A Historical Perspective on Russia and Ukraine

Some people at the church I serve recently asked me to give a talk on Russian history and Ukraine in light of the current crisis between Russia and Ukraine. I do, after all, have a PhD in Russian history. So I agreed to do it. I gave that talk on May 17, 2014. By then I had received a couple of requests for a text of my presentation from people who couldn't be there. I didn't give the talk from a prepared text, only from an outline. I have however typed up a document based on that outline that more or less reflects what I said in the talk. Here it is.

Russia and Ukraine

The Historical Background Of a Contemporary Crisis

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

May, 2014

About the author: Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson is Co-Pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA. In addition to degrees in ministry and law he holds a PhD in Russian History from the University of Washington. His PhD dissertation is a study of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905 and tutor of the last two tsars.

INTRODUCTION TO A CRISIS

Russia and Ukraine have been much in the news lately. A popular uprising in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine ousted a pro-Russian popularly elected but corrupt Ukrainian government. Russia (technically The Russian Federation) has interfered with the territorial integrity of the Republic of Ukraine by taking control of the Crimean Peninsula, which had been part of Ukraine since 1954 but part of Russia since 1789. Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine have taken over cities and districts and fought bloody battles with Ukrainian troops and armed civilians. Russia has massed troops on its long border with Ukraine and is very probably meddling in internal Ukrainian affairs. The United States and the European Union have attempted to defend Ukraine, punish Russia, and influence Russia’s actions by imposing certain economic sanctions on leading figures in the Russian government and economy. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine run high, and the future of Russian involvement in Ukraine and of the continuing territorial integrity of Ukraine are very much in doubt.

The current crisis in Ukraine is rooted in a long history. That history begins with the very beginnings of Russian history in the tenth century CE. It involves conquest of the lands now called Ukraine by Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians among others. It becomes part of the history of the expansion of the Russian Empire and of the persistent conflict between Russia and the West. It is a long and complex history. I can give only a cursory overview of it here, but perhaps even that cursory overview will help us understand the current crisis more deeply than we can from the reports in the popular media, reports that rarely reflect much awareness of the historical context that shapes the crisis.

My thesis here is that the histories of Russia and Ukraine are so inextricably intertwined that they cannot truly be separated. Historically, Russians have not seen Ukrainian as a language and a culture distinct from the Russian language and culture while, for the last two hundred years or so, Ukrainians have aggressively claimed that they are. Today they are distinct, but traditional understandings change very slowly. The tensions between Russia and Ukraine today reflect the vagueness of Ukrainian identity, Russia’s long denial of a unique identity to the Ukrainians, and the demographic overlapping between Russian and Ukrainian populations. I intend nothing I say here as a justification for the actions of either the Russians or the Ukrainians. Understanding must come before judgment. My project here is to increase your understanding of the crisis in Ukraine. I’ll happily leave the judging up to you.

SOME NECESSARY GEOGRAPHY

To understand the current crisis between Russia and Ukraine we must understand the geography of Ukraine, southern Russia, and western neighbors of Ukraine including Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. I will not include a map here because I don’t want to violate anyone’s copyright, but I urge you to go on line and look at a map of Ukraine that shows its relationship to Russia and its neighbors to the west. They’re easy to find through any search engine. Ukraine is located to the south of European Russia. It runs along the length of the northern shore of the Black Sea. In the northeast corner of the Black Sea is a large peninsula known as Crimea, or the Crimean Peninsula. Crimea is geographically contiguous with Ukraine, and it has no land border with Russia. Today on its western border Ukraine touches Moldova (like Ukraine a former Soviet Socialist Republic), Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. On the north Ukraine borders Belarus and Russia. To the east it borders only Russia.

The Dnieper River flows through Ukraine and played a vital role in the region’s early history. The river flows into Ukraine from the north. It flows more or less northwest to southeast across the country before making a turn to the southwest and emptying into the Black Sea to the east of the Ukrainian city of Odessa. The Black Sea itself opens to the Mediterranean through narrow straits at the Turkish city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. The Black Sea never freezes over as do Russia’s outlets to the Baltic Sea (St. Petersburg) and the far northerly Barents Sea (Murmansk). It will help you as we go along to become familiar with this geography.

THE BEGINNINGS: KIEVEN RUS’

Where does Russian history begin? In Russia? In Moscow? In St. Petersburg? In the old Russian cities of Novgorod, Vladimir, or Suzdal? No, Russian history begins in Kiev, the capital city of present day Ukraine. Thus we see the intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian history right from the start. In the tenth century CE an important trade route existed along rivers from Scandinavia on the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and on to Constantinople. The Dnieper River was a major artery of that trade route. An entity called Kievan Rus’ straddled the Dnieper at Kiev, as the city of Kiev does today. That word “Rus’” is the origin of the word Russian, russkii in Russian. Kievan Rus’ was a Slavic culture, closely related to the languages and cultures of what today are Bulgaria and Serbia and a bit less closely related to the cultures and languages of Poland and other Slavic peoples. Under the rule of people who came to call themselves Grand Princes, Kiev came to control the trade along the Dnieper River.

The culture of Kievan Rus’ was Slavic, but it wasn’t Christian, at least not at first. Kievan Rus’ had a rather typical, primitive polytheistic religious system. In the year 988 CE something happened in Kievan Rus’ that all Russians have considered to be a central fact of Russian history from that day to this. In that year Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, known as Vladimir the Great or even Saint Vladimir to the Russians, converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity. An ancient document called the Chronicle of Nestor, also called the Primary Chronicle or the Tale of Bygone Years, tells an intriguing story of why Vladimir chose Greek Orthodox Christianity as his faith. The Chronicle says that he decided that he would adopt one of the world’s great religions, either Islam, Judaism, western Catholic Christianity, or Greek Orthodox Christianity. He sent emissaries to investigate each of these faiths. The emissaries returned a report on each of them. Among the Muslims they found nothing but sadness “and a great stench.” Besides, Islam forbids eating pork and drinking alcohol. That Vladimir couldn’t tolerate for, as he said, drinking is the joy of the Russian. (It still is, by the way, with frequent tragic consequences). The historical fact that the Jews had lost Jerusalem meant that God had abandoned them. (They “lost” it to the Romans in 70 CE, an awfully long time before Vladimir of Kiev, but never mind.) Among the Catholic churches they found no beauty whatsoever. Then they came to Constantinople and the great cathedral Hagia Sophia, The Church of the Holy Wisdom, the greatest church in Christendom at the time. They said that the place was so beautiful that they didn’t know if they were still on earth or had been transported to heaven. (Hagia Sophia, by the way, still exists. After the Turks took Constantinople in 1454 CE they turned it into a mosque. Today it is a museum.) Those reports convinced Vladimir that Orthodox Christianity was the only way to go. He converted and was baptized in the year 988 CE. In those days if the prince adopted a new religion so, eventually at least, did the rest of the population. The conversion of St. Vladimir in 988 CE is the beginning of the Russian Orthodox Church, and every Russian knows it. Of course, that old story is just that, a story. Vladimir’s conversion to Greek Orthodoxy certainly had more to do with commercial ties to Constantinople and cultural ties to the Orthodox Bulgarians that with reports from emissaries about different religions.

Still, the conversion of Vladimir to Orthodoxy in many ways marks the beginning of Russian history; and that seminal event of Russian history didn’t take place in what today is Russia. It took place in what today is Ukraine. Try thinking of the matter this way: How would a lot of Americans feel if Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and Valley Forge somehow ended up in Canada? They would still be the sites of seminal events in the history of the United States. We wouldn’t much like it if they belonged to a foreign country regardless of how much like our country that foreign country is. The parallel with Ukraine and Russia isn’t exact, for Ukrainian and Russian history are much longer than the history of the European cultures in North America. Still, the example may give you some idea of how Russians feel about Ukraine.

THE TARTAR YOKE AND THE RISE OF MOSCOW

Kiev remained the political and cultural center of the culture known as the Kievan Rus’ until the 1240s CE. That’s when the Mongols, often called the Tartars in Russian history (not to be confused with the Crimean Tatars, about whom more below), sacked Kiev. I’ll use the terms Mongols and Tartars interchangeably here. They’re the same people. The Mongols were from, of all places, Mongolia. They were Asiatic marauders who established a rule that extended from Russia in the west to China in the east. They dominated Russia (and much of Ukraine) for more than two hundred years. They were Muslims not Christians. They were eastern not western, Asian not European. Their sacking of Kiev left the Slavic people, the Rus’, with no political or cultural center of any significance. There were Russian cities and an Orthodox culture in places other than Kiev. They included the ancient Russian cities of Vladimir, Suzdal, and Novgorod, all to the north or northeast of the Ukraine and Kiev. They also included the little town of Moscow, which at the beginning of the Mongol period of Russian history amounted to precisely nothing. Moscow had a prince of course, but he didn’t amount to anything. Eventually, however, the Prince of Moscow signed on with the Mongols as their agent for collection of tribute from the Russian lands. Thus began the rise of Moscow.

Eventually Moscow, under rulers now call not just prince but Grand Prince, freed Russia from Mongol domination. That process wasn’t completed until the sixteenth century, but much of it was done in the fifteenth century. In particular a Grand Prince of Moscow named Ivan III, 1440-1506, known to history as Ivan the Great, had significant success in freeing Moscow and the Russian lands from the Tartars. He is known as “the gatherer of the Russian lands.” He tripled the size of the territory Moscow ruled.

Under Ivan III an ideology developed about the divine ordination of Russian rule. It’s known as Moscow, the Third Rome. That theory says that there had been two Romes before Moscow. The first one was ancient Rome itself. The city of Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire had been destroyed by invading Huns and other northern people by the end of the fifth century CE. The second Rome was Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine, the one who first legalized, then converted to Christianity, had made his new city of Constantinople, on the Bosporus, the strait at the opening of the Black Sea toward the Mediterranean, a second capital of the Roman Empire. After Rome fell in the west Constantinople became the capital of what was called the Byzantine Empire, which really was just the eastern Roman Empire living on as a Christian empire. In 1454 the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims, conquered Constantinople. Thus the second Rome had fallen just as the first one had. The second Rome, Constantinople, had been a Greek Orthodox empire, at least in form. Moscow was an Orthodox power, again at least in form. So Muscovites began to see themselves as the Third Rome. They said there have been three Romes, and there shall never be a fourth. Few of us, I suppose, think of Moscow as any kind of Rome, but a lot of Russians did in the late fifteenth century.

The next significant Grand Prince of Moscow was Ivan IV, 1530-1584, known to the world as Ivan the Terrible. (His nickname in Russian actually means something more like Ivan the Threatening, but never mind.) Ivan IV is famous because at the end of his life he was probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His condition was of course a tragedy for him but perhaps even more of a tragedy for the people upon whom he inflicted his paranoid delusions. He killed his own son in a fit of rage. He build St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the famous one with the multicolored onion domes. Then he put out the eyes of the church’s architect so that he could never build anything else as beautiful as St. Basil’s. More significantly, Ivan IV put a final end to the Mongol presence in Russia. The Mongols still has a fortress at the city of Kazan on the upper Volga River northeast of Moscow. Ivan’s forces famously tunneled under the city, filled the tunnel with explosives, and blew the place up.

Ivan consolidated the power of the Grand Prince of Moscow. He brought the landowning nobility under his control. Most significantly, he started to use the title Tsar. You will sometimes see it transliterated as Czar, but the correct transliteration into English is Tsar. It is a Russian corruption of the Latin word Caesar. Rome had had a Caesar. Byzantium had had a Caesar. Moscow, the Third Rome, would have a Caesar too, only in the Slavic language of the Russians it came out as Tsar. Ivan IV was the first Tsar. Nicholas II was the last.

Even after Ivan the Terrible the lands Moscow ruled did not include Kiev and the territory we now call Ukraine. Some of that land remained under Tartar domination for a time, but as the Tartars’ power fell much of Ukraine, especially its western portions, came to be ruled by Lithuania (which was a significant regional power at the time) or Poland (another significant power) or a Lithuanian/Polish confederation. Other parts of what today are parts of Russia and Ukraine came to be ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but it is significant for our purposes that much of what today is Ukraine was ruled by western, Catholic (that is, not Orthodox) powers for a very long time. Russia proper, including Moscow, never was, or at least never was for long.

The domination of Russia by the Mongols had a profound effect on Russian history and culture. Russia was cut off from all of the major developments of west European history for a very long time by the Mongol domination. The Scholastic Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which produced such giants of western thought as Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, never reached Moscow, and not just because Moscow was Orthodox rather than Catholic. The Renaissance proper, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had no effect on Russia at all because Russia was still cut off from Europe. Russian culture develop independently of those great western developments. It became a more eastern, Asian culture, or perhaps better, an admixture of Asian and European cultures. Russia was, after all, Christian, not Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Still, Ivan IV ruled more as an Asian khan than as a European monarch.

It was different in Ukraine, or at least in western Ukraine. Those territories came to be ruled by European, Roman Catholic powers. Poland in particular was (and is) a major European culture. Poland’s Roman Catholicism tied it to western Europe, to Catholic Germany and to Italy. Developments in European culture flowed easily into Poland and through Poland into Ukraine. Most of Polish Ukraine didn’t become Catholic, but part of it did come into full communion with Rome through a union signed at Brest-Litovsk in 1596 that allowed the Ukrainian churches to keep their Orthodox liturgy while coming under the jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome. Ukraine, or at least part of it, was becoming more western than Russia was. Keep in mind, however, that there still wasn’t much of anything called Ukraine and not much of anyone who would have called their language and culture Ukrainian. They were Rus’, that is, to a considerable extent they were Russian.

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Enter Peter the Great, 1672-1725. Peter I, Tsar of All the Russians, is one of the most fascinating and powerful figures in all of European history, not just Russian history. Under Peter Russia became an empire in fact and not just because its ruler called himself Caesar (Tsar). Peter was obsessed both with expanding Russian power and with western Europe. He traveled in western Europe. He studied shipbuilding in Holland. He made his nobles shave their beards and adopt western dress. He built a summer palace on the Gulf of Finland that he called “Petergof,” a Russian form of the German name Peterhof, Russian having no H sound. Today it is called Petrodvorets, a translation of Peterhof into Russian. It is an eighteenth century European palace that would not look out of place were it located just outside Paris. It really is quite magnificent. He forced the construction of a brand new city in swampland on the River Neva near the Gulf of Finland. He made it look like a western city, and today it still pretty much does. He called it St. Petersburg, essentially naming it after himself (or at least after his patron saint, Saint Peter). It became the capital of his empire. Under the Soviets it was called Leningrad, but today it is again St. Petersburg. It is easily the most western looking of the Russian cities. Peter built his western city where the Neva flows into the Gulf of Finland precisely because from there Russian ships could easily sail to western Europe and beyond.

Peter was fascinated with the west, and he made the people of his court adopt western ways, but he still ruled in quite an eastern way. If a courtier didn’t shave off his beard, Peter would grab the man and shave it off himself. He has his own son killed. He was brusque and gruff in his personal demeanor and hardly the cultured European he wanted people to think he was. He played at being western, but he didn’t even begin to make Russia itself much more western than it already was. Most Russians still lived the way they had for centuries, as peasants tied to the land through the system of serfdom that wasn’t quite slavery but was pretty close to it. And Peter’s power never extended to Ukraine, much of which was under Polish control during Peter’s time.

Then we come to the fourth “Great” Russian ruler in our story after Vladimir, Ivan, and Peter. Catherine the Great ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796. Catherine is another really famous ruler of Russia, being the Tsarina rather than the Tsar because Russian nouns carry gender. She’s a famous Russian ruler, but she wasn’t a Russian. She was a German. She was married off to Tsar Peter III and came to power in a coup that ousted him. Catherine did more to expand the Russian Empire than any other Russian ruler before or after her. Most significantly for our purposes she captured the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Turks in 1789. Crimea remained part of Russia until 1954, and the Russians have now taken it back from Ukraine. She participated with Prussia and Austria-Hungary in the partition of Poland that ended Polish rule in Ukraine. During her reign all of Ukraine gradually came under Russian rule. By the end of the eighteenth century Ukraine was part of Russia. It had been the birthplace of Russian civilization but had developed along quite different paths from Russia since the thirteenth century. Part of it, the western part, had had much closer ties with western Europe than Russia had ever had. Many Ukrainians had come to think of themselves as more western than those benighted Russians, as many Ukrainians no doubt saw them. Ukraine had not voluntarily joined Russia. It had been absorbed by Russia.

The Crimean Peninsula and Ukraine became part of Russia, and to the Russians several events that occurred thereafter in Ukraine are pivotal events in modern Russian history. Many of us have heard of the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Under Tsar Nicholas I, a true reactionary, Russia had been exerting its influence in the Balkans, where the Russians came to consider themselves the protectors of the Orthodox Serbs against both the Ottoman Turks (who were Muslim, not Christian) and the Catholic Austrians. As the Ottoman Empire weakened Russia saw a chance to control the Black Sea access to the Mediterranean in a way it had never been able to do before. Western powers, especially Britain and France, opposed the expansion of Russian influence into that part of Europe. They fought the Crimean War to stop Russian expansion. We know that war best perhaps from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which tells the story of a battle from the Crimean War that didn’t go well for that particular unit of British forces.

Still, Russia lost the Crimean War, and that loss was something of a turning point in Imperial Russian history. In 1855, while the war was still on, Tsar Nicholas I died. He was succeeded by his son, Tsar Alexander II, 1818-1881, reigned 1855-1881. Alexander saw Russia’s weakness exposed by the loss to western powers in the Crimean War, and he vowed to do something about it. He introduced a series of reforms based on western models. Most significantly he emancipated the serfs. It was only a sort of half reform that left the peasants badly in debt to the landowners, but it did make it possible for some of them to leave the land to work in the new factories in the cities. He introduced a jury system into Russia. He introduced a kind of limited self rule for rural districts of the country. He reformed the army. Alexander II is really important in the modern history of Russia, and his work was all motivated by events that had happened not in Russia proper but in Crimea.

From the fifteenth century on the population of the Crimean Peninsula had consisted mostly of people known as the Crimean Tatars. They were, and are, a people with a Turkic language and Muslim faith. They arose as an identifiable ethnic group under Ottoman rule. For centuries they lived largely off the slave trade, capturing Russians and others and selling them to the Turks. They remained the majority population of the Crimean Peninsula until 1944. More about that below.

Ukraine continued to play an important role in Russian history into the twentieth century. There was a revolution against Tsar Nicholas II in 1905, the first Russian revolution, not the one that brought the Communists to power. One iconic event in that revolution was the revolt of the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin. The great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made a film of the incident that most every Russian knows. It is for Russians something like the sinking of the US battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 was for Americans, something everyone knows about. Just as the Maine wasn’t sunk in the US, the crew of the Potemkin didn’t revolt in what today is Russia. They did it in Odessa, the major Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

The attitude of the Russian government toward Ukraine throughout the imperial period is telling. The Russian imperial authorities did not consider Ukrainian to be a separate language. They called it a dialect of Russian and didn’t allow it to be taught in the schools. They didn’t consider Ukraine to have a distinct culture. To them, Ukrainians were just Russians who spoke a bit funny. That attitude produced significant tensions in Ukraine. As happened with peoples in much of central and eastern Europe at the same time, beginning in the early nineteenth century Ukrainians began to see themselves as a distinct people with their own history and their own culture that they wanted to develop and practice. The Russians wouldn’t let them. Many Ukrainians were not exactly pleased.

THE SOVIET PERIOD

On Nov. 7, 1917 (October 25 by the old calendar the Russians still used at the time), Vladimir Lenin led a gang of his cohorts known as the Bolsheviks into the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (called Petrograd at the time because St. Petersburg was way too German to use when Russia was at war with Germany). They captured the members of the Provisional Government, an ineffective bunch of western style intellectuals and politicians who had taken over Russia when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March (February under the old calendar) because of the disaster World War I had been for Russia. The Soviets called the events of Nov. 7, 1917, the Great October Revolution (October of course because it happened in October not November under the old calendar). I still have in my home office a label pin I got in Russia with Lenin’s picture on it next to the word October. The revolution was at the beginning more of a coup d’état than a true revolution, but never mind. The Soviet period of Russian (and Ukrainian) history had begun.

Lenin quickly made peace with Germany, ending Russia’s involvement in the World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He knew he could do nothing with the country while the war was still raging. Besides, to him World War I was nothing but an imperialist struggle between capitalist powers that he wanted nothing to do with. His coup was followed by a long and bloody civil war between the Communists, as the Bolsheviks came to call themselves, and various groups opposed to Communist rule, generally called the Whites to distinguish them from Lenin’s Reds. Eventually the Communists prevailed and established rule by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Its rule extended throughout most of what had been the Russian Empire, including most of what today is Ukraine. In 1922 Lenin created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR to most of us. “Soviet,” by the way, is just an ordinary Russian word that means “council,” the rebels of 1905 having created soviets, councils, as governing authorities in areas they briefly freed from Imperial rule and making the soviet the ideal governmental form for the Communists. Originally there were four constituent Soviet Republics. There eventually came to be fifteen of them, but how that happened doesn’t matter for our purposes because Ukraine was one of the original four and remained a Soviet Socialist Republic until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Originally the Crimean Peninsula was part of the Russian republic, not the Ukrainian one.

In the late 1920s and the 1930s the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dictated over by Josef Stalin, began a policy of the forced collectivization of agriculture. That means that the Communist regime was going to reorganize essentially all farming in the country into collectives in which the individual people owned no land of their own and were obligated to grow and harvest crops and quantities dictated to them by the central planners in Moscow. The peasantry throughout the Soviet Union resisted. They even killed their own farm livestock to keep it from being turned over to a collective farm. Stalin decided to force the peasantry to comply by starving millions of them to death through an artificially engineered famine. He did it throughout the country, but he did it most thoroughly and most viciously in Ukraine, where the Soviet Union’s richest farmland was located. One head of the Ukrainian Communist Party in the 1930s was Nikita Khrushchev. More about him anon.

In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The German armies rather quickly overran Ukraine and Crimea. There was so much anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiment among the Ukrainian population that many scholars believe that Hitler could have made Ukraine an ally and gotten a great many Ukrainians to join him in fighting the Soviets. He didn’t. His demented racial ideology told him that all Slavic people, including Ukrainians, were subhuman. He didn’t want them as allies, he wanted to exterminate them and settle Germans in their land. Instead of enlisting them as allies the Nazis alienated the Ukrainians but good. Some of them fought with the Soviet Red Army against the Germans. Some joined guerilla bands that fought both the Germans and the Soviets. Few supported the Germans.

With one exception, although the exception was in Russia not Ukraine at the time. That exception was the Crimean Tatars. Many of them corroborated with the Germans, who occupied Crimea for a time. In 1944 the Red Army retook Crimea. Stalin retaliated against all of the Crimean Tatars, not just the ones who had supported the Germans. He set out to deport every last one of them out of Crimea. Many fled the country, with large numbers of them ending up in Turkey. Stalin, however, succeeded in deporting most of them to other parts of the Soviet Union, especially Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Crimea was resettled with Russians, and its population has remained predominately Russian to this day.

The Soviet Union of course defeated the Germans in World War II. The Russians don’t call that war World War II. They call it the Great War of the Fatherland (or depending on how you translate the Russian words, The Great Patriotic War). The suffering of the Soviet people was unimaginable. They had suffered under Stalin for nearly twenty years when the war began, then many of them suffered under the Nazis. Soviet casualties in the war are usually said to number around twenty million. Compare that to the less than 500,000 that the US lost. I don’t mean to minimize the losses to the families of those Americans who were killed, but in the Soviet Union every family had people who were killed. When I was there in 1968 people were surprised when I said that both of my parents were still alive. For Soviet people just a little older than I am having lost at least one parent in the war was so common that it was almost assumed. The Soviets of course used the war as an excuse for the economic harshness of Soviet life for a long time after the war, but there was some truth in that excuse. The country suffered horribly. Some of that suffering was of their own making, but the suffering cannot be denied or minimized. And Ukraine suffered as much or more than any other part of the country.

World War II ended in 1945 with an allied victory brought about more by the Soviet Union than by any other country, ours included. Stalin resumed his reign of terror, albeit with perhaps a bit less vehemence than he had had before the war. As part of the events that ended the war Stalin annexed some territory that had belonged to Czechoslovakia or Hungary to the Ukrainian SSR.

Stalin died in 1953. Shortly thereafter Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of both the Communist Party and the country. Recall that he had been the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party back in the 1930s. Despite the immense brutality of Communist policies in Ukraine at that time, Khrushchev seems to have had something of a soft spot in his heart for Ukraine. That at least is one explanation given for the fact that in 1954 he engineered the transfer of Crimea from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian Republic. At that point Crimea had been part of Russia since Catherine the Great conquered it from the Turks in 1789, 165 years earlier. After Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars its population was mostly Russian, not Ukrainian. It is of course true that Crimea has a land border with Ukraine but none with Russia, and under the Soviet system it didn’t make much of a difference to the people whether they were in Russia or in Ukraine. Still, as we have seen, Crimea had seen crucial events in the history of Russia and was clearly Russian territory. Nonetheless, Khrushchev got the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a top legislative body in the USSR, to transfer Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet didn’t actually have the legal authority to do it; but if the Party wanted something, legal niceties didn’t matter much. The Supreme Soviet changed the law a few days later to give itself the legal authority to do what it had already done. All that really mattered was that Khrushchev ran the Party, and Khrushchev wanted it done. Many have considered the transfer to have been illegal ever since. Legal or illegal, Crimea became part of the Ukrainian Republic in 1954 and remained part of it until a few weeks ago. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

THE POST-SOVIET ERA

The Soviet Union dissolved by order of the Supreme Soviet on December 26, 1991. The three Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had already gained their independence. Ukraine had also taken steps toward independence by that time. The order dissolving the USSR recognized the independence of the remaining twelve Soviet Socialist Republics. Among those Republics were the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Republic. The new nations that were formed had the same borders as they had had as Soviet Republics. That meant that Crimea became part of the newly independent Republic of Ukraine. The rest of the world quickly recognized the newly independent republics as independent nations, which meant that both Russia and the rest of the world had recognized Crimea as part of Ukraine. But of course Crimea had been part of Ukraine for only thirty-seven years at that point, the mere blink of an eye in historical perspective. And Crimea’s population was overwhelmingly Russian, not Ukrainian. Crimea was given some sort of autonomous status within Ukraine, but it was still part of Ukraine.

The Republic of Ukraine has a more or less democratic constitution. In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych was elected President with 48% of the vote. Of course, the old divisions and tensions within Ukraine remained. The population was only something like 77% Ukrainian, with most of the rest of the population, including virtually all of the population of Crimea, being Russian. The Russians were, and are, concentrated mostly in the eastern parts of Ukraine that border on Russia. They looked to Russia for the aid Ukraine badly needed to deal with its severe economic difficulties. Most people in the rest of Ukraine looked to the European Union for that help.

Yanukovych leaned toward Russia. He scuttled an embryonic agreement that the previous Ukrainian administration had worked out with the European Union and sought closer economic ties with Russia. The people of Kiev and the western parts of the country rebelled. Their massive demonstrations brought down the Yanukovych government, and Yanukovych himself—a major league crook as it turned out—fled to Russia. A more western-leaning government took his place. That government, which currently runs Ukraine (more or less) was never popularly elected. Russia has something of a point when they say that that government is illegal. Yanukovych may have been a crook, and many people may have disliked his policies, but he had at least been popularly elected. The current government of Ukraine never was.

Whereupon Russia, under its President Vladimir Putin, took Crimea from Ukraine. Putin just sent in the troops and took it. It was a bit more complicated than that of course, but that’s essentially what happened. The Russians cooked up a referendum that had the people of Crimea vote for union with Russia, but of course most of the people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians. The world, including the US with President Obama leading the way, reacted with outrage. Russia’s action in taking Crimea from Ukraine was indeed clearly a violation of international law. Russia violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine as both Russia and the rest of the world had recognized it when the USSR dissolved. Still, it seems to me that the matter is hardly so simple. The people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians (for the most part at least). The port city of Sevastopol is the home port of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet, and it has been that for a very long time. To the Russians Crimea is Russian. That doesn’t give them the legal right to take it under international law, but it surely explains why they did what they did. After all, to them the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 was illegal from the beginning. Beyond that, who was going to stop them? Surely not Ukraine. The Russian military could overrun Ukraine without even trying very hard. Surely not the US. We have no vested interest in the matter other than respect for international law, which is after all an abstraction that we ourselves violate whenever we feel like it. (Exhibit A: George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.) Moreover, Russia has enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over. There’s no way we’re going to war with Russia over Crimea (or I trust over anything else). It seems to me that the Russian annexation of Ukraine is a done deal. It is justified by numerous historical and demographic circumstances. We just need to get over it.

Of course tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and between Ukrainian and Russian citizens of Ukraine, continue. Many cities and districts of the easternmost portion of Ukraine have majority Russian populations. The economy is in bad shape. In the eastern part of Ukraine the economy is based on mining and heavy industry related to the mining. It consists, however, mostly of Soviet era equipment that is obsolete and horribly inefficient. All of Ukraine needs outside economic assistance on a huge scale. The country is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas for its energy supply, as by the way is Germany. The historical enmeshing of Russia and Ukraine that we have briefly reviewed here simply cannot be ignored. We don’t know what Putin is going to do, but clearly we must base our response to whatever he does on a better understanding of the history of the region than our response so far seems to reflect. I hope that my humble efforts at explanation here help you with that understanding.

Good Friday Sermon

Yesterday, April 18, 2014, was Good Friday. We did our customary Good Friday evening worship service at Monroe Congregational UCC. My wife and co-pastor Jane thought attendance wasn't bad. I thought it was terrible. We had around two dozen people, including all who were there because they are in the choir and including a few children. That's about one-third of the total congregation. I thought that turn out was bad because for me Good Friday is the most holy day of the Christian year. Not Easter. Jesus' Resurrection after all follows his Crucifixion and wouldn't have happened if he hadn't died. That our founding figure did not die a natural death but was executed by the Roman Empire as a political criminal is one of the relatively few things that truly distinguish Christianity from other great faith traditions. If Christianity is not to be a rank lie there must be profound meaning in Jesus' death.Of course there is meaning in his Resurrection too, but we don't have difficulty getting people to celebrate Easter. Most of them won't come to Good Friday services no matter how much we explain and how much we cajole. I don't see how you can take being a Christian seriously and not commemorate Jesus' execution on Good Friday, so either most of the people of my church think you can or they don't take being a Christian very seriously. I won't express an opinion here as to which of those possibilities is the more correct. Whatever the reasons were that caused most of our people not to attend our Good Friday worship, I find their decision not to attend to be quite discouraging. 

I gave a Good Friday meditation at that service. At least one of our people who did attend--and she drove a considerable distance to do it--called this morning and told me she found my remarks very powerful and moving. I found them powerful and moving as I gave them, so I'm posting them here. I hope they mean something profound to you too.

O Yeah. You Get It

A Good Friday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

April 18, 2014

Scripture:  Mark 15:25-39

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.

A few weeks ago I attended our Conference’s annual clergy retreat at Pilgrim Firs. In one of our sessions we were talking about Holy Week, and one of my colleagues asked: “Why do we call it Good Friday?” I was a little surprised to hear the question from a clergy colleague, but I have heard it often enough from the people of the church. After all, there doesn’t seem to be much good about it. Jesus, the one we call the Christ, God’s Anointed One, the one we confess to be the Son of God, indeed to be the Word of God become flesh, to be nothing less than God Incarnate, gets brutally executed by the Roman Empire as a political criminal. That is what happened after all. The Romans crucified Jesus. They killed him in a most brutal way designed to increased the condemned person’s suffering for everyone to see. Surely there is nothing good about crucifixion. Indeed, many of us believe (and I am convinced that all of us are called to believe) that any form of capital punishment inflicted on anyone is a grossly immoral. Certainly the execution of Jesus was anything but good. So why do we call this day on which we remember that execution Good Friday?

When my colleague asked that question at our clergy retreat I spoke up. I don’t often do that at these gatherings. Mostly I can’t get a word in even when I want to because the extroverts are taking up all the air time. But I spoke up this time. I said “I can tell you why it’s Good Friday.” Then I told this story, or at least a shortened version of it. I know some of you have heard me tell it before, but I think it’s worth telling again.

In May, 2007, my twin brother Pete suffered a severe stroke. At first we thought he wouldn’t survive it. That’s what his younger son told me when he called the morning after it had happened. Then it became at least a possibility that he would survive; so after Jane and I drove to Eugene to tell my father what had happened, I flew to Tucson to be with Pete and his family. Pete was in the ICU at a Catholic hospital there. It was really hard for me to be there, although of course not as hard as it was for Pete to be there. We were pretty confident he would live; but we didn’t know how disabled he would be, although the best case scenario involved substantial loss of movement and possible cognitive impairment. I’ve always said that Pete and I have never been as close as people think twins always are, but his stroke hit me pretty hard. I was grieving. I was scared for him and for his wife. It was an emotionally difficult time.

I spent time in Pete’s room with him and his wife Virginia. I spent other time in the family room of the hospital’s ICU wing. As I sat there grieving and stewing about what had happened and what my brother’s future life might be I noticed a crucifix on the wall. It was, after all, a Catholic hospital. A crucifix, for any of you who don’t know, isn’t just an empty cross like we Protestants use. It is a cross with the body of Jesus on it. It is a graphic representation of Jesus suffering and dying. It is the scene of Good Friday. As I sat in that family room of that hospital on the verge of tears I looked up at that crucifix, and I said: “O yeah. You get it. You’ve been here, and worse.” Seeing that crucifix and saying those words helped. They helped me feel some better. They helped me be more present for Pete and Virginia. When I told that story at our clergy retreat I said “that’s why it’s Good Friday.” My colleague who had asked the question said: “Well, that’s a pretty good answer.” Indeed. It is a very good answer.

Good Friday is Good Friday not Bad Friday, not Tragic Friday, not The Friday of Tears, because that isn’t just any man on the cross that we remember today. It isn’t just any man on the cross in that crucifix on the wall in that Tucson hospital. It is Jesus, and Jesus isn’t just any man. He is the Son of God. He is God the Son become human. He is God in human form experiencing the worst that human life has to offer. That Friday was very bad news for Jesus, but that bad news for Jesus is very good news for us. It is very good news for us because in the crucifixion of Jesus we see that God gets it. God gets everything about human life. Most importantly, God gets it about the worst that human life brings us. In Jesus God experiences human pain—excruciating, soul-killing physical pain. God experiences human death. It is not an exaggeration to say that in Jesus on the cross God dies a human death. God enters into human mortality and experiences in God’s own person what it is and what it is like. In Jesus on the cross God suffers gross human injustice in God’s own person. In Jesus God is persecuted, prosecuted, wrongly convicted, and wrongly executed. In Jesus on the cross God experiences human injustice worse than most of us every will. In Jesus God knows. In Jesus God gets it.

And that God in Jesus gets it makes all the difference for us. It makes all the difference for us because when we see Jesus on the cross we know that God does not forsake human suffering. God does not forsake human death. In Jesus on the cross God enters into them. More than that God sanctifies them, God makes them holy because God makes them God’s.

Jesus cried “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus knew the human experience of the absence of God. Jesus knew the human experience of abandonment by God. But in Jesus it was God who knew the absence of God. In Jesus it was God who knew the experience of abandonment by God. Because in Jesus it was God who knew those things we know that God is not really absent when we feel God’s absence. God has not really abandoned us when we feel that God has abandoned us. We can look at Jesus abandoned by God on the cross and say O yeah, you get it. You’ve been there. You’ve been where we are. You’ve felt what we feel, and worse. You’ve had the experiences of pain and death, and you are present with us in our experiences of pain and death. In our times of pain, grief, and death we can see your presence when we see Jesus on the cross. We can know that you are there with us. We can know that you hold us. You sustain us. You comfort us.

Yes, at first we feel alone. We feel your absence. Those feelings are real, and we should not deny them. But when you feel them, look at the cross. Look at Jesus on the cross. Then maybe you can say what I said in that hospital in Tucson seven years ago. O yeah. You get it. You’ve been here, and worse. You know my pain. You know my grief. You are present with me in them. And when you can say that you will feel God’s unfailing arms of grace holding you tight. It won’t make all the pain go away, but it will make the pain easier to bear because you will know that you do not bear it alone. God, even God, bears it with you.

Knowing that helps. It really helps. That’s what we know in Jesus on the cross. We know that God is present with us in the worst that life brings us. We can know that God’s presence will sustain us. God’s presence will get us through. God’s presence will draw us near to our source and our goal, to our Creator and our Sustainer. Trust me. I know. I’ve been there. It helps. Yeah. God knows. God has been there. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Modernist?

Modernist?

At the Tuesday evening session of the 2014 meeting of the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion I presented the response that I had written to the book Evangelical vs. Liberal by James Wellman. You can find that paper immediately below this one on this blog. In that presentation I said that if Christianity is going to survive it must adapt to the “tectonic shift” that is under way from modernism to postmodernism. I said that what Wellman calls the liberal churches are in a position to do that in a way that his evangelical churches are not because evangelical, literalist Christianity is grounded in a modernist literalism that is a product of modernism’s reduction of truth to fact. I grant that I was pretty critical of literalist Christianity. I said that it is already dead, it’s just that there are still lots of people who don’t know it yet. I’ve said that many times before, and I think it is true. My presentation, however, provoked a very interesting and challenging response.

Present at our gathering was Michael Kinnamon, former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, former professor at Eden Seminary and a former seminary head, and currently a visiting professor at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, my alma mater. He said that he liked and appreciated my paper, but he also said that he sees my position as itself thoroughly modernist because it sets up one vision of Christianity as tenable and the other as untenable in the postmodern world. I said that’s fair. I think it is fair, but I don’t think it’s right. Since that session I have given the matter some thought, and I want here to think it through some more.

Kinnamon, one of the world’s leading Christian ecumenicists, doesn’t like my interpretation because it is on some level exclusivist. It denies the ultimate legitimacy of religious literalism. I grant that. I think literalism is just flat wrong. I think that it is ultimately untenable. I don’t want to accommodate it, I want to defeat it. I am convinced that it will kill Christianity if we can’t overcome it. Literalism will kill Christianity because it is incompatible with the emerging worldview of postmodernism. Religious literalism of all kinds, not just Christian literalism, is incompatible with postmodernism because it is grounded in modernism’s reductionist ontology and epistemology. Modernism reduces truth to fact. That’s its reductionist ontology. Only facts are real. Only factual truth is true. Factual truth is known primarily through the scientific process, but for Christian literalism the Bible trumps mere human science. If an asserted scientific truth contradicts what Christian literalists see as a fundamental biblical truth, the Bible wins. Modern science does contradict fundamental biblical truth in several ways; but it does that if, and only if, those biblical truths are understood to be on the same level and of the same nature of truth as scientific truth.

The best example is Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and the pseudoscience of creationism. The great creation myth with which the Bible opens says that God created the earth and the heavens in six days (seven actually if you count the creation of Sabbath on the seventh day, as I believe we must). Biblical literalists take that ancient account of creation as “true,” but by true they mean factual. They mean that in the impossible case that you had been there to see what happened you would have seen something like what Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says happened actually happening. For modernist literalists the first creation myth of Genesis is true, and that means to them that it has to be factual. The sciences of evolutionary biology, geology, and anthropology tell a very different story. At least they tell a story that is different for those who insist on understanding Genesis factually. Since for such a literalist Genesis and science are both speaking facts, and because they report different facts, they cannot both be true. Yet because for our literalist all truth is, or at least is factually consistent with, scientific truth, there must be science that says essentially the same thing as Genesis and the science that says something different from Genesis must be wrong. Hence creationism, or creation science. Creation science isn’t science because it begins with an a priori truth—God’s acts of creation understood literally according to the Bible—and sets out to prove that a priori truth with factual findings that sound scientific. Clearly what these literalists are doing is reducing the Bible to modernism’s limited view of truth, its limited view of the nature of reality.

That way of understanding Christianity and its foundational book the Bible will not survive in a postmodern world. It can’t. It won’t and it can’t because postmodernism cuts its ontological and epistemological foundation out from under it. It’s not that postmodernism doesn’t know factual truth of course. Postmodernism accepts the findings of science as established facts, or at least it accepts them as facts provisionally. Postmodernism accepts the findings of science provisionally because science, at its best, also accepts its findings provisionally. A scientific truth is one that by definition is at least theoretically subject to being proven wrong, so all scientific truths are by definition provisional. They are true until they are proven to be false. So within the scope of its own ontology and epistemology postmodernism accepts factual truth.

Postmodernism differs from modernism however in that it does not reduce all truth to fact. Postmodernism understands and accepts kinds of truth other than factual truth. In this aspect of its worldview postmodernism has recaptured something from the pre-modern worldview. The pre-modern world knew factual truth of course, but it also knew other kinds of truth as well. It knew what I and others (including Tillich) call mythic or symbolic truth. Some people today, like Marcus Borg, insist on calling this kind of truth metaphoric, but the theologically correct term for it is mythic. The ancient world sometimes called this truth analogical rather than mythic, but it meant essentially the same thing by that term as I mean by mythic. Mythic or analogical truth is truth that is not factual. It is truth that is much deeper and in important ways more powerful than mere factual truth. It is truth to which human language can point but cannot fully capture. To use an old metaphor for it, it is a finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. It is truth that is more experienced by the whole person than known only by the intellect. It is truth that knows that it is not complete, absolute, or final. It is truth that allows for other truths different from itself, that is, it is truth that is not exclusivist. It is truth that is open toward the future, not closed by something said or supposedly discovered in the past. It is truth expressed in story and the exegesis of story, not in scientific formula.

Postmodern ontology and epistemology allow for different truths, but there is one approach to truth that postmodernism must reject. Postmodernism must reject any truth claim that reduces truth to fact and that claims exclusive validity for itself. I admit that we are dealing with a paradox here. Postmodernism is an approach to truth that is open to multiple truths but that must nonetheless reject some claims of truth. It must reject truth claims that radically contradict its underlying understandings of the nature of reality and  of human knowledge. It must not condemn people who still cling to those contradictory primary understandings (although it can and must condemn their statements and public policy demands that are harmful to people and to the earth), but neither must it accept and honor those understandings either tacitly or explicitly.

The postmodern worldview does not prohibit itself from proclaiming and developing itself. The postmodern worldview does not prohibit itself from expressing its critique of the modernist worldview that it has moved beyond. Nothing in the postmodern worldview prohibits it from proclaiming the death, realized or pending, of modernism in all of its manifestations, including its religious manifestations. Postmodernism does not prevent one from doing penetrating analysis of current reality. It does not prevent one from discerning the trajectory of human culture and predicting where it will go. Indeed, it requires us to do such analysis and such discernment.

So is my critique, indeed my condemnation, of modernist, literalist Christianity itself modernist? I don’t think so. Modernism cannot critique religious literalism the way I do because it shares modern literalism’s ontology and epistemology. I think that my critique is an expression not of modernism but of a postmodern sensitivity and awareness. It is discernment of a fundamental contradiction between literalist faith and the trajectory of western culture. It is not a condemnation of people. As I said in the session in which Professor Kinnamon made his statement, I don’t want to destroy any faith that gets a person through the night; and I freely admit that literalist Christianity still gets millions of people through the night. Indeed, in my book Liberating Christianity I say that people do find a real connection with God in literalist Christianity. I do not deny that connection, although many people today who have been badly burned by conservative Christianity do deny it. It’s just that I am convinced that that kind of Christianity will not survive in the long-term future of western culture. That conviction is based on a postmodern analysis not on a modernist one. So with all due deference to Professor Kinnamon, the scope of whose life work and public prominence far exceed my own, I respectfully disagree that my critique of literalist Christianity is modernist.

A Re-Post for MLK Day

Three years ago I posted on this blog a sermon I had given on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It still rings true, so I am re-posting it here today as we once again remember Dr. King.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, 2011.  A lot of people are talking about him today.  Some progressive voices are saying what I want to say about him, but most people aren’t.  I’ve haven’t before posted one of my sermons here, but I’m now posting the one I gave yesterday.  It’s about Martin Luther King, and it’s about the Martin Luther King we’d rather forget.  It’s an important message.  I hope that by posting it here I can in some tiny measure help to get the word out.

A Light to the Nations

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 16, 2011

Scripture:  Isaiah 49:1-7

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 Martin Luther King Day weekend.  This weekend we pause to remember and celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  If Protestantism had saints he’d probably be one.  He would at least be venerated as a martyr for the faith, as many people are in Orthodox Christianity.  We don’t do that exactly, but we do celebrate King’s life and work.  Yet as I considered Martin Luther King once more this past week I discerned that we need to ask ourselves just what it is about his life and work that we celebrate; and we need to ask whether there aren’t parts of his life and work that we don’t celebrate, that we’d rather forget.  I am convinced that there are such aspects of his life and work, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning.

We celebrate Martin Luther King the civil rights leader.  We celebrate his courage and the powerful way he articulated, in the great preaching tradition of the Black churches, the cause of equality in our country.  We celebrate his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech.  All of that is worthy of celebration, and we do celebrate it.  But here’s the thing.  Martin Luther King was about a lot more than that, and it’s that a lot more that we maybe would rather forget, that, in fact, a lot of Americans do forget or ignore.

We know that King insisted on nonviolence in the civil rights movement.  It was, I think, that insistence on nonviolence that made him white people’s favorite civil rights leader.  We wanted the civil rights movement to be nonviolent.  That was a good thing, although maybe we only thought it was a good thing because we were afraid of Black America’s righteous anger at centuries of white racism resulting in violence against us.  What we pay less attention to is the fact that King did not limit his call for nonviolence to the civil rights movement.  He saw the connection between violence at home and the violence we were perpetrating at the time in Vietnam.  So he spoke up.  He spoke out against the Vietnam War, and when he did he became a lot less popular with white America.  People told him to stick to his proper sphere of activity, the civil rights movement.  That was of course a racist response to King’s opposition to the war because it said that a Black man’s only legitimate concern was the civil rights of his own people, but just as importantly it greatly misunderstood King’s—and Jesus’—message of nonviolence.  It limited nonviolence as a value to one aspect of life, one set of issues.  It failed to see that King’s—and Jesus’—call to nonviolence is universal, that it applies to all aspects of life.  That was, and is, a part of King’s—and Jesus’—message that a great many of us did not and do not want to hear; but Jesus proclaimed it and King preached it just the same.

And King insisted on more than nonviolence; and he insisted on more than legal equality, equality of legal rights, for Black Americans, as important as that was and is.  He insisted on economic justice for poor people, Black and white and every other color as well.  When he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, he was there to support the demands of sanitation workers for a fair wage and safe working conditions.  That was an issue of economic justice not of race.  King also saw the connection between poverty and violence.  He saw that it was disproportionately Black Americans and other poor Americans whom we sent to fight and die in our imperialist war in Vietnam.  A great many white Americans reacted to King’s calls for economic justice the same way they did to his call for an end to the Vietnam War.  Civil rights are fine, we said, as long as you’re only talking about legal rights.  But don’t go supporting the economic rights of the poor.  That’s not your concern, we said, perhaps out of fear that true economic justice for the poor might mean that those of us with economic privilege might have to live a little less high on the hog.

We celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader, but he was much more than a civil rights leader.  He was an advocate of nonviolence in all aspects of life, and he demanded economic justice for the poor.  Where did all of that emphasis on nonviolence and justice come from?  It came from Jesus, that’s where.  Why did King insist on preaching those things as well as civil rights?  Because he was a Christian, that’s why.  Jesus preached economic justice, what Crossan calls distributive justice, economic justice that assures that all have enough.  Jesus called us to be advocates of such distributive justice as well.  Jesus preached and lived nonviolence, and he calls us to preach and to live nonviolence too.  Martin Luther King got all of that.  A great many Christians do not.  Those things are hallmarks of King’s life that many of us would rather forget.

Our passage from Isaiah this morning may not seem to have much to do with the message of Martin Luther King, but I think it does.  That passage is one of the so-called servant songs from the part of Isaiah scholars call second Isaiah.  In it God calls God’s servant, whose identity historically is unknown, to be a light not only to his own people Israel but to the whole world.  God says to the servant “I will give you as a light to the nations.”  By that light, God says, the nations of the world will see and come to the ways of God.

For us Christians the primary light to the nations is Jesus Christ.  He is a shining beacon in a world of darkness.  He lights the way to God and reveals the ways of God.  What is the way to God that he lights?  What are the ways of God that he reveals?  They are more than anything else the ways of economic justice for the poor and of nonviolence in all aspects of human life.  Martin Luther King understood that truth.  He proclaimed that truth, a truth he learned from his Lord and Savior, and ours, Jesus Christ, our primary light to the nations.  Everyone who reflects the light of Christ is also a light to the nations.  God, you see, calls us to be a light too.

Friends, the world today desperately needs that light.  It desperately needs the light of economic justice.  We are starting to see the effects of the world’s unjust distribution of resources, an unjust distribution from which we all benefit, revealed more and more starkly.  In recent days we’ve seen stories of soaring food prices causing hardship in places like India and Indonesia.  In our own state services on which many people depend just to stay alive are being reduced or eliminated because the rest of us won’t pay for them.  Economic injustice today threatens to destabilize the whole world.  If it doesn’t do it today, it most certainly will do it tomorrow.

Violence today threatens to destroy the whole world.  Prophets of nonviolence like Crossan and Wink say, rightly, that unless we humans can overcome our addiction to violence, can transcend our belief in what Wink calls the myth of redemptive violence, the belief that violence can save us, we will eventually and inevitably destroy ourselves and our part of God’s creation.  We have the means to do it.  More nations are seeking the means to do it.  I and many others are convinced that Jesus’ way—God’s way—of nonviolence is our only hope of escape, the only path of salvation for the world.

Martin Luther King knew these truths.  He knew them because he knew Jesus Christ.  He was a light to the nations because he reflected the light of Christ.  He did that not only by working for civil rights but by working for economic justice and by preaching universal nonviolence as well.  In all of that he was a light to the nations.  Are we?  Amen. 

Depth and Postmodern Faith

I belong to an organization called the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion. It's a group of pastors (active or inactive), mostly Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) with a couple of us UCC types tagging along. It meets for a retreat once a year. This year's gathering is coming up in February. One of the things we will do is discuss the book Evangelical vs. Liberal, The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest, Oxford University Press, 2006, by James Wellman of the University of Washington. I am tasked with being one of the responders to the primary presentation about the book. I have written up some comments and observations on and in response to the book. It may be of some interest even to those of you who are not part of our group and have not read the book.  Here's what I have prepared for the meeting.

Depth and Postmodern Faith:

Comments on Evangelical vs. Liberal, The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest, by James K. Wellman, Jr.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

January, 2014

Introduction

Since I am a responder and not the major presenter on this book, and since Keith has given a rather detailed summary of its content in his paper “Religious Vitality In a Liberal Church,” I will summarize the book here only very briefly. In the book Wellman, a professor of comparative religion with the Henry M. Jackson School at the University of Washington, has done a sociological study of thriving churches in western Washington and Oregon that he classifies as either evangelical or liberal. He analyzes these churches in terms of what he calls their moral worldviews and how those moral worldviews shape and direct the life and activities of the churches. The evangelical churches include both what we would more traditionally call Evangelical churches and Pentecostal or other charismatic churches. Apparently none of them accepted the label Fundamentalist, although that is what we liberals often call at least some of them. The liberal churches are congregations from the old mainline Protestant denominations. I strongly suspect that Wellman’s churches include among the evangelical churches both Seattle’s Mars Hill church and probably Seattle’s University Presbyterian Church (a mainline church among Wellman’s evangelicals, and UPres truly is evangelical in Wellman’s sense) and among the liberal churches Plymouth Congregational UCC in downtown Seattle, but I can’t be sure of that suspicion. In any event I suppose it doesn’t really matter. The moral worldview of the evangelical churches is grounded in a biblical literalism that sees humans as inherently sinful but saved by Jesus Christ if they accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. The moral worldview of the liberal churches is grounded in a biblically based understanding of God and Jesus Christ as all-loving and all-inclusive. The liberals are, in Wellman’s terms, morally libertarian in the sense that liberal churches believe in the right and obligation of each person to make her or his own moral choices. It is interesting that Wellman calls his liberals libertarian in this sense because in our common political parlance libertarianism is a kind of conservatism. Wellman says that the culture of the liberal churches is similar to the secular culture in which they are located in both their commitment to social justice and their moral libertarianism. Since they are grounded in such radically different moral worldviews, the churches of the two groups differ in almost every way—in their worship style, outreach to the community, expectations of members, expectations of clergy, and in just about every other way one can imagine.

I am a pastor of a church that falls squarely into Wellman’s liberal category, and although I am quite new to NWATD I suspect that all of this group’s members would identify more with the liberal churches than with the evangelical ones. My church is Open and Affirming. We believe in the right and duty of each person to make their own decisions about faith and values, a stance that may be in some sense libertarian but that in the religious context is hardly conservative. I preach Christian nonviolence and commitment to social justice. Some full disclosure: As I read Wellman’s book I found my head nodding in agreement with most of what he said about the liberal churches, both positive and negative. I found myself railing against most of what he said about the evangelical churches. I’ll just say here that I strongly disagree with the evangelical churches’ vision of what Christianity actually is. I was, as you’d suspect, most interested in what Wellman has to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal churches in the Pacific Northwest.

With that disclosure, here are two issues that occur to me from reading Wellman’s book that I think are worth discussing. They are first: If Wellman is right that the culture of liberal churches is essentially identical to the secular but spiritual culture of the Pacific Northwest and that those churches therefore have a hard time differentiating themselves from that broader culture, what if anything do we offer people that they can’t get from secular organizations or from belonging to no organization at all? Second: Wellman uses the term postmodern on occasion, but the biggest lack I found in the book was his failure to analyze how the conflicting cultures of evangelical and liberal churches hold up in the light of postmodernism. I will discuss those issues in turn.

The First Issue

I think Wellman is generally correct that the secular culture of the Pacific Northwest (at least west of the Cascades, where his churches are located) is on the whole socially liberal and morally libertarian. So are Wellman’s liberal churches. Wellman posits that these characteristics make these churches so similar to the secular culture around them that it is hard for them to articulate what they have to offer that the secular culture does not. Their similarity to the secular culture, he says, raises the question for liberal churches of why people should be part of them. It is I think a serious question for us liberals, but I also think there are significant answers to it. When I first read Wellman asking the question about the similarity between liberal churches and secular culture the word that immediately popped into my mind was “depth.” That word comes from Tillich’s statement that faith expresses the depth dimension of reality. Our liberal churches may be liberal, but they are also churches. That means that they, that we, are about more than social justice and moral libertarianism. We worship God, not social justice, not individual moral choice. Our commitment to social justice and individual moral choice is grounded not in reason, not in merely cultural values, but in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Because we are communities of faith, we can offer people so much more than mere commitment to certain values. What we offer them is connection with God, with ultimate reality, with the depth of life.

I was talking about Wellman’s presentation of this issue with a couple of people from my church, and one of them asked me what I would say to put what we have to offer in simple terms. I said something like “We offer ultimate reality. We offer a connection with God, the truly ultimate, who will support, comfort, forgive, call, push, inspire you, and give your life meaning.” My parishioner responded “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” No, it wasn’t; but how many of us say things like that to new people who ask about our church? How many of us preach it often and with conviction? I surely haven’t.

I have often heard people say when asked why they come to church that they come to church because they have done well in life and want to give something back to society. Fair enough, but when I hear that statement I always think OK, but you can give back to society by joining Rotary, or Kiwanis, or the Lions Club; and you can probably give back more directly and efficiently in those groups than you can in most small liberal churches. So why church? I think the answer to why church is precisely that we offer more than service clubs do. Our secular culture is inadequate for people precisely because it is secular. Because our culture is secular it is superficial. We human beings have as part of our makeup a longing for connection with something beyond mere physical existence. We long for connection with a reality that is deeper, more basic and more ultimate, than the reality we perceive around us every day. The great theologians of our time, including Tillich and Rahner, have explored that human longing in powerful ways and made it a foundational part of their transformative theologies. That longing is a basic fact of human existence, a fact that explains why every human culture we know of has developed religions, that is, systems of symbol and myth that function to connect people with that which lies in, behind, and beyond physical existence. We are liberal, but we are churches. That means that we have symbols and myths that can satisfy that elemental human longing for connection with something greater than ourselves, something greater, deeper, and more spiritually powerful than anything in the physical world.

As Wellman points out, another problem we liberal churches have that is closely related to the similarity between liberal church and secular society is that the people of our area are “spiritual but not religious,” and they think they find their spiritual connection in nature rather than in organized religion. Of course it is possible, and wonderful, to find a connection with God, with ultimate spiritual reality, in nature. But when I hear that people don’t join a church because they find their connection with God in nature I want to ask them: Are the deer going to come visit you when you’re in the hospital? Or when you’re on your death bed? Are the elk going to tell you that God loves you and will never abandon you? Will the beavers be there for your family after you’re gone? They’ll still be there out in nature, but will they hold your grieving spouse’s hand and help her grieve well? Nature spirituality may not be secular exactly, but it sure doesn’t take the place of a faith community or of a faith’s system of symbols and myths that truly connect us with that for which we long. As communities of faith we indeed have so much to offer that people can’t get in secular society or in nature.

So if Wellman thinks, or if we think, that we don’t have more to offer people than they can get without us he, and we, are wrong. If people don’t know that we have more to offer, that is our fault not theirs. If they don’t feel that more in our worship services, that is our fault, not theirs. I think that Wellman has not analyzed the relationship of his churches to their cultural context very deeply, but his question about what liberal churches have to offer people that those people can’t get outside them is an important one. We need to do a better job of living and communicating all that we have to offer.

The Second Issue

The second issue that I want to discuss has to do with the issue of cultures that are usually called modern and postmodern. A couple of times Wellman calls his liberal churches modern or modernist. He thinks we’re modernist because we value human reason and accept the results of scientific research. He never calls his evangelical churches modernist. He doesn’t discuss this issue at any depth at all, and that is for me the book’s biggest shortcoming. Of course, Wellman is writing here as a sociologist, not as a theologian, philosopher, or cultural anthropologist. He is reporting the results of research he and his assistants have done, so perhaps it isn’t fair to expect him to analyze larger anthropological issues. Still, I think Wellman gives a wrong impression when he calls us liberals modernist and doesn’t call his evangelicals modernist.

In this regard I was struck by the book’s very shortsighted view of the future. Writing in probably about 2004 or 2005 he said we won’t know if the growth of the evangelical churches has leveled off until the results of the 2010 census, a whole five or six years out. That’s a very short-term future. A major change is taking place in our culture, and the future of the church and of just about everything else about our culture has everything to do with the tectonic shift taking place from modernism to postmodernism, but we must view that shift in much longer terms than a mere few years. I am convinced that the church’s future depends more than anything else on how it relates to that shift. Can it adapt? Can it change? I think the liberal churches (or at least some of them) are already doing that to a considerable extent, and the evangelical churches aren’t—and can’t. Let me explain.

Western culture underwent a huge change between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries CE. We call that change the Enlightenment. One key part of the Enlightenment was the Scientific Revolution. By 1648 western Europe had been ravaged by wars, especially by the series of conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years War, which greatly discredited organized religion because of the violence it had perpetrated and endorsed.  By 1648 Rene Descartes had already written cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, and attempted to recreate a world solely on the basis of human reason. The world hasn’t been the same since. Over the next two hundred years and beyond human reason displaced revelation as the source of knowledge, and it replaced the church as the source of cultural authority. Any detailed review of the history of these changes is unnecessary here, but their result is of utmost importance. One result of those changes was that in Western culture truth got reduced to fact. When truth is fact, there can only be one true answer to any question. Christians had always understood the Bible at least in part as factually true of course, and Christianity has been sinfully exclusivist from the beginning; but the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution resulted in truth being seen only as fact, and that epistemology strengthened Christianity’s exclusivism in powerful ways. The thinking went that if Christianity is factually true, then no other religious tradition can contain any truth at all.

Perhaps this story from my personal experience will help clarify things here. In the 1970s, while I was a graduate student in history at the University of Washington, I took a seminar from the great Russian/British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[1] Berlin told us that western civilization, by which he meant, I think, western civilization as shaped by the Enlightenment, holds to three fundamental truths. They are that every question has an answer, every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible for us humans to know that answer. Those three truths sum up the modernist worldview that came out of the Enlightenment very nicely. They apply to Wellman’s evangelical Christianity. That type of Christianity claims to know all the answers and to know the only true answers to the great existential questions humanity faces.

Modern biblical literalism, indeed modern literalism about all matters of faith, is a result of the Enlightenment. That is, it is a product of modernism, the worldview formed by the Enlightenment. As scholars applied human reason to the study of the Bible, and as science continued to discover truths that appear to contradict the world and the cosmos reflected in the Bible, many Christians, especially in the United States, reacted powerfully against those developments. That reaction reached its height in the appearance of true Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century. Yes, Fundamentalism was a reaction against some aspects of modernism. It was a reaction against critical study of scripture that revealed how problematic the Bible’s texts are. It was a reaction against science, especially the science of biological evolution. Yet Fundamentalism’s reaction against some aspects of modernism masks the radically modern nature of that movement. It was modernist because it accepted the modernist view of truth, that truth consists only of facts, that only one set of facts is true, and that we can and do know those facts. If the Bible says God created the world in six days, and if that statement is factually true, then the sciences of geology, anthropology, and biology that were presenting very different truths must be factually wrong. Fundamentalism’s assertion of the falsehood of modernist science is itself a thoroughly modernist statement and is grounded in modernist epistemology and ontology.

Today culture is moving beyond modernism. The leading elements of western culture are rediscovering kinds of truth other than factual truth. We are rediscovering the depth and the power of mythic truth, and we know how vastly it exceeds mere literal truth in depth and power. We are learning the limits of human reason. We know that though we can conceive of the infinite and the ultimate we can never fully understand of what they consist. We are experiencing the limits of human language. We are coming to understand that human language understood literally is incommensurate with the task we assign it of speaking a truth about the infinite. We have learned that our language can point to ultimate truth but can never capture it, can never define it, can never express it in its fullness. We have rediscovered human subjectivity. That is, we now understand reality from the perspective not of external objectivity, which is in the end something of which we simply are not capable, but of the human being as a subject who experiences a reality that seems to us external but that is actually something that we create internally. We therefore know in a way that modernism cannot that ultimate, absolute truth is beyond us and that all of our truth is relative and contingent. The world of modernism that produced contemporary religious literalism is dead. Yes, a great many people still live in it and don’t know that it is dead; but dead it is, and dead it shall remain.

All of these aspects of our current context have profound meaning for faith and for religion. Since the worldview that produced modern literalism is dead, biblical literalism is dead. It still exists of course, and a great many people still adhere to it; yet that reality is simply a function of how human cultures change over time. I said above that in the seventeenth century Rene Descartes wrote cogito ergo sum and the world has never been the same ever since. That’s true, but of course at first very, very few people were aware of Descartes or his radical new rationalistic philosophy. It took a good couple of hundred years before the rationalism and philosophical positivism of Europe’s leading intellectual lights filtered down into popular culture. The same process is underway today. Most Americans still live in a modernist world, but our culture is moving beyond that world. It will take a couple of hundred more years for the transformation to be complete; but it has begun, and it is unstoppable.

Which of course raises profound questions for the future of the Christian faith. By “the future” I mean the long-term future, not the very short-term future that Wellman addresses. To understand the long-term future of the Christian faith we have to start with understanding the basic truth of Wellman’s evangelical churches. Those churches are grounded in biblical literalism. Their notion that Christianity is about how one gets to heaven after death by believing in Jesus is grounded in a literal reading of certain passages of the Bible. Their Christian exclusivism is thoroughly modernist. It results from a literal reading of the New Testament combined with a modernist understanding of truth as fact. In the postmodern world that is to some extent already here and that is the wave of the future both textual literalism and a reductionist ontology are excluded. It is already clear to those with eyes to see that Wellman’s evangelicalism will not survive into the future that seems distant to us but that in terms of the development of human cultures is actually quite close.

That’s why, current demographic trends to the contrary notwithstanding, liberal Christianity in Wellman’s sense has a brighter future than does evangelicalism. It does, that is, if it has the courage truly to transcend modernism and modernism’s consequences for religious faith. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage truly to move beyond biblical literalism. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage truly to move beyond Christian exclusivism. Liberal Christianity has a future if it has the wisdom and the courage to move beyond devotion to specific doctrines and to offer people a truly deep connection with God, if it has the wisdom and the courage to engage people where they are today and to address the existential dilemmas of today rather than continuing with the old saws about sin and salvation that mean so little to so many today.

We humans have a longing for connection with the divine that is so much more than a fear of damnation. Yet assuaging a fear of damnation is where evangelical Christianity is grounded. Evangelical churches may express joy in their worship services as Wellman contends, but that joy is grounded in relief that one is no longer going to receive the eternal damnation evangelicals are convinced they and all the rest of us deserve. They may speak of respect for others, but they deeply believe in Christian exclusivism. The epistemological and ontological underpinnings of that kind of faith are steadily being eroded away in the postmodern world. Liberal, non-literal, non-exclusivist Christianity has within it that potential for adapting itself to the postmodern world and speaking a powerful truth to and for that world. Evangelical Christianity doesn’t. Therein lies the promise of a future for Christianity. Wellman’s book is an important and interesting snapshot of our current time, but it leaves the most profound questions about the future of Christianity unasked and unanswered.

---

[1] Not Irving Berlin. Once during World War II Isaiah Berlin was introduced to Winston Churchill, who asked him to play something on the piano.  So it’s Isaiah, not Irving, Berlin.

The War on Christmas

Here's the sermon I gave on Dec. 15, 2013, on the so-called war on Christmas. There really is such a war, but it's not what you've probably been told it is.

The War on Christmas

Rev.  Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

December 15, 2013

Scripture:  Luke 2:8-14; Luke 1:46-55

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.

We’ve all heard about it.  There’s a war on Christmas.  Didn’t you know?  Christmas is under siege!  Christmas is being assaulted.  Christmas is in danger of falling to its secular enemies!  It’s awful!  People tell us to say Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas!  People write Xmas rather than Christmas so they don’t have to say the word Christ!  The forces of secular liberalism don’t want America to celebrate Christmas.  They don’t want us to celebrate Christmas because they hate Jesus and they hate Christians.  The forces of Christ must rally to defend the celebration of his birth.  If we don’t, our ancient and sacred faith is doomed.  There’s a war on Christmas.  To arms, everyone!

Have you heard that kind of nonsense spewed by people who believe it, or who at least want you to believe it?  I have, and it is all utter and complete garbage.  Those two aspects of it that we hear condemned all the time, Happy Holidays and Xmas, are actually quite proper.  Happy Holidays simply recognizes that we are a multi-religious society as well as being one in which a great many people aren’t religious at all.  How would you feel if everyone went around wishing you Happy Hanukah or Happy Ramadan when you aren’t Jewish or Muslim?  Well, that’s how Jews and Muslims feel when people wish them Merry Christmas.  And Xmas?  That’s in fact quite Christian.  The X in Xmas is actually the Greek letter chi, and Christians have used chi, the first letter of the Greek word Christos from which our word Christ comes, to designate Christ virtually from the beginning of the faith.  So those false prophets on Fox News and elsewhere who proclaim that Happy Holidays and Xmas constitute a war on Christmas are just flat wrong.

They’re wrong that those things constitute a war on Christmas, but here’s the thing.  As Marcus Borg has recently said in a blog post of his, there actually is a war on Christmas going on.  It’s not a war on superficial things like Happy Holidays and Xmas, it’s a war on what Christmas really means.  It is a war on who Jesus was and is.  Now, I’m not much taken with the war language here.  I use it only because it has become so common among us; but it is nonetheless true that there are at least two things going on among us today that change and even tear down what Christmas actually should mean to us.  One of them has to do with our society and our secular culture.  The other has to do with Christianity itself.  The first is the rampant secularization of Christmas.  The other is what Christianity has done to Jesus.  Let me explain.

We all know about the way that Christmas has gotten secularized.  Christmas among us isn’t so much about celebrating the birth of Christ any more.  It’s mostly about giving gifts.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving gifts, or at least there isn’t if it is done in a spirit of love.  But gift giving has become an obsession, a mania even, among us.  People get trampled on “Black Friday” as others force their way ahead of them to get a bargain price on a flat screen TV or the latest toy rage.  Ads tells us, especially us men, over and over again that if we don’t give the woman in our lives a diamond or a $50,000 car we don’t really love her.  We buy our children and grandchildren so many toys that Christmas overwhelms them, and what should be an occasion of joy becomes an occasion for an exhausted tantrum.  And it all has nothing to do with the birth of Christ.  Yes, the magi give three symbolic gifts to Jesus in Matthew’s birth story, but giving gifts didn’t become part of the celebration of Christmas for well over one thousand years after Jesus’ birth.  Christmas has come to be a whole lot more about helping retailers end the year in the black than it is about celebrating the birth of Christ.  That, my friends, is a true abasement of Christmas.  Fox News won’t talk about it a lot because saying it doesn’t help their corporate sponsors and wealthy supporters, but it is a true secularization of Christmas that diverts us from the holiday’s true meaning.

The church has diverted us from the holiday’s true meaning too.  For me, this part of the real war on Christmas is more subtle, more hidden, and much more dangerous than is our society’s secularization of the holiday.  The church has waged a war on Christmas through who it has turned Jesus into.  We’ve all heard it.  Many of us grew up with it.  Why was Jesus born?  For the last seventeen hundred years the church has answered:  To die as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  That’s it.  Just that.  The reason we celebrate Christmas, we’ve been told, is because at Christmas our Savior is born; and that means the one is born who will die so that we can get to heaven.  We’re told:  This man had to be born so he could die—for us.  Now, I think Jesus did die for us; but I don’t think it was as an atoning sacrifice for sin, and I don’t think dying was why he was born.  The church has changed Jesus into something he wasn’t, and isn’t; and that changes the meaning of Christmas for us.  So if we don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus because he’s going to die for us in a few months, at least a few months on the church’s calendar, why do we celebrate Christmas?  Who is this whose birth we’re celebrating?  You may have different answers to those questions.  Here are at least a good part of mine.

We celebrate the birth of Jesus because in and through him we know God.  Jesus came to give the world a new and different vision of who God is, of how God relates to us and to all of creation, and of what God wants from us.  He came to give us that new vision in how he lived his life, what he did, what he taught, and even—or perhaps especially—how he died.  Obviously there’s a whole lot more to say about why Jesus matters than I can say in one short sermon, but if I had to summarize what Jesus was all about I would say that he was about a call to transformation.  He called us to transform ourselves, and he called us to transform our world.  You might well think that the birth of someone whose significance lies in a call to transformation is not worth celebrating.  After all, transformation isn’t usually a lot of fun.  It isn’t easy.  It may involve gain, but it also almost certainly involves loss, at least for those of us who are relatively well off by the world’s standards.  Well, so be it.  Whether we like it or not, Jesus is all about calling us to transformation.

The transformation to which he calls us starts with us, with each individual person.  Violent revolutionaries in Jesus’ time wanted to transform the world through violence.  Jesus, the ultimate prophet of nonviolence, wanted us to transform the world by transforming ourselves.  He called us out of our selfishness.  He called us out of our self-centeredness.  I called us to give up our individual need to survive so that we could truly live out of ourselves for others and for God’s world just as he did.  The Christian tradition has waged war on that aspect of Jesus’ meaning for at least the last seventeen hundred years.  It has told us Jesus is about our own personal salvation.  It has told us that he’s not about transformation in this life, he’s about how we get to heaven in the next one.  Well, the truth is that in the Gospels Jesus says very little about getting to heaven in the next life, but he says a great deal about transformation in this life.  If Christmas is about the birth of a Savior who calls us to radical transformation in this life, and it is, then Christ’s own church has waged war on Christmas for a very, very long time.

But as I just said, Jesus was also about transformation of the world.  That’s what his talk of the Kingdom of God was all about.  The Kingdom of God isn’t a heaven up in the sky somewhere.  It is the world transformed to correspond to God’s will and ways.  It is a world transformed from greedy materialism to selfless sharing.  It is a world transformed from the ways of violence to the ways of peace.  It is a world transformed from injustice and oppression into a world where all are equal and all are free.  Jesus calls us to that transformation too, and that transformation starts with the transformation of our hearts.  Jesus wants to change the world one transformed person at a time, and he calls us to that work of transformation.  His church has waged war on that part of Jesus’ meaning too.  It has said don’t worry so much about poverty, hunger, illness, oppression, and injustice in this life; worry about how you get to heaven in the next.  That message betrays Jesus, and if Christmas is about the birth of the one who calls us to transformation, and it is, then that message is a war on Christmas being waged within Christ’s own church.

So in ten days we will celebrate Christ’s birth.  Let me suggest to you today that before we do we need to figure out why we’re doing it.  As Christians why we’re doing it isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, about presents.  It isn’t about a big Christmas dinner that we enjoy while others go hungry.  It isn’t even about get-togethers with family, as good and meaningful as those can be.  It is about recognizing who this person whose birth we celebrate was and is.  It is about recognizing his meaning for us.  That meaning is salvation to be sure, but it is salvation through transformation.  Transformation of our selves, and through transformation of ourselves transformation of the world.  In ten days, will we recognize that that’s what we’re commemorating?  I hope so.  If we do then the real war on Christmas will have failed, and we can truly celebrate the birth of the one we call Lord and Savior.  May it be so.  Amen.