am a king; but I am a very different kind of king.  I am a king of peace not war.  I am a king of peacetime pursuits, of agriculture and peaceful trade.  I am a king from among the people not a king reigning over the people.  Maybe the Romans didn’t get all of that from Jesus’ symbolic act of riding in on a donkey.  They probably weren’t up on their Zechariah. The Jewish people of the city, however, surely did.  Or at least they did if they knew their Zechariah as well as a good Jew of the time should have.  If they didn’t get all that, if they saw only a reference to a king but missed the clear depiction of what kind of king Jesus is, then they missed his meaning altogether.  Maybe that would explain why five days later these same people were shouting Crucify him!

The Romans for sure and the people of the city perhaps missed Jesus’ meaning when he rode into the center of power in his world on a donkey.  Christianity has missed his meaning pretty much ever since.  We’ve seen his riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as an act of humility.  We haven’t seen it as a provocation aimed at the powers of the world.  Yet that surely is what it was.  We haven’t seen it as a prophetic act proclaiming the kingdom of God as a very different kind of kingdom from the kingdoms of the world.  Yet that surely is what it was.

So thank you little donkey, and thanks to whoever owned you for letting Jesus borrow you.  You played a role you could not possibly understand.  You became a symbol, a symbol of peace triumphant over war, a symbol of ordinary, productive pursuits over military ones.  A symbol of providing for people not conquering them.  Most people who saw you, and most people who have read about you, have misunderstood you.  As we begin our journey with Jesus through Holy Week, may we at last understand what you were all about.  Amen.

The Radical Gospel: What We Don't Get About Jesus

          In the hallway outside the Sunday school rooms in the church that I serve as pastor there is a painting of Jesus.  It depicts the Jesus saying from Matthew 19:14 (also Mark 10:14 and Luke 18:16) where Jesus says “Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”  (Let me hasten to add that this picture has been in my church many, many years longer than I have.  I had nothing to do with putting it there.)  Here’s it is:

 It’s a common theme for paintings in Christian education wings of Christian churches.  The one in my church is particularly telling.  The figures, a man who is supposedly Jesus and three children, are located in a garden with blooming tulips and gladiolas, flowers that we have here in North America but I doubt that the actual Jesus ever saw in first century Galilee.  In it Jesus is the stereotypical western image of Jesus, dressed in a white robe with long wavy hair and beard.  There is absolutely nothing threatening, nothing radical (except that he looks a bit like a 1960s hippie), nothing challenging even about him.  He is serene, placid even.  He is a stereotype that looks nothing like the Jesus of the Gospels.  Not that the Gospels tell us anything about how Jesus looked physically except that he was a peasant class Semitic man of the first century CE.  They don’t, but it’s not the details of Jesus’ physical appearance that concern me.  It is the way that in this picture he is so American middle class.  The way he is so nonthreatening.  The way he welcomes but seems not to demand anything at all in return.  He is, in other words, nothing like the Jesus that the Gospels give us.  He is the Jesus of established American Christianity.

The depiction of the children is telling as well.  They are 1950s vintage white American children.  They look like illustrations out of the Dick and Jane readers I had in grade school in the 1950s.  One of the children, the only boy, is holding what appears to be a model of a World War II vintage military airplane.  (Really!  A military airplane in a picture that is supposed to teach children about Jesus!  It boggles the mind.)  The children are white, healthy, well-dressed.  They are stereotypes.  They don’t look remotely like first century CE Jewish children from Galilee or Judea.  They are the image of America the way we wanted it to be in the 1950s.  They are the children of establishment America, for whom Jesus is just one of us who saves without challenging, without demanding anything at all.

That image of Jesus and the children would be of no particular concern if it were limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms.  Jesus did say let the little children come to me, and that’s what the picture shows, albeit very stereotypically.  The thing of it is, however, that this image of Jesus is not limited to a picture in a hallway outside some Sunday school rooms.  My years in the church have convinced me that this image of a serene, welcoming, nonthreatening Jesus is the image that many, perhaps most, of the people in the church have of him.  It is the image the Christian church, at least in its western forms, has inculcated in people for centuries.  (There are problems with the image of Jesus that the eastern Orthodox churches have inculcated in people too, especially the image of Jesus Pantocrator; but that is not my concern here.)  This picture outside my church’s Sunday school rooms shows the image of the Constantinian Jesus (and of the American version of the Constintinian Jesus in particular), the Jesus of the established church whose primary role is to make people feel good and to get them to heaven, not to say anything to them about the kingdom of God on earth.  To comfort not to confront.  To legitimate the status quo not to challenge it.  To reflect the values of the culture, not to stand them on their heads at every turn.  In other words, to be a tame Jesus, safe for the established powers of the world (including the military powers symbolized by the model warplane in the boy’s hand in our picture), the servant of the kingdoms of the earth not the herald of the radically different kingdom of God.

The simple and undeniable truth is that ever since it became the established religion of empire the Christian church has distorted, even denied, the image of Jesus that anyone reading the Gospels with an open mind can (and should) get, the image we get from reading the Gospels without the Constantinian glasses that the church has so effectively put on us over the centuries.  Time and time again Jesus took the conventional wisdom of his day, and ours, and turned it completely on its head.  The instances of his doing so are too numerous to mention all of them here.  Virtually everything Jesus said and did was and is radical; and you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see how radical he was, and is (although we do lose some of his radicalism when we don’t understand his historical context well enough).  Jesus is radical in the true meaning of the word.  Everything he said and did went to the root (radix, Latin for root, is the source of our word radical) of the beliefs and practices of his society, his culture, his religion—and ours.  Here are just a few examples taken from the Gospel of Matthew.  It’s one of the Gospels with the saying about the children that our Sunday school picture portrays, and it is the Gospel that most people read first because it comes first in the traditional order of the New Testament even though it isn't the first of our Gospels to have been written.

Let’s start with a few examples from the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus says “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”  Mt. 5:5  In Jesus’ day it was the Romans with their legions that were anything but meek who were inheriting the earth.  The most common Jewish vision of the Messiah was of a new King David, a military ruler who would inherit the earth through anything but meekness.  Today it seems to be mostly we Americans who are inheriting the earth, and we do it through economic, political, and military power, not through meekness.  Jesus has completely upended the expectations of his world and ours.  

He says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  Mt. 5:9  The Roman legions, who perhaps made peace but who did it through brutal violence, were the metaphorical children of the god Caesar.  The United States is today’s Rome, also seeking to make peace through a liberal application of violence.  For Jesus the children of the one true God are the ones who truly make peace through justice.  He has again turned the expectations of his world, and ours, on their head.  He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist violently, then gives examples of the oppressed turning the tables on their oppressors.  (Walter Wink)  Mt. 5:38-41  In that world where violence was the norm, and in ours where violence is still the norm, Jesus has yet again turned everything upside down.

He said:  “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven….For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  Mt. 6:19-21  It’s a truly radical, revolutionary statement in his world—and in ours—where most everyone works as hard as they can precisely to build up treasure on earth and where the policies of the ruling powers are aimed most of all at building up the earthly treasure of the wealthy.  He called a tax collector to be one of his disciples.  Mt. 8:9  Jesus’ Jewish people and followers despised tax collectors, for they worked for the Romans and oppressed their own people; but Jesus made one of them a disciple, again a truly radical prophetic demonstration of God’s universal grace that defied the deep religious and political convictions of his time.  It defies the deep religious and political convictions of our time too.  How many of us would call Bernie Madoff to be a disciple?  It’s not a perfect parallel I know, but I think it makes the point.  Jesus made, and makes, disciples of the ones the world despises.

In Jesus’ day women were forbidden to touch men to whom they were not married in public.  Blood was considered unclean, and touching blood rendered a person unclean.  A woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years violated these taboos when she reached out and touched the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.  Jesus should have been outraged.  He should have condemned the woman and then gone through a purification ritual to cleanse himself.  He didn’t.  He said “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well;” and the woman was healed.  Mt. 9:20-22  We probably hear this story as a tale of Jesus’ compassion for a suffering human being, and so it is; but we probably don’t see how radical it is.  We don’t see how it flies in the face of the religious and social conventions of Jesus’ time, and we don’t see in it a call for us to question--and reject--the religious and social conventions of our time too; but so it is.

I suppose I could go on and on with examples of how radical Jesus is.  How he healed on the Sabbath in violation of the religious law and approved of hated Samaritans.  How he told parables of God’s unfailing grace for the lost—the woman searching for her lost coin, the shepherd searching for his one lost sheep, the father welcoming home his prodigal son even before the son has had a chance to beg forgiveness.  How he went not to the wealthy, the respectable, the righteous but to the poor, the excluded, the sinners.  How he symbolically overthrew the temple and condemned the temple authorities for “devouring widows' houses” with their temple tax.  Mark 12:38-44  There are lots and lots of examples. 

Yet there is one passage that perhaps more than anything else shows how radical the demands are that Jesus makes on us.  Jesus said:  “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  Mt. 16:24-25  “Take up their cross.”  We want to minimize that line, or even romanticize it.  We want it to mean to bear whatever difficulties come our way in life with faith and endurance.  The problem is that Jesus doesn’t say “bear whatever difficulties come your way in life with faith and endurance.”  He says take up your cross.  What’s a cross?  A brutal, inhumane instrument of torture and death.  He means of course not take up your cross to inflict torture and death on another but rather to bear torture and death yourself for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the Kingdom of God.  It is a demand for our whole lives, our entire being, everything that we have and everything that we are.  Nothing could be more radical.  Nothing could be a more radical call to follow the way of the Kingdom of God that Jesus showed us, the way of nonviolence and the way of justice for the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable.  The way of intimate personal relationship with God, not the way of established religious authority.  The way of spurning the world’s norms and mores for the sake of mercy and compassion.  The way of self-denial for the sake of all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.

How did the man who overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and drove out the sellers of sacrificial animals there ever get to be the Jesus meek and mild of so much of Christianity?  How did the Jesus who said love your enemies and do not resist an evildoer with violence, who wouldn’t even let his followers use violence to save his own life, become the Jesus of earthly armies, the Jesus of a picture with a child holding a model of an instrument of death and destruction?  How did the Jesus whom the authorities of his time, both religious and secular, saw as such a threat to their power that they had to kill him ever get to be respectable?  How did the Jesus who subverted the beliefs and conventions of his time at every turn ever get to be the guardian of the status quo that the Christian tradition has made him? 

There are of course historical, anthropological, and sociological answers to those questions.  It all began with establishment in the fourth century of course, but it certainly didn’t end there.  There is, however, a question that is more important for us than the “how did it happen” questions.  The more important question for us is:  What are we going to do about it?  Are we ever going to get what the dominant forms of Christianity have for so long not gotten about Jesus?  Are we ever going to get how radical he was, and is?  More importantly:  Are we ever going to let him radicalize us?

A "Just Peace Church" and Nonviolence

Some of us at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, the church that I serve as pastor in Monroe, Washington, USA, have begun exploring the possibility of our church claiming the identity of a “Just Peace Church,” an identity that the UCC has proclaimed for itself and that some of its local churches have adopted for themselves.  (The UCC has a strongly congregational polity in which proclamations by the national bodies of the denomination speak to but not for the local churches, who are free to adopt what the national bodies have done or not, as they deem proper.)  As part of that work I recently read the “Pronouncement on affirming (sic) the United Church of Christ as a Just Peace Church” adopted by the Fifteenth General Synod of the United Church of Christ in 1985 (hereafter “the Pronouncement”).  To say the least I was not particularly pleased with what I found there.  For one thing, the Pronouncement is badly written and edited.  One sentence early in the Pronouncement reads “Since Just War criteria itself now rules out war under modern conditions, it is imperative to move beyond Just War thinking to a Theology of a Just Peace.”  (Sic throughout)  Did no one working on this thing realize that “criteria” is plural?  What rules of capitalization they were following is anybody’s guess.  Those things, however, are quibbles.  There is a much more theologically significant flaw in the document, namely, that it resolutely avoids a radical endorsement of and commitment to nonviolence as the way of God made know to us by Jesus Christ.

The problems begin very early on in the Pronouncement.  It states that it is “based on insights from all three of the historic approaches of Christians to war and peace—pacifism, just war, and crusade….”  Crusade?!  Really?!  That crusade is indeed an historic Christian approach to war is of course true, but did the Pronouncement really have to say, and does it mean, that it is based in part on that historic approach?  Does that part of the Christian tradition have any “insights” worth considering?  Shouldn’t we be rejecting crusade categorically and repenting of the Christian tradition of crusade?  I almost couldn’t believe it when I read that sentence in the Pronouncement.  I will grant the drafters of the Pronouncement that in 1985 Walter Wink had just begun to publish his groundbreaking work on Jesus and nonviolence, so I can’t really criticize them for not referring to what Wink calls Jesus’ “third way” of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil; but today no list of Christian approaches to questions of war and peace can be complete without including, and embracing, Wink’s contribution to our understanding of Jesus and nonviolence.

Things don’t get better as the Pronouncement proceeds.  Early on it has a section labeled “Biblical and theological foundations” (capitalization sic).  What that section says is all right as far as it goes, but the most striking thing about it is what it does not say.  It makes no reference whatsoever to the truth that nonviolence is God’s way that we learn through the nonviolent teaching and even more through the nonviolent life of Jesus Christ.  Because it utterly fails to refer to the nonviolence of Jesus it of course does not say that nonviolence must therefore be the way of the Christian.  The Pronouncement’s failure to ground itself in this foundational teaching and example of Jesus is it’s most significant failure, a failure that is reflected throughout the Pronouncement in its rather ambiguous relationship to the question of violence generally.

The Pronouncement does use the term “nonviolence” on a few occasions.  It says that “Nonviolent conflict is a normal and healthy reflection of diversity.”  It says that “Nonviolence is a Christian response to conflict shown by Jesus.”  But notice:  It does not say that nonviolence is the Christian response to conflict shown by Jesus.  The use of the indefinite rather than the definite article here badly weakens the Pronouncement’s commitment, such as it is, to nonviolence.  The document’s weakness is also reflected in the statement “Violence can and must be eliminated in most situations.  However, because evil and violence are embedded in human nature and institutions, they will remain present in some form.”  (Emphasis added)  Violence must not be eliminated in every situation?  Should we not at least be committing ourselves to the ideal of eliminating violence in every situation?  Violence is embedded in human nature?  Really?  Didn’t Jesus show us how God intends human nature to be, and didn’t he show and teach us that that nature is nonviolent?  How can a Christian talk about human nature without making a distinction between how God intends humans to be and how humans far too often are under the conditions of existence, which, after all, is what the Christian notion of “the Fall” is all about?  How can a Christian not express a commitment to human nature as God intends it to be?  How can a Christian resign herself to the way things are when we see in Jesus Christ how things are supposed to be?  The Pronouncement simply does not reject violence as it should.  It does at one point say “We declare our opposition to war, violence, and terrorism.”  Yet that opposition to violence that is here stated without elaboration is badly weakened by the document’s ambivalence toward violence which is its major voice on the subject.

The Pronouncement does not radically reject violence the way Jesus did.  It does however reject war, and that is its major virtue.  Right after the statements about violence that I quoted and criticized in the previous paragraph the Pronouncement says “War can and must be eliminated.”  Later on it says “war must be eliminated as an instrument of national policy….”  The “Summary” with which the Pronouncement begins says that it “Places the United Church of Christ General Synod in opposition to the institution of war.”  Tragically, it does not place the United Church of Christ in opposition to the institution of violence as radically and consistently as it should.

The Pronouncement does a good job of connecting opposition to war with social justice around the world.  There is of course no doubt that there is a connection between injustice and war and indeed between injustice and violence.  Pope Paul VI famously said “If you want peace, work for justice,” and the Pronouncement puts the UCC squarely behind that that sentiment.  Today, however, the world demands a much more radical commitment to nonviolence than the Pronouncement provides.  As John Dominic Crossan says every chance he gets (and he gets lots of them), the world has never developed a weapons system that it has not used; and today our weapons systems have the capacity to destroy the world.  Only a radical commitment to nonviolence can save us from ourselves.  Beyond that, only a radical commitment to nonviolence is true to the teachings and the model of Jesus Christ.  Obviously that doesn’t matter to non-Christians (although many non-Christians, like Gandhi, have understood Jesus’ nonviolence much better than most Christians have), but it simply must matter to Christians.  If we don’t follow Jesus in this, one of his most foundational teachings and the basis on which he lived his whole life right up to and including rejecting violence even to save his life, how can we call ourselves Christians?  The UCC’s Pronouncement on being a just peace church is OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  It is time for us to revisit the issue and adopt a far more radical, and a far more Christian, commitment to nonviolence.

And All the People Say: Duh!

I have seen some things about Christianity in the press recently that are so obvious that they make me wonder why anyone thinks it necessary even to say them.  That it nonetheless seems necessary to say them is an indication of the sorry state of religion in America today and of a massive default by the Christian church.  The first thing I saw that got me thinking along these lines is something from The Huffington Post.  A pastor friend of mine posted a link to it on his Facebook page.  It’s titled “Five Things Everyone Should Know About the Bible, Believe It or Not” by Kristin M. Swenson, Ph.D.  According to The Huffington Post Dr. Swenson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of a book (that I do not know) titled Bible Babel:  Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time,” Harper, 2010.  The five things Dr. Swenson thinks everyone should know about the Bible are:

1.      Every Bible is actually a collection of books.

2.      Not everyone who believes in it believes in the same Bible.

3.      The Bible came after the literature it comprises.

4.      If you’re reading the Bible in English, you’re reading a translation.

5.      This information about the Bible is compatible with belief in it.

When I read this list I immediately said to myself “And all the people say:  Duh!”

The second thing I saw that involved something about Christianity that is so obvious that I wonder why anyone thinks it even necessary to say it has to do with the existence vel non of hell.  A United Methodist pastor in North Carolina named Chad Holtz said in a post on Facebook that he doubted the existence of hell.  Not long thereafter he was fired from his position at Marrow’s Chapel in Henderson, North Carolina.  His Facebook post expressed support for a book by Rob Bell, whom the Associated Press describes as “a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.”  When I read this news about Pastor Holtz's and Rob Bell’s denial of the existence of hell I once again wanted to shout “And all the people say:  Duh!” 

Really?  Are enough Americans really so ignorant about the Bible that someone gets published on The Huffington Post and gets a book published by Harper (with a Kindle version no less) by saying the things Dr. Swenson says about the Bible in her Huffington Post piece?  Are enough Americans so stuck in an ancient worldview and an ancient understanding of God that a pastor gets fired for stating the obvious, that the God we know in and through Jesus Christ is not a God who condemns billions of souls to eternal torment for not doing the right things, or worse, for not believing the right things?  Apparently so.  What a sad state of affairs!

That these things need be said is testimony to a massive failure at best and a massive fraud at worst perpetrated on the people by the Christian church.  The Christian church, especially in its Protestant varieties but not only in its Protestant varieties, has taught people for centuries that, in effect at least, God wrote the Bible.  The church has taught people that the Bible contains one consistent message throughout, something that is so obviously false to anyone who has ever read the Bible that it’s impossible to understand how the church ever managed to sell this one.  The church has taught that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word(s) of God.  The result is to lock God up in a book.  Which of course makes God understandable.  Worse, it makes God controllable.  It gives the church control over God, and throughout its history the Christian church has been about nothing if not control.  The church has taught people for centuries that if they don’t act the way the church tells them to act and don’t believe what the church tells them to believe their souls will spend eternity in torment in a place called hell.  The result of course has been to give the church considerable control over people and their lives, and throughout its history the Christian church has been about nothing if not control.

And the thing of it is, these things are so obviously and undeniably not true!  The things Dr. Swenson says everyone should know about the Bible are Bible knowledge that should be the level of about a third grader.  Or maybe when I say that I insult first and second graders.  These things are so obvious, so basic, that anyone with any interest in the Bible, whether inside the church or outside of it, should discover them in about the first five minutes of Bible study.  Or maybe I should give them an hour.  It certainly shouldn't take longer than that.  How anyone can say in one breath that the God we know in and through Jesus Christ is a God of grace and love and then say in the next breath that that God damns billions of souls to eternal torment because during their life on earth they didn’t do the right things or believe the right things about Jesus, even if they never heard of Jesus or lived before he did, is simply incomprehensible.  Yet the Christian church has denied the things Swenson says about the Bible and taught that God of wrath and damnation not quite from its beginnings but nearly that long.  We in the church have much for which to beg God’s forgiveness.  One major task of those of us who work in the Christian church today is help the people develop an understanding of the Christian faith such that when they hear such platitudes as the ones Swenson states about the Bible or a denial of the reality of hell, or any of the other things the Church has taught that are palpably not true, they will instantaneously shout, as I did when I heard these things:  And all the people say:  Duh!

On Nonviolence in a Violent World: A Meditation on US Military Action in Libya

As the pastor of a small congregation of the United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, I lead worship every Sunday.  Part of our worship service every Sunday is a time of confession.  I usually introduce it by saying that it is the time in the service when we acknowledge our need for God’s grace.  It consists of a written unison prayer of confession that I write followed by a brief time of silence for personal, private confession.  As I was leading that part of the worship service on Sunday, March 20, 2011, a day after a full day of US military action against Libya, as we went into the time of silent, personal confession, I asked God’s forgiveness for the ways that I participate in this country’s systems that engage in and perpetuate violence.  I first felt God’s grace and forgiveness pouring over me like a warm ointment, but then something else happened.  An image appeared to me.  It was the image of God kicking me in the butt and saying “So what are you going to do about it?” 

I confess that I have no idea what I’m going to do about it, or even what I possibly could do about it.  It seems that all I can do is analyze those systems that engage in and perpetuate violence, hold them up to the judgment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and keep proclaiming Jesus’ Gospel of nonviolence.  I’ve been doing that for a long time now, although the audience for the writing and my preaching in which I do it is pathetically small.  I’ve done it in my preaching to my small congregation, although I admit that I haven’t done it as forcefully as I might for fear of alienating some of my church people.  I did it some in my book, which isn’t exactly an international bestseller--yet.  I’ve done it in many of the posts on this blog, parts of which have been read by people all over the world but that in total has reached only a small number of people.  I preach and I write, but that’s all I do.  I continue to pay taxes to the United States government, an obscene percentage of which go to support the war machine and is used to kill and maim God’s people all over the world.  I pay the taxes because I don’t want to go to jail for not paying them, and that’s how it works in human political structures, especially empires like the United States.  I ask myself why we Americans aren’t out in the streets in our millions demanding an end to American militarism, to the violence we inflict on people all over the world, and to the use of our tax dollars to do it, but I don’t have an answer; and I’m not out in the streets doing that.  I’ve never been arrested for an act of civil disobedience against the war machine, and because I haven’t I confess that I have not been as faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as I might be.  I tell myself that my gift is writing, my gift is preaching, it isn’t physical action; but I ask myself:  Is that a copout?  Is it a rationalization trying to cover up the fact that I don’t really have the courage of my convictions?  So I ask God’s forgiveness, and I receive it; but then God kicks me in the butt and says “What are you going to do about it?”

I guess what I’m going to do about it is what I’ve done about it before.  I’m going to preach, and I’m going to write.  It’s not enough, but it’s all I can, or at least all I’m prepared, to do.  Writing is my gift, and being an activist certainly seems not to be, or am I throwing up rationalizations again?  Either way I write, and I’m going to start by addressing here the latest act of American militarism, our military strikes against the forces of Muammar Khadafy in Libya.  I start that analysis by admitting that this particular use of American military force challenges my commitment to nonviolence.  After all, everyone who believes in freedom and in human dignity must support the Libyan rebels against the madman Khadafy.  Not that all the rebels are necessarily freedom loving, democratically inclined people, but Khadafy is a megalomaniac who has oppressed his people and distorted Libyan life through the creation of a totalitarian cult of personality on the Stalinist model.  He has destroyed any institutions in his country, civil or governmental, including the military, that could possibly have become centers of opposition to his rule.  That Khadafy is a very bad guy is beyond question, and that fact does, I admit, make the analysis of our use of violence to support his opponents more difficult.

Khadafy and the humanitarian nightmare that will surely result if he succeeds in defeating the rebels make the analysis of our use of violence to support his opponents more difficult, but, in the end, one is either committed to nonviolence or one is not.  So I oppose my country’s use of force in this situation as I oppose it in every situation.  That being said, there is a lesson to be learned here about the effectiveness of nonviolence in a violent world and about how the international community can use nonviolence to control madmen like Khadafy. 

The reason why I and so many have to struggle with our commitment to nonviolence in the current instance is that the international community waited far too long to try to remove Khadafy and did far too little when we did anything at all.  We had sanctions in place against Libya when we listed that country as a state sponsor of terrorism; but those sanctions did nothing to remove Khadafy from power.  There is one nonviolent thing that the international community could have done that would have removed him from power, and that is to stop buying his oil.  Oil is, as far as I know, Libya’s only meaningful resource.  The whole economy depends on it, which means that the whole economy depends on the sale of that oil to the industrialized nations.  Very little of that oil comes to the United States, but some countries in western Europe, especially Italy, are heavily dependent on it.  If the world, acting in unison, had stopped buying Libyan oil Khadafy would have been gone in very short order.  Whether his removal would have been violent or nonviolent I cannot say.  That would be up to the Libyan people; but we would not have engaged in violence.  Coercion yes, but nonviolent coercion is not violence.  If the world had said with one voice we will not buy oil from that brutal lunatic, that brutal lunatic would not have lasted long.  We didn’t do that.  The industrialized world is so addicted to oil that we didn’t do that.  So now we perceive that we have no choice but to use military force to protect the rebels and try to oust the dictator from power.

This lesson applies to more than Libya of course.  We so often think that violence is the only solution to a problem because we wait too long to address the problem with creative, assertive, nonviolent action.  There is in fact a nonviolent solution to every problem, however difficult it may be to imagine and implement that solution; but nonviolence isn’t easy.  It takes time.  It takes creativity.  It takes prophetic imagination.  War is fast and requires no creativity or imagination at all.  Just arm the bombs, aim the rockets, load the cannon and the rifles, and blast away.  Great demonic creativity may have gone into creating those weapons, but it takes no creativity at all to use them.  Technical skill yes, creativity no.  So violence seems so much easier, and often it is; but that doesn’t make it right.  It is still wrong.

  Will we learn the lesson of Libya?  Will we learn that it is better to apply creative, effective nonviolent measures as soon as a problem is identified than to wait until only violent measures will seem to work?  History gives us no reason to be optimistic about the chances of the world, including the United States, learning that lesson.  For people of faith there is, however, reason to hope.  For us Christians our reason to hope is our firm conviction that when we act with creative, assertive nonviolence to oppose the forces of evil we are following the way of Jesus, we are doing the will of God.  In the end that is all we really need to know.  Yet the words of the great Pete Seeger still echo:  When will they ever learn?  When will they ever learn?

No He Didn't: A Meditation on the Significance of Christ

            As members of my congregation and readers of this blog know, I believe that nonviolence must be the way of the Christian because it was the way of Christ and is the way of God.  I have written about nonviolence in my book, and I have other posts on nonviolence on this blog.  Christians have, of course, been infinitely creative in thinking of ways around Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  It began with  the development of Christian just war theory in the late fourth century CE.  It continued in the Middle Ages with the absolute conviction that surely God would want the Christian West to use force to drive the infidel Muslims out of the holy places in Jerusalem, such an affront to God the presence of those devils (as western Christians saw them) in the places of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection surely must be to God.  (Western Christians were of course projecting their own sense of the impropriety of the Muslims being in those places onto God, but then we humans never tire of projecting our own prejudices and hatreds onto God.)  In our time the arguments against Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence tend to be pragmatic.  Violence “works,” nonviolence doesn’t, we say.  It’s not true, but we say it as though it were.  But I recently heard one justification for rejecting Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence that I hadn’t heard before, and it is that objection and some of its theological consequences that I want to examine here.

This objection to the binding nature of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence for us goes like this:  God gave us life.  Life is God’s gracious gift to us, indeed, it is perhaps God’s most significant and precious gift to us.  God wants us to have life, therefore we have a sacred duty to defend our life even if we must use violence to do it.  A Christian may therefore use violence at least to defend her or his own life.  It is a short additional step to make this justification for the use of violence in self defense a justification for using violence to defend the life of another.  The person I heard this line of argument from recently didn’t take it this far, but this line of reasoning could, I suppose, be used to justify the use of violence in the defense of anything that is seen as gift of God.  In my recent conversation on this subject I pointed out that in all four Gospels Jesus objects to his disciples using violence to defend him at the time of his arrest.  (Yes, John’s Jesus states a different rational for his objection to the use of violence than we find in the Synoptics, but he still objects.  More about that below.)  My interlocutor responded:  Yes, but he came to die.  There is of course a whole theology in that response “He came to die.”  It is that theology that I want to discuss here.  I have discussed it elsewhere, in particular in Chapters 8 and 9 of my book, but the matter is so significant that it certainly deserves further, if brief, treatment here.

The theology behind the objection “He came to die” is of course the classical theory of atonement, the theory that says that God became human in Jesus for the purpose of suffering and dying as the necessary atonement for human sin.  The objections to the classical theory of atonement are well known.  It isn’t biblically mandated.  It presents  God as violent.  It presents God as concerned more than anything else with God’s own honor.  It convicts God of cosmic child abuse.  It ignores the way that in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere God forgives human sin without demanding the sacrifice of God’s own Son as a precondition.  All of these objections are well developed in contemporary theological literature.

My recent conversation points to yet another objection to the classical theory of atonement, one that has perhaps not received sufficient attention.  That objection is this:  The classical theory of atonement, the notion that, as Mel Gibson put it, “Dying was his reason for living,” eliminates Jesus as a model for human living.  Eliminating Jesus as a model for human living is precisely what my conversation partner was doing when she dismissed my statement about Jesus’ rejecting the use of force at the time of his arrest with her “He came to die.”  The classical theory of atonement limits Jesus’ purpose to one unique divine mission, the mission of being a God-man who suffers and dies.  The problem isn’t that the theory makes Jesus unique.  For Christians Jesus was unique.  The problem is that it makes his uniqueness something that has to do only with him and God, not with us, or at least only indirectly with us.  We are purely passive beneficiaries of Jesus’ sacrifice.  He is not there to be a model for us, only to die for us.

The classical theory of atonement does depend on the concept incarnation.  In its classical formulation by Anselm of Canterbury in the early years of the twelfth century CE it says that the necessary price for human sin, the repayment due to God to restore God’s honor that has been horribly besmirched by human sin, could be paid only by a creature who was both human and divine.  Yet the classical theory of atonement severely limits the scope of the Incarnation’s meaning.  Broadly understood the doctrine of the Incarnation says that Jesus both reveals God’s nature to us and reveals pure human nature to us, human nature the way God intends it to be.  Jesus then becomes both our window onto God and the model of the ideal human life.  That it points in both directions, revealing to us divine truth both about God and about ourselves, is one of the Incarnation’s great virtues.

Some streams within the Christian tradition have actually emphasized Jesus’ role as a model for the ideal human life.  There is a tradition within Christianity of the Imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, in which men and women have intentionally set out to imitate Jesus Christ in the way they lived their lives.  When Jesus Christ is understood only according to the classical theory of atonement, however, imitating Christ becomes impossible.  It becomes impossible because to do what Christ came to do he had to be both human and divine, and we of course are only human.  (That we may have some spark of divinity within us does not take away from the truth that in his nature as both fully human and fully divine Christ was in a fundamental way other than us while at the same time being one of us.)  Therefore seeking to imitate Christ makes no sense in this view of things, as it is trying to do the impossible.  Truly imitating Christ using a broader understanding of the Incarnation may be trying to do the impossible too, but Christ as a human being can remain nonetheless our model and our goal.  The impossibility of the task in this view arises not from the nature of the task but from our nature as imperfect creatures rather than gods.

Making Christ irrelevant as a model for human life as the classical theory of atonement does is far from harmless.  Making Jesus a divine and human sacrifice for human sin, and thereby making him irrelevant as a model for human living, becomes a ready excuse for not even trying to follow his teachings about the Kingdom of God.  As I saw in the conversation I related above it becomes a handy excuse for avoiding Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence.  It is an equally handy excuse for not following Jesus’ teaching on anything else too, not his teaching on justice, not his teaching on inclusion of the excluded, not his teaching on the equality of woman (see the story of Mary and Martha and the role of Mary Magdalene in bringing the news of the Resurrection, for example), not any of his teaching.  His teaching is simply irrelevant to the classical theory of atonement, which focuses exclusively on Jesus’ death.  It ignores his life.  It even ignores his Resurrection, which the classical theory of atonement in no way requires.  The way in which the classical theory of atonement focuses the Christian’s attention exclusively on Jesus’ death goes hand in hand, both theoretically and historically, with the way the Christian tradition made the faith be about how our souls get to heaven when we die rather than about how we live our lives here on earth; and it shares the danger and the fallacy of the Christian focus on heaven of making our commitment to Jesus’ way of peace and justice irrelevant. 

The person with whom I had that conversation in which she said that Jesus came to die is a good Christian person with a generous spirit and a kind heart.  She struggles with Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence, as I suppose we all do.  She was expressing an understanding that the Christian Church has given her, one that has biblical support, among other places, in the Gospel of John’s version of Jesus’ arrest.  In that story, when Peter strikes out with a sword to defend Jesus, Jesus says:  “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”  John 18:11  The author of the Gospel of John believed that preventing Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion would have stopped Jesus from accomplishing the most important thing that he came to do, namely, to die.  So does the classical theory of atonement. 

Which of course does not mean that we must profess the classical theory of atonement.  That theory does in fact offer one powerful explanation of the significance of Jesus Christ for us humans.  Yet the theory’s shortcomings are so significant and so manifold that in the end we must reject it.  One of those shortcomings that I find to be quite significant  is the way in which it makes Jesus irrelevant for human life.  My friend, echoing the classical theory of atonement, said:  He came to die.  Respectfully, speaking the truth in love, we reply:  No he didn’t.

Fred Phelps and Freedom of Speech

In its recent case Snyder v. Phelps The United States Supreme Court upheld a decision by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned a large monetary judgment against Fred Phelps, his family, and Westboro Baptist Church (which consists almost entirely of members of Phelps’ family) (hereafter “Westboro”) on the grounds that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech shields Westboro from civil damages in lawsuits based on activities that constitute free speech.  In this case the father of an American serviceman who had been killed in the line of duty sued Westboro for compensatory and punitive damages because Westboro had picketed his son’s funeral with their usual signs saying things like “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.”  Westboro’s demonstration took place approximately 1,000 feet from the site of the funeral and in accordance with regulations of the appropriate local authorities governing demonstrations.  Mr. Snyder saw the tops of Westboro’s signs, but he did not learn of their content until after the funeral.  Mr. Snyder sued Westboro in federal court and won a large monetary judgment for both compensatory and punitive damages from a jury.  The federal trial court reduced the award of punitive damages but otherwise let the jury’s verdict stand.  The United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the judgment in favor of Mr. Snyder on First Amendment grounds.  The Supreme Court accepted review of the case and, on March 2 of this year, affirmed the decision of the Circuit Court overturning Mr. Snyder’s judgment against Westboro.  The Supreme Court held that while Westboro’s speech that led to the judgment might be despicable and hurtful, the First Amendment protects even such speech that others find despicable and hurtful.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court. Six other justices of all political leanings joined in Roberts’ opinion.  Justice Breyer filed a concurring opinion, meaning he agreed with the result but may have reached the result on the basis of different reasoning.  Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion, meaning that he would have affirmed the trial court and reinstated Mr. Snyder’s judgment against Westboro.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Snyder has been met with disbelief and anguish by many of my friends who find Fred Phelps and his actions to be despicable, hurtful, and un-Christian, as of course I do as well.  Let us take it for granted, then, that Fred Phelps is a disgrace to the sacred name Christian, that he does not deserve the honorable title “Reverend” that the media always give him, and that his actions reveal both a personal and a social pathology far more than they say anything even remotely faithful to Jesus Christ.  The issue here is not whether Fred Phelps and his actions are beyond deplorable.  They are, and there really is no question about that fact.  The issue in Snyder was actually a very narrow legal one, not a moral or theological one.  The issue that the Supreme Court addressed was only whether the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects persons who engage in speech within the law as established by competent local authorities from civil liability in favor persons who found the speech to be hurtful.  And let us just assume that Westboro’s speech was indeed hurtful to Mr. Snyder as it certainly would be hurtful to anyone in his state of grief at the death of his son.

The Supreme Court held that yes, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does protect persons engaging in such speech from such civil liability.  In reaching its decision the Court held that Westboro’s speech here was public as opposed to private speech, a distinction in First Amendment law that can affect the level of constitutional protection the speech is afforded.  Public speech on a public issue is afforded the highest level of constitutional protection.  The Court held that that protection means in this case that the constitutionally protected speech at issue could not be the basis of a civil judgment for damages against the persons engaging in the speech.  Allowing such civil liability for constitutionally protected speech would inhibit citizens in the exercise of their free speech rights.

I understand the emotional reaction many of my friends have against this decision.  Indeed, I share it.  It remains true, however, that it is precisely difficult cases like this one that test the strength of our commitment to free speech.  In her biography of Voltaire the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend the death your right to say it” to characterize Voltaire’s belief.  The line is often misattributed to Voltaire himself.  Whoever first penned it, this line brilliantly sums up the concept of freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech has no meaning if it applies only to speech of which I, or you, or a majority of Americans approve.  We need a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech precisely because people must be free to say things with which other people disagree. 

In the law world it is commonplace that difficult cases make bad law.  This is a difficult case because Westboro’s speech is so hateful, is so hurtful.  That’s why the Supreme Court’s decision strikes us as bad law.  Yet I ask my friends who are upset by this decision to consider:  To draw lines around speech on the basis of whether a majority of people find it hateful and even hurtful is to start us down a very dangerous path.  I have said things in this blog, for example, that I’m sure would cause, indeed may have caused, some people to want to silence me because they so disagree with what I have to say.  Many Americans, I’m sure, consider the things I have had to say about American imperialism and the military, for example, to be un-American and worthy of being censored.  Yet I know that as an American I have the freedom to say what I believe, and no one has the right to stop me.  I am not willing to give up that right even if it means that I must extend the same right to Fred Phelps, whose speech I consider to be nothing less than diabolical.

The extremely broad scope of our constitutional protection of freedom of speech is one way in which we Americans differ from many of our European cousins.  The European Union has a law prohibiting hate speech, and some of its members have had such laws for a long time.  Those laws are understandable.  Historically in places like Austria and Germany they arose after World War II in response to the Holocaust and the anti-Semitic speech that fueled it.  We can understand such laws, but America’s legal tradition is different.  Freedom of speech is a foundational American value, and it has meaning for us primarily and particularly when it applies to speech we abhor.

It is easy to imagine a scenario in which our courts would reach a different result.  If the Westboro people had violated the local regulations that kept them 1,000 feet away from the funeral, for example, or if they engaged in violence, they would have overstepped the limits of freedom of speech and forfeited their First Amendment protections.  In this case, however, they did not do that.  The Supreme Court’s decision in Snyder v. Phelps may be a hard one for us to accept, so despicable are Fred Phelps and his followers.  I for one, however, will tolerate bigots like Fred Phelps rather than give up Americans’ historic and cherished freedom of speech.