On American Racism

Back in 2008 the national office of my denomination, the United Church of Christ, asked us local church pastors to preach on racism. I did. Below is the sermon I gave, typos and all. Given the tragic events in Charleston, SC, this week, I think it is more important than ever for us white Americans to hear what I said, so I'm posting that sermon here. May God open our hearts and minds to confront and transform our history of murderous racism.

On Racism

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 18, 2008

Scripture:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a

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.

This is the first time I’ve preached on a topic that someone else selected for me, so this sermon may be a bit different from most. The Collegium of Officers of the United Church of Christ has asked us parish pastors to preach on racism today. As near as I can tell, the Collegium of Officers is the UCC’s version of the old Soviet Politburo. It is the collective body of the denominations four top leaders led by Chairman—I mean President and General Minister—John Thomas. They want us to preach on racism, and who am I to argue with the Politburo—I mean the Collegium. So, for what it’s worth, racism it is. And because my denomination has asked me to speak on it, I’m going to tell what I know to be the truth of American racism with no holds barred, or at least that is my intention. Some of what I have to say may be difficult for us white people to hear, but perhaps it should be. And before I start there’s something I need to say to Manny, Shawna, and anyone else here this morning who isn’t white: I apologize in advance that this sermon is directed mainly to us white people in the congregation. It’s what most of us are, and my white experience is the only experience from which I can speak. I pray only that I may speak as a white ally of the victims of racism everywhere. Amen.

My reflections on racism in American history and contemporary culture, and on my own life experience, have led me to the conclusion that the key dynamics of American racism among white people during my lifetime and today are historical ignorance and contemporary denial. But rather than speak in the abstract about these matters, let me tell you about my personal experience as I grew up in the thoroughly racist white American culture.

My parents came from overwhelmingly white North Dakota. They didn’t know any Black people, and I don’t think even the Lakota Indians of the Dakotas were ever on their view screens despite the fact that they both graduated from the University of North Dakota whose teams were, and are, called the Fighting Sioux. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, in those days an almost exclusively white town. There were some people of color around, mostly Asian or Asian-American faculty members at the University or foreign students from around the world, including some from Africa. I had one Chinese-American friend in grade school, but I knew not one single Black person.

As I grew up my parents, my schools, and my culture lied to me about American racism, if only primarily by ignoring it and failing to teach me about it. We kids used to sing “eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a nigger by the toe” And no one told me that was racist, but of course if was. No one told me how hateful that “n” word is, but of course it is. My mother, may she rest in peace, on occasion would say about someone who had done something decent “that was white of him.” And no one told me that was racist, but of course it was.

In school in the 1950s and into the early 60s we were taught some about American slavery, but its true horrors were glossed over. We weren’t told of the millions who died in the holds of slave ships. We weren’t told of families ripped apart when members were sold away to other slave owners. Most of all, there was no moral outrage expressed over it, no repentance, no instilling of a passion to make sure its vestiges were rooted out from American culture. I attended South Eugene High School, and every year at the football game with North Eugene High School, someone dressed in a Confederate uniform rode a horse around the field carrying a Confederate flag. A few people complained, and we thought they were silly. No one told us we were being racist, but we were.

We were not taught that slavery and the genocide of the American Indian nations are the twin moral abominations upon which this country was built, but they are. Nothing at all was said about the racist reality of the Jim Crow South, the de facto segregation in the North, the power of the Ku Klux Klan in earlier decades even in supposedly morally pure Oregon, the reality of lynching of Black people, the power of “Yellow peril” politics in Oregon, or about the many, many other ways in which racism permeated American history. We loved Black entertainers like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nat King Cole, but no one ever told us that these men were not permitted to stay in the Las Vegas hotels that made fortunes off of their appearances simply because they were Black. Both the racism and the denial or ignorance of racism were pervasive in the culture in which I grew up, and I could hardly be unaffected by them. I can only hope that I have grown morally and spiritually and that, although my past will of course always be with me, I can to some extent transcend it and embrace a new understanding of the equality and the equal worth and dignity of all of God’s people.

I like to think that I have done that, if not completely than at least to a significant degree. I fear, however, that I cannot say the same about our country as a whole. We have made some progress to be sure. It is significant that the apparent Democratic nominee for President is of mixed race, but he self-identifies as African American. Nonetheless, racism remains a central characteristic of American life today. If you doubt that, just look at the statistics. I’ll just quote one set of them. As of June, 2006, in the US the incarceration rate for whites was 406 per 100,000. The incarceration rate for Blacks was 2, 468 per 100,000. Among Black males the rate was 4,789 per 100,000, and for Black males ages 25 to 29 the rate was 11,695 per 100,000, or nearly 11.7% of Black men in their late 20s.¹ This outrageous disparity in the rates at which we incarcerate Black people compared to white people can be explained by only one thing—white racism.

Yet there are loud voices among us today that say that we have transcended our racist past and now live in a post-racial America. Friends, it just isn’t true. Centuries of racism do not disappear in a few decades just because some significant laws were passed, as important as they are, as any reputable historian will tell you. The claim that we have now leveled the racial playing field is so obviously false that I have become convinced that the denial of the reality of racism in today’s America has today become the dominant, socially acceptable form of American racism. That denial functions to perpetuate racial inequality behind a fraudulent mask of racial neutrality. Racism is our past. Racism is our present. And I fear that unless we white Americans get a lot more honest about that reality than we have been, racism will be our future for a long time to come.

Racism is American reality, but the God we claim to love and to worship rejects racism categorically. I’ll cite just one place where we see that rejection from this morning’s lectionary readings. In the magnificent, poetic creation myth of Genesis 1 we read that God created humankind on the sixth day. The text says: “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” Genesis 1:27 NRSV God created men and women, not White, Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow men and women. God created all men and women. We force onto people the false sociological construct of race, but God does not. God sees all people in all their marvelous variety of colors and shapes as humans created in God’s image. And consider this, all of us white people here this morning. God did not come to us as one of us in the person of a blond, blue-eyed European, all of those Eurocentric portraits of Jesus to the contrary notwithstanding. God came to us as one of us as a dark skinned Semite, someone our wonderful Traffic Safety Administration would today racially profile as a potential terrorist.

God does not see race. Does that mean that we should all suddenly become color blind? Actually, no. People who engage in the denial of American racism today often claim that they simply do not see race. That claim is almost certainly false, but there is a deeper problem with it. God did not make race a significant fact of human existence, but our history of racism has. White racism has so shaped the lives of non-white people in our country that when we whites say we do not see the race of non-white people, we deny a significant part of the human reality of those people. I’m afraid our task is more complicated that simply not seeing race. Our task is to see and acknowledge the racial diversity of God’s people, to recognize it as a significant part of a person’s humanity, especially the humanity of people of color. Then we need to celebrate it, rejoice in it, embrace it as part of God’s good creation. There used to be a sign in the Pike Place Market in Seattle that read: “We don’t tolerate diversity around here. We celebrate it.” That is our call as Americans today.

And when we have come to the place where we can truly celebrate the diversity of God’s people, what else can we do? We can confront our own internalized racism. We can recognize it, name it, and set it aside. We can refuse to remain silent, as we so often do, when we see racism in midst. On a few occasions out here in Sky Valley I have seen trucks and buildings with that Confederate battle flag on them that my high school used, that ultimate American symbol of hatred and oppression, the American equivalent of the Nazi swastika flag. And I have said nothing. I, and you, can remain silent no longer. We can call the deniers of contemporary racism, like the leaders of the successful movement here in Washington a few years ago to ban affirmative action, on their denial, which surely is grounded in and reflects the very racism they deny. We can refuse to follow their siren song that says we have no more to do. We can refuse to let veiled appeals to racial fears determine whom we will support for President this year. That’s not an endorsement of Senator Obama. It is merely an appeal that whatever decision you make on his candidacy not be based on his race.

There are many more things we can do. Do your relatives still use racist language the way mine used to? Talk to them about it. Do people at your work place tell racist jokes? Call them on it. Demand an end to racial profiling by law enforcement. Demand that prosecutors stop seeking the death penalty disproportionately against Black defendants, or much better yet, demand that they stop seeking it at all.

Racism is a fraud. It is a lie. It is one of the great American lies, a lie that resides at the very heart of our culture. May God grant us the wisdom and the courage to root it out in all of its aspects. We are all made in the image of God—Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White, and all of the myriad gradations in between. That’s the truth that can dispel the lie of racism. Let us hear God’s truth and listen to the lie of racism no more. Amen.

¹ www.prisonsucks.com

On Religious Freedom and Discrimination

On Religious Liberty and Discrimination

It’s a hot topic in the news these days. What is the relationship between freedom of religion and discrimination in the provision of public accommodations, including business services to the public, employment, and housing? More specifically, do new so-called religious liberty statutes signed into law in Indiana and passed by the legislature in Arkansas give legal protection to discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity? To understand these important questions we must begin with an understanding of the nature of civil rights law and then move to consideration of the specific questions before us. Perhaps I can offer a useful perspective on these questions; for I am a Christian pastor, and I have a law degree and worked for more than twenty years as a practicing attorney. So here goes.

The basic legal principle with which we must start is that any business is free to refuse services to any person for any reason unless refusal of services on specified bases is prohibited by an applicable law. Let’s take racial discrimination as a case that shows the issues in a particularly bright light. Historically, before the passage of local, state and federal civil rights laws, businesses across our nation were legally free to deny services to Black people simply because of the race of those individuals. No law prohibited such discrimination, so such discrimination was legal and was of course widely practiced across our land. That’s why civil rights legislation was necessary. Beginning in the 1960s both the federal government and many state and local governments enacted civil rights laws that prohibited racial discrimination in the provision of public accommodations and services, in housing, and in employment. Denial of services on the basis of race then became legally prohibited in those businesses to which the statutes applied. They didn’t apply to all businesses. The federal law applies only to businesses involved in interstate commerce, although as a practical matter that’s almost all businesses today. State statutes on employment discrimination generally specify the size of business to which they apply, exempting very small businesses. Religious organizations are exempted from both the federal and the state laws. Still, as a legal matter these laws made illegal what previously had been legal, namely the denial of services to persons on the basis of race.

In the way these statutes exempt religious organizations we see how two fundamental American values can come into conflict. Civil rights laws express the American value of equal treatment and equal protection of the law. The exemption of religious organizations expresses the American value of freedom of religion, both the right of individuals to practice their religion and the prohibition of the government interfering in the operation of churches and other institutions operated by churches. I would of course never do it, but I am legally free to deny employment at the church I serve to any person based on that person’s race. That’s because, while the law values nondiscrimination, it also values my freedom as a pastor and my church’s freedom as a church to express our religious values in the operation of our faith institution, pretty much whatever those religious values may be.

The matter is different if I step out of my role as pastor and outside of my church and operate in any secular field. Here’s a personal example. Setting aside for the moment the issue of business size, back when I had my own law office I was not free to refuse to hire a qualified Black person as office staff just because of that person’s race. I was still a person of faith. I still had my personal religious beliefs. Outside of the realm of the church, however, the law doesn’t care about my faith or my religious beliefs. The civil rights laws say go ahead and believe anything you want. We can’t control what you believe, and we don’t care what you believe. We can, however, control what you do. We can create a civil cause of action against you for damages if you practice racial discrimination in your hiring practices. The law says believe whatever you want, but you may not practice racial discrimination. You may believe, as many Christians used to, that all Black people carry the curse of Ham. That’s none of the law’s business. Your acting on that belief, however, is the law’s business, and the law says you can’t do it.

Let’s turn now to the issue of discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. Tragically, a great many Christians still believe that these people are inherently immoral. Conservative Christians were wrong about race, and they’re wrong about sexual orientation and gender identity, but those untenable beliefs still exist among a great many Christians and members of other faith traditions. In theory the legal situation with regard to LGBT civil rights is the same as it is for racial minorities. Discrimination against them in public accommodations, housing, and employment is perfectly legal unless there is an applicable law that prohibits it. So is discrimination against straight people for that matter, although no one seems ever to mention that one. In recent times some states and many local municipalities have added sexual orientation and gender identity to their civil rights statutes or ordinances. In my own state of Washington the city of Seattle has had a civil rights ordinance on orientation and identity for many years. The state of Washington added orientation and identity to its nondiscrimination law more recently, but we have done so. The federal government has not done so. There is no federal statute that prohibits discrimination against LGBT people the way the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits it on the basis of race and certain other human characteristics.

In recent times the question of discrimination against gay and lesbian people has evolved into the question of marriage equality. Through most of our country’s history it was simply assumed that marriage meant a marriage between a man and a woman. Gay and lesbian people, however, have a natural affectional and sexual orientation not toward members of the opposite gender but toward members of their own gender. Gay and lesbian couples have long created faithful covenanted relationship that mirror traditional marriage in every way except for the gender identity of the persons in the relationship, but those couples could not legally marry and were therefore denied the legal advantages (and burdens) of legal marriage. In the past few years that legal status of LGBT folks has begun to change at a remarkable rate. Some states, including my own state of Washington, have removed gender discrimination from their marriage laws either by act of the state legislature or by popular vote. In more states the courts (usually federal but sometimes state courts as well) have declared bans on same gender marriage to be unconstitutional as violating citizens’ rights of equal protection and due process. The United States Supreme Court voided part of the outrageously misnamed Defense of Marriage Act on those grounds. Gay and lesbian people are getting married. Thanks be to God!

As could entirely be expected, many conservative Christians are outraged by the growing legal equality of LGBT people, especially with regard to marriage. Some businesses that provided services for weddings have refused to supply those services for same gender weddings. Bakeries have refused to sell same gender couples wedding cakes. Florists have refused to provide flowers for a same gender wedding. Photographers have refused to take pictures at those weddings. The people acting in this discriminatory way often claim that they are merely exercising their freedom of religion. They say their faith condemns all same gender sexual activity, so they will not participate in any act in any way related to same gender sexual activity, as of course same gender marriage usually is. Courts in some states that have sexual identity included in their nondiscrimination laws have said these businesses may not refuse services on those grounds. The people who don’t want to provide those services say their religious freedom is violated by such court orders.

So we are presented with a conflict between two American values, equal treatment on the one hand and religious liberty on the other. Some states have passed legislation that somehow claims to protect religious liberty in the cases where a person’s claimed religious beliefs lead them to deny services they otherwise would supply. The federal government has passed such a law as well. Those laws have been relatively uncontroversial and without significant legal effect until recently. In recent days the legislature of the state of Indiana has passed, and Indiana Governor Pence has signed, a law that, among other things, gives a business sued for discrimination a legal defense of freedom of religion. The legislature of the state of Arkansas recently passed an essentially identical law, although Governor Hutchinson of that state has so far refused to sign it. Although neither Indiana nor Arkansas includes sexual orientation or gender identity in their civil rights laws some municipalities in those states do, and voiding legal liability under those local laws seems to be the purpose of the new state religious liberty laws.

Governor Pence of Indiana and the advocates of such laws across the country say that the purpose of the laws is to protect citizens’ freedom of religion and is not to authorize discrimination. The claims that the intent of the law is not to authorize discrimination are in the first place irrelevant. The legal question is not the intent of the law, it is the effect of the law. A statute need not intend to be discriminatory in order to be found to be discriminatory. Conservatives want to change the law in this regard, but it is still well established that a law can be voided as violating a civil rights statute or the Constitution if it has what the law calls a “disparate impact” on a protected class of people. That means that the law has a negative impact on people because of a human characteristic such as race that is protected by law. The so-called religious liberty laws that are the subject of so much news today clearly will have a disparate impact of this sort on sexual and gender minorities. Beyond that, the claims that the laws do not intend to authorize discrimination are either unbelievably naïve or, more likely, totally disingenuous. The most significant part of the law in Indiana, and the one that is provoking such a strong reaction by advocates of equality, clearly allows a business owner to avoid liability for discrimination under state or local law by saying that the discrimination was grounded in the business owner’s religious beliefs.

I find it disturbing that those claims receive such a favorable hearing from so many politicians. Why I find that reality disturbing becomes apparent when we analogize these new laws to civil rights laws based on race. The federal, state, and local laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race do not attempt to control anyone’s beliefs about different races of people. They say in effect go ahead and dislike Black people as much as you want. The law doesn’t care. The law says however that whatever your beliefs are, there are limits to the extent to which you may act on those beliefs. The law cares about actions not thoughts. The distinction between beliefs and actions in US law goes back at least as far as the US Supreme Court case of Reynolds v. US, decided in 1878. That decision upheld laws against polygamy against claims by Mormons that their religion authorized that practice. The law doesn’t care what Mormons or anyone else thinks about polygamy. It says however that the state may regulate marriage and may say that only monogamous marriage is allowed. Similarly, civil rights law says we don’t care what you think about Black people, gay people, or any other people covered by the law. We do care what you do. You can think what you want, but you may not discriminate.

People are of course free to think whatever they want about LGBT people. Dislike them as much as you want, as prejudicial and unwarranted as your thoughts may be. The law doesn’t care. Some states and cities, however, have laws that say you may not discriminate against them in the provision of public services, housing, employment, etc. Your religious beliefs are yours, and the government has no right to control them nor any interest in controlling them. The government does however have the right to control and an interest in controlling your actions. That, after all, is what law does. It controls, or at least seeks to control, people’s actions. The clear purpose of the religious liberty laws before us today is to authorize discriminatory actions that might otherwise be legally prohibited. No new law is necessary in this country to give people freedom of religious belief. Thanks be to God! Law is however necessary in this country to prohibit discriminatory actions that violate other deeply held American values, especially the values of equality and equal treatment. The current religious liberty laws have the clear intent of allowing behavior that violates those values in the name of religious freedom. They are legally unsound, for they ignore the distinction between belief and action that is at the heart of the American legal system. I believe them to be religiously unsound too, but that is not a legal consideration. These laws must be repealed or struck down precisely because they are bad law. They are bad policy because they hurt LGBT people, and they are bad law because they transgress long-established legal principles. May they quickly disappear from our public life.

Reflections on the Resurrection

Reflections on the Resurrection of Christ

March 19, 2015

We are approaching Easter, the day in the Christian calendar when we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ more directly and intentionally than we do on any other day. Easter is the great feast of the resurrection. We proclaim with great joy “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” We sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” and we feel lifted up into the realms of God’s unfailing love and grace. In our secular culture Christmas is the main holiday, celebrated even by people who don’t at all believe in Jesus Christ. In the church Easter is the main holiday. After all, every human there ever was or will be was or will be born (although of course not conceived by the Holy Spirit like Jesus was). Only Jesus has risen from the grave. So Easter is the defining celebration of the Christian faith.

We western Christians have been so influenced by our secular culture that we make a bigger deal out of Christmas than we do out of Easter. Our Eastern Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters know better. For them Easter is by far the biggest celebration of the year. One of my most powerful spiritual experiences was attending the Easter vigil service at St. Sergius Holy Trinity monastery outside Moscow on Orthodox Easter in 1976. The service lasted from 10 pm on Saturday until dawn on Easter Sunday. I didn’t understand a word of it of course. The Russian Orthodox service isn’t even in Russian. It is in an old language called Old Church Slavonic, which is related to Russian but isn’t Russian. Still, the beauty of that long Orthodox Easter service is simply overpowering. You can feel the joy of Christ rising from the dead without understanding a word of the liturgy. Easter is that powerful. Easter is that joyful.

Yet most of us Christians aren’t much given to stopping and thinking about the central elements of our faith, about what they mean and how we know what they are and what they mean. I think that’s as true of Christ’s resurrection as it is of any other aspect of our faith, so here I want to reflect a bit on the resurrection of Christ. What is it? How do we know about it? What does it mean for us? Those are powerful questions, so come along while I share with you some of what I think about those things.

We read about Christ rising from the dead in some of the oldest Christian writings that we have. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, written in the mid-50s of the first century CE, Paul says “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day….” 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Paul doesn’t recount any real resurrection appearance stories except to say that the risen Christ appeared to him as well as to many others, apparently a reference to his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. Still, Christ’s resurrection is of central importance to Paul, his resurrection being for Paul the time when Christ became Lord and Savior.

There are accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, or at least of his tomb being empty on the third day after his crucifixion, in each of the four Gospels in the New Testament. The oldest of them is Mark, written probably in the early 70s of the first century CE. Unfortunately, with Mark we immediately run into a problem in understanding Jesus’ resurrection. In its current form Mark ends at chapter 16, verse 20. Scholars are convinced, however, that Mark originally ended at chapter 16, verse 8. Verses 9 through 20 truly don’t sound anything like Mark. They sound a lot more like Luke than like Mark, and there is little doubt that some other author added them to the Gospel of Mark at an unknown time after Mark was originally written. So originally Mark ended at verse 16:8. That’s a problem, for at verse 16:8 three women, identified as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, have come to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body, that is, to perform the typical burial customs of their culture. They find Jesus’ tomb open with a figure identified as “a young man dressed in white” sitting in it. This figure, apparently intended to be an angel but who in any event clearly is not himself the risen Christ, tells them that Christ has risen. He tells the women to go tell Jesus’ disciples that Jesus is going to Galilee and will meet them there. Then comes verse 8, which reads: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” That’s how the Gospel of Mark originally ended, with terrified women having seen an empty tomb, having been told that Jesus has risen, but saying nothing to anyone about it.

It’s not hard to understand why someone later added stories of Jesus appearing to the disciples to the Gospel of Mark. Most of us find Mark’s original ending immensely unsatisfactory. We’re told Jesus has risen, but he doesn’t appear to anyone. The women who receive the news say nothing to anyone. So we’re left with an empty tomb, and we’re left wondering how anyone knows anything about Jesus resurrection if the only humans who know about it don’t say anything about it to anyone. I actually quite like the way Mark’s original ending leaves the meaning of the empty tomb open and unspecified. Mark invites us into the empty tomb to contemplate for ourselves just what Jesus rising from the dead might mean. Still, we have to contend with the fact that in its original form the oldest Gospel we have has no resurrection appearances at all.

The other three Gospels, all written at least ten or more years after Mark, of course do have resurrection appearance stories. Yet there is an undeniable truth about those stories that I have rarely heard anyone in the church pay much attention to. That truth is that the other three Gospels each has its own resurrection appearance stories, and no resurrection appearance story appears in more than one Gospel. These stories do all have a few things in common. Jesus’ tomb is empty, or at least he isn’t in it. It is women who first discover the empty tomb, and one of those women is always Mary Magdalene, as she was in Mark. In John she is the only one who goes to the tomb and finds it empty.

The other three Gospels besides Mark contain these resurrection appearance stories:

Matthew: Mary Magdalene and another woman identified only as “the other Mary” go to the tomb. There’s an angel sitting on the stone that he has rolled away from the entrance to the tomb. He shows them the empty tomb and tells them to go tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee. As the women are leaving Jesus meets them and says “Greetings.” He too tells them to tell the men to go to Galilee, where they will see him. The disciples go to Galilee and meet Jesus on a mountain. He says to them “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:19

Luke: Women identified as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others go to the tomb on Sunday morning. They find the stone that had closed the tomb rolled away but they don’t find Jesus’ body. Two men in white, clearly intended to be angels, appear and tell the women that Jesus has been raised. They go back into town and tell the others, but no one believes them. Peter goes to the tomb, sees that it is empty, and wonders just what has happened. Then comes the wonderful story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus appears to two disciples as they walk toward their home outside of Jerusalem, but they don’t recognize him. They get him to agree to spend the night at their place. Then we read: “When he was at table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.” Luke 24:30-31 Jesus then appears to other disciples. Luke ends with Jesus ascending to heaven, something that happens in neither Mark, Matthew, or John but does appear with slightly different details in Acts, which is actually the second volume of Luke.

John: John’s resurrection stories are by far the longest and most complex in any of the Gospels. In John Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus’ tomb alone on Sunday morning. She sees that the stone that closed the tomb has been rolled away. She runs to tell Peter and the mysterious figure from the Gospel of John called “the disciple whom Jesus loved” that someone has taken Jesus out of the tomb, and she doesn’t know where he is. Peter and the other disciple run to the tomb, see that it is empty, and just go home. Mary Magdalene, however, stays at the tomb crying. She sees two angels who ask her why she is crying. She turns around and sees Jesus standing there, but she doesn’t recognize him. She takes him for the gardener and asks him where Jesus’ body is. Jesus then addresses her by name, and she recognizes him. She goes and tells the others “I have seen the Lord.”

Then comes the famous and intriguing story of “Doubting Thomas.” Jesus appears to the disciples in a locked room, but the disciple Thomas, identified as a twin, isn’t there. Later the others tell Thomas that they have seen Jesus. Thomas replies “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” John 20:25 A week later the disciples are again gathered in the locked room, and this time Thomas is with them. Jesus appears again. He says to Thomas “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas doesn’t actually do what the risen Christ has invited him to do. Instead he replies “My Lord and my God!”

There is reason to believe that the Gospel of John originally ended right after the story of Doubting Thomas. John 20:30-31 read: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Sure sounds like the end of the Gospel, but in its current form John continues with a chapter 21. In it resurrection appearance stories continue.

The disciples have returned to Galilee and to their old occupation of fishing. Jesus appears on the shore while some of them are on the Sea of Galilee fishing, but they don’t recognize him. He asks them if they have caught anything, and they say no. So he tells them to lower their nets on the other side of the boat. They do and bring in a huge catch of fish. The disciple who Jesus loved recognizes Jesus and tells the others that it is the Lord. When they come ashore Jesus has a fire going, and they eat some fish together. Finally John gives us an account of Jesus commissioning Peter to care for the people of the Christian movement. Three times, in slightly different wording, Jesus asks Peter if Peter loves him. Peter protests that he does. Jesus responds “Feed my sheep,” or words to that effect.

So it is clear that while all of the empty tomb or resurrection appearance stories have a few basic things in common, they are all different. No one story of Jesus actually appearing to anyone appears in more than one Gospel. In the different stories Jesus appears to different people in different places. I say that not to upset you but just to point out a simple fact about the stories. Although three of the four Gospels (all four if you count the additions to Mark, which I don’t) have resurrection appearance stories, they don’t have any of the same resurrection appearance stories. Now, it is of course perfectly possible (or nearly so) to believe that all the stories actually happened the way the different Gospels tell them and that different authors simply chose to include different ones in their Gospel. It that works for you, fine. I have to tell you, however, that it doesn’t work for me. I just can’t help wondering why original Mark ends just with an empty tomb and no appearance by the risen Christ and the other three all have different stories in them. So let me give you a different way of understanding what’s going on here. It is a way that works for me and a lot of other people today. That doesn’t mean it has to work for you.

It seems to be undeniable fact that after Jesus’ crucifixion his followers had some kind of powerful experience that death was not the end for him and that somehow he was still alive in their midst. Not alive the way you, I, or any human person is alive, but alive in some mysterious, powerful, spiritual way. We know that they must have had some such experience from the simple fact that the Jesus movement didn’t die when he did. There had been other would-be messiahs before Jesus. There would be others after him. The Romans killed them all, their movements ended, and we’ve never heard of most of them. That didn’t happen with Jesus and his movement. When the Romans (not the Jews, by the way) killed him his movement didn’t end. His followers somehow stayed together despite the threat that the Romans might come after them next, and they started saying that he had risen from the grave. They stayed together. They preached Jesus risen from the grave to others. They took their word of Jesus’ resurrection out from Jerusalem to most of the Roman Empire and perhaps beyond. It seems clear that they told stories the purpose of which was not to communicate mere facts but to convey their profound conviction that though Jesus had most definitely died, death was not the end of him. He still lived in spirit though he was dead in body. He lived among them. He lived in them. So they told stories of having seen him risen from the grave. In different places different early Christian communities told different stories of having seen him risen from the grave.

Now, please don’t think that I am saying they were lying when they told those stories. They weren’t, but to understand just what they were doing we have to understand a profound difference between their world and ours. You see, in the ancient world there were no newspapers. There were no weekly news magazines. There was nothing that today we would call part of the media. Beyond that, their world was nowhere near as interested in facts as we are in our modern world. Our preoccupation with facts is a product of the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, and those things were at least sixteen hundred years in the future in Jesus’ time. The culture of ancient times was far more interested in meaning than it was in facts, and the ancient world communicated meaning less by writing essays than by telling stories. The purpose of stories was less to convey facts than it was to convey meaning. The question we should ask of the resurrection appearance stories (or of any other story in the Bible for that matter) is not did things happen just as the story says but what does the story mean.

Perhaps a couple of examples will help. Let’s start with the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke. The culmination of the story occurs when Jesus is at the table with the two disciples. The scene is thoroughly Eucharistic. Jesus acts as the host though he is in someone else’s house. He goes through the four part Eucharistic liturgy with the bread. He takes, blesses, breaks, and gives it. That is precisely what we do with the bread in every Communion service. The first audiences for this story would immediately have seen the Eucharistic nature of the story. The meaning of the story seems clear. The sacrament of the Eucharist goes back to Jesus himself, and Jesus is present with us in that sacrament. He is the host, we are not. In the story the disciples recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. The point is that we too can recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Don’t look for the facts in this story, look for its meaning. If you can do that you will honor the intent of the author, and the story will have real meaning for you.

Then there’s the story of Doubting Thomas from John. I find this one particularly meaningful, perhaps because my name is Thomas and I am a twin. Some of Jesus’ disciples see him risen and standing among them, but Thomas does not. He isn’t there, not at first. The disciples who have seen Jesus tell Thomas that they have seen him, but Thomas doesn’t believe them. Then he too sees the risen Christ, and he believes. The story ends with Jesus saying “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:29 This story is in a Gospel that was written around seventy years after the time of Jesus. We can safely assume that no one in the community in and for which the Gospel was written had themselves seen Jesus, either during his earthly life or risen from the grave. Even if the author of the Gospel had himself been an original disciple and had known and seen Jesus (something we can’t know about him, by the way), his audience certainly had not. By the time John was written the world surely was full of people like Doubting Thomas. They are the ones for whom the story is told. It wasn’t told to convey facts. It was told to encourage people to believe in Jesus’ resurrection though neither they nor anyone they knew had seen it happen. The meaning is that you can believe though you have not seen. It’s an important message for John’s community. It’s an important message for us too.

So did Christ rise from the grave? Yes, but to understand that confession you have to understand what you mean by “rise from the grave.” Go ahead and accept the resurrection stories as factually true if you want. I won’t try to stop you, but those stories come alive for us and have power for us when we ask not did they happen but what do they mean. They mean that death did not end Jesus. It did not end his message. It did not end his power. His brutal execution by the Romans didn’t mean he was a failure. It didn’t mean he had lost. Jesus’ resurrection means that he was indeed the Son of God. Whatever the facts of Jesus’ resurrection were, that incredible event is God saying to us he is the one. Listen to him. Follow him. Believe in him. Jesus’ resurrection says that just as death was not the end for him it is not the end for us either. Our lives with God never end. Jesus’ tomb was empty, the stories say. So, in a way we can’t really comprehend, are ours. All that is what Jesus’ resurrection means. Thanks be to God.

Reflections on Marcus Borg

Reflections on Marcus Borg

 

Marcus Borg has died. Many of my liberal/progressive Christian friends are expressing unqualified enthusiasm for Borg and his work. I too greatly appreciate Borg’s contribution to popular, progressive Christian theology. Yet that being honestly said and meant, I am a bit less enthusiastic about Borg than many of my friends. So on the occasion of his death I want to reflect on what I see as Borg’s gifts and his shortcomings. They are both significant, and I sense that his shortcomings are often overlooked in progressive Christian circles. We need to recognize both sides of his important work.

Marcus Borg was a Christian theologian and biblical scholar. For many years he held an endowed chair in the philosophy department of Oregon State University. OSU is an odd place for a widely read popular theologian to work, but that’s where Borg lived and taught for most of his public life. He was educated at, among other places, Oxford University in England, perhaps the most prestigious university in the world. He certainly had the credentials to be a first class theologian. Whether he ever became one is another question.

Borg first came to public attention as a member of the Jesus Seminar. The first project of that large group of biblical scholars was to determine which of the sayings the Gospels (including for some reason the Gospel of Thomas) attribute to Jesus he may actually have said. The issue the Seminar addressed was the undeniable truth that the Gospels were written at least a few decades after Jesus’ death. They contain both historical fact and confessions of faith about Jesus from the later Christian communities that produced the Gospels. The Jesus Seminar established what they consider to be objective criteria for determining which of the sayings of Jesus actually come from Jesus and which are more likely faith confessions by his later followers. These criteria include whether a Jesus saying appears in more than one independent ancient source and whether the saying is something the later community would likely leave out if they could because the saying was so unpopular or caused them so much trouble with the Romans.

The members of the Seminar applied their criteria to each Jesus saying in the Gospels, then they voted on whether they thought the saying was authentic Jesus or the later community. Their method of voting got a lot of publicity and was rather widely ridiculed. They used colored balls. A red ball meant the member thought the saying was from Jesus. A black ball meant the member thought it wasn’t from Jesus but was a later faith confession. Each saying was then colored red, pink, grey, or black. Red meant there was a consensus in the group that the saying came from Jesus. Pink meant they thought it sounded a good deal like Jesus but probably had some later addition or alteration as well. Grey meant it didn’t sound much like Jesus but may have some echo of an authentic Jesus saying. Black meant they were sure Jesus never said it. Marcus Borg was an important member of the group doing this voting.

Many progressive Christians are very enthusiastic about this work of the Jesus Seminar. Frankly, I’m not, or at least I’m not as enthusiastic as many of my friends. I have a couple of problems with it. First, it seems to me that the Seminar claims an objectivity for their work that just isn’t there. I get the sense that their opinions come down to no more than “It sounds like Jesus to me” or “It doesn’t sound like Jesus to me.” There certainly are Jesus sayings that sound like Jesus to me and that don’t sound like Jesus to me too, but I don’t claim much objectivity behind those reactions. This kind of sorting of the Jesus sayings can far too easily come down to “I like this one” and “I don’t like that one.” Or “This one sounds like who I want Jesus to have been” and “this one doesn’t sound like who I want Jesus to have been.” Many of the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions sound right to me, but that doesn’t make them objectively correct.

Second, the question of whether Jesus actually said something a Gospel says he said has no bearing on the fact that the saying is in the Bible. All of the sayings the Seminar addressed are in one Gospel or another, some of them in more than one. The Gospels, and not some version of the Gospels edited to take out things the Seminar (or anyone else) thinks Jesus didn’t actually say,  are our sacred texts. Concluding that Jesus didn’t say something in a Gospel can be very useful. At John 3:18, for example, Jesus says “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”[1] That verse has been a bulwark of destructive Christian exclusivism and thus of Christian spiritual imperialism for nearly two thousand years. It helps us to reject that saying if we can say Jesus never said it, which I am convinced he never did. Yet that conclusion doesn’t change the fact that John 3:18 is in the Bible. It doesn’t change the fact that we pastors have to deal with it in our relationships with parishioners who have been taught all their lives that it is something Jesus said because the Gospel of John says he said it.

Finally, whether Jesus actually said something a Gospel attributes to him is essentially irrelevant to whether or not a saying is true and/or important. The Jesus Seminar doesn’t think Jesus said any of the things attributed to him in the Gospel of John, and I think they’re probably right about that. John of course includes the famous “I am” sayings—I am the good shepherd, I am the way the truth and the life, I am the vine you are the branches, and others. I am quite prepared to agree that those statements are faith confessions about Jesus by the Johanine community and not actual sayings of Jesus. I read them as though they said “We confess that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life,” etc. Yet those sayings are among the most powerfully true statements about Jesus in the New Testament. For us he is the way, the truth, and the life. For us he is the good shepherd. For us he is the vine on which we are branches. It really makes no difference to the truth of those statements that Jesus didn’t say them. So I get a lot less excited about the work of the Jesus seminar than do many other progressive Christians.

Borg made a name for himself first by publishing books about Jesus that became quite popular. His early work was rather scholarly and was intended, at least in part, for an audience of scholars. Borg became famous, however, not through his scholarly work but through his work as a popularizer. His book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, published in 1994, was one of his early popular successes. In that book we see both Borg’s greatness and his limitations. With that book Borg became much more of a popularizer than he was a scholar. My father, a history professor at the University of Oregon, used to object to Borg because he held a chair at a major public university but published popular, faith based books, not scholarly ones. Dad was largely correct about that. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, along with its sequel Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, published in 2001, are immensely useful tools for adult education in the church. They present the understandings of modern biblical and theological scholarship in a way that is quite easily accessible to a lay audience that doesn’t have much theological or biblical education. I have used them that way myself, and I may well do so again in the future. They introduce people to nonliteral ways of thinking about Jesus and about the Bible, something Christianity desperately needs if it is to survive in the postmodern world. What these works are not however is original scholarship. Borg may have held an endowed chair at a public university, but he wrote mostly as a man of faith writing to an audience of faith.

Borg’s greatest contribution to the life of the church is his book The Heart of Christianity, Rediscovering a Life of Faith, published in 2003. It introduces lay people to a new way of looking at Christianity as a whole. It leads us to see Christianity as a new way of life rather than as an old way of believing. It is a wonderful book. I believe every Christian should read it and probably should read it again and again. Yet once more I must say, this book is not original scholarship. I found nothing in it that I hadn’t heard before. Borg’s virtue is not really that he comes up with new insights. It is that he takes insights that really are quite old and makes them accessible to people who have never heard them before.

Borg did some of his best work with his colleague and close personal friend John Dominic Crossan. Crossan is a much better scholar than Borg. Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, published in 1993, is scholarly and intellectually dense in a way Borg never was. So is his book In Search of Paul, published with Jonathan L. Reed in 2005. Borg and Crossan became close personal friends. I heard them speak together two or three times. Together they wrote The First Christmas, What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Birth, published in 2005, and The Last Week, What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem, published in 2007. These are fascinating books, and many lay Christians find them quite challenging. They are great adult education tools in the church for people who are ready to take on what for them are new ways of thinking about Jesus and the Gospels. Borg and Crossan used to lead tours of Turkey to look at ancient Christian sites and teach people about early Christianity. I wish I had been able to go on one of them.

Here’s the bottom line about Borg for me. He was a popularizer, not a scholar. He certainly had scholarly training, having received advanced degrees, including a D.Phil., from Oxford University. Yet he isn’t primarily significant as a scholar. He is significant as a popularizer. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with being a popularizer. I often wish I were more of one than I am. Yet my father was right. A professor at a public university really shouldn’t be writing faith based, popular literature; yet that’s exactly what Borg did before he retired from Oregon State University in 2007.

More importantly perhaps, Borg’s work as a popularizer rather than a scholar led him to make some compromises in his theology that I wish he hadn’t made. Here’s the most important one for me. In The Heart of Christianity and other works Borg insists that we think of the language of faith as metaphor. His use of the word metaphor is, frankly, a cop out. What he means is myth and/or symbol. Myth and symbol are the technical theological terms for what Borg always calls metaphor. Yet metaphor doesn’t really mean the same thing as myth. A metaphor is a figure of speech that defines a thing by saying that it is something else. “All the world’s a stage” is a metaphor from Shakespeare.  “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” from Romeo and Juliet contains several metaphors. A light is the east. A person is the sun. Obviously Juliet’s window isn’t literally the east, although it may face east. Juliet is a young woman, not literally the sun. Yet these metaphors tells us a good deal about how Romeo perceives Juliet. Metaphors like these say something about a subject by calling it something else with which we all are familiar.

Symbol and myth have similarities with metaphor but they are much more than metaphor. A symbol is a thing or word that points beyond itself to a profound truth that we cannot grasp in any direct, literal way. A myth is a story that acts as a symbol.[2] “God is love” is also on one level a metaphor. In the statement “God is love,” however, the word love isn’t a mere metaphor, it is a symbol. It says something about God by calling God something else, in this case love. Yet “God is love” also has a much deeper meaning than a mere metaphor. The statement points beyond itself to an ineffable reality that we call God that we cannot know directly but know through symbols that point to God and participate in the reality of God. A symbol conveys meaning in a way a mere metaphor never can.

Borg says metaphor when he means symbol or myth. It’s not hard to understand why he does. He’s writing for a popular audience not a scholarly one, and it seems that he’s afraid of how theologically unsophisticated people react to the word myth. It get it. You see, the word myth has acquired a meaning in popular usage that is very different from its technical meaning. In popular usage a myth is something that people think is true that in reality is not true. In theological usage a myth, so far from being something that isn’t true, is something that is more deeply true than mere fact can ever be. Still, I know how church people react against the word myth. I use it my own writing. I use it in Liberating Christianity. I explain it. I try to get people to use the technical, theological meaning of myth not the popular one. I admit that I have had rather limited success in that endeavor. Some of the people in groups with which I have read Liberating Christianity, never got over the popular meaning of myth, and their inability to accept my definition of myth blocks them from fully grasping what I’m trying to tell them in my writing. Still, Borg was a university professor. He compromised his scholarly integrity to reach a mass audience. Reach a mass audience he did, and he did a lot of good work there. Still, I’ve never gotten over his compromise of his language. It keeps me from celebrating Borg as enthusiastically as many of my friends do.

So rest in peace Marcus. You were a good man who did much good work. I won’t follow you everywhere you went. Because I understand the language of the faith as symbol and myth I don’t have to reject things like Jesus’ Resurrection as you sometimes seem to do. Still, I appreciate what your work can bring to the people of the church who are searching for new (to them) ways to understand the faith. I trust that much of your work will continue to be of great use in the church for decades to come.

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[1] At least Jesus says that in John if the translators have put quotation marks, which aren’t in the Greek original, in the right place. The NRSV has a translators’ note that says “Some interpreters hold that the quotation concludes with verse 15.” If that’s right John 3:16-18 isn’t even a saying attributed to Jesus but is only a statement by the author of the Gospel of John. Still, the Christian tradition has always taken those verses to be statements by Jesus.

[2] For a fuller discussion of symbol and myth see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, chapter 3.

Maltby and Me

Maltby and Me

As of December 16, 2014

As I write this post I am the pastoral search committee’s candidate for the call as half time pastor of The First Congregational Church of Maltby. That news has surprised (or shocked?) some of my friends and ministerial colleagues. Several have asked me questions about my possible call to Maltby. They have ranged from “Where’s Maltby” to “Don’t you think they’re too conservative for you?” So I decided to write down what I know about the Maltby church and how my relationship with it has developed. I hope this little essay will answer your questions, at least to the extent that I am able to answer them at this time.

Maltby is an unincorporated area on the southern boundary of Snohomish County, Washington. It is located a few miles north (more or less) of the city of Woodinville just off Washington state Highway 522 on Washington state Highway 524. It is famous not for its church but for the Maltby Café, located just a short distance from the church. The Maltby Café is widely known for having the best breakfasts around and gigantic cinnamon rolls. Maltby has been occupied by non-native people for well over one hundred years. Today it is mostly suburban with farm or ranch property mixed in.

The First Congregational Church of Maltby is a member not of my United Church of Christ but of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. In 1957 the national bodies of a denomination called The Congregational Christian Churches merged with another denomination called The Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the UCC. No entity had the authority to merge the Congregational churches into the UCC. Each Congregational church had to make its own decision whether or not to join the new denomination. Eventually most did, but some did not. Maltby didn’t. The Congregational churches that didn’t join the UCC formed the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. Maltby is one of the 400 or so churches that make up the National Association.

The First Congregational Church of Maltby was founded in 1903 by settlers in what was then a logging community. Like most mainline Protestant churches it has experienced periods of health and strength and periods of decline and struggle. The church has given me a rather long history of the church, but I haven’t read it all yet. I know that Rev. Norm Erlandsen served as pastor from 1990 until after 2005. He was a graduate of Pacific School of Religion, the very liberal UCC seminary in Berkeley, California. More recently the church’s pastoral history has been unsettled and troubled at best. Various people have filled the pulpit. One of them was, by all accounts, very conservative. Recently (I don’t know exactly when) he left and took some of the conservative members of the congregation with him. They had an interim pastor named Diane until sometime in the spring or summer of 2014. She described herself as progressive, and the people tell me they loved her. She resigned for health reasons, and the church has been without a pastor since that time.

I have known that there was a non-UCC church on the main road in Maltby for a long time. I recall that when my parents, brother, and sister-in-law were visiting me when I lived in Lynnwood and was serving the Monroe church I gave them directions to the Monroe church by driving down Hwy 524 from Lynnwood to Hwy 522. In my note to them I pointed out the Maltby church, but at that time I knew only that it was not part of the UCC. Over my time as a pastor of Monroe Congregational UCC I met a few of the members of that congregation. One of them, Joan Pinney, is a fine artist who is widely known in these parts. She painted a picture of the Monroe church’s sanctuary building that hands in that church’s fellowship hall. I met her once in Monroe years ago, but I certainly didn’t know her. Two or three of the men of the Maltby church have come to the Monroe church’s men’s group breakfasts a time or two after Ed Meyer, a former member of the Maltby church, moved his membership to the Monroe church.

I learned a good deal more about the First Congregational Church of Maltby from Ed. He and his wife Mariko live in Maltby and had been members of the Maltby church for some time. Then the time of troubles started after Norm Erlandsen left. Finally the church got too conservative and too conflicted for Ed and Mariko, and they came to Monroe for a better church experience. From Ed I got the notion that the Maltby church had become very conservative and very troubled.

My relationship with the Maltby church started to change in the summer of this year, 2014. Ed was attending one of my book groups for the Monroe church. One day last summer it was really hot, so Jane and I invited the group to meet at the house we had recently purchased in Sultan, where we had installed a ductless heat pump. Air conditioning is indeed a marvelous thing. Kris and Walter, a couple who are members of the Maltby church, came to that meeting with Ed. A short time later Kris called me and asked if I would ever be available for pulpit supply in Maltby. I said Kris, I thought I was the last person in the world the Maltby church would want to hear from. She said that about one quarter of the congregation is very conservative but the rest of us aren’t. We’d love to hear from you. She said that some of the people of the church had even talked about exploring membership in the UCC. So I arranged with my co-pastor (and wife) Jane to preach at the Maltby church on October 12, 2014.

Not long after the inquiry about my doing pulpit supply someone else from the Maltby church (Walter I think, but my memory is terrible these days) called and asked if I knew of any UCC pastor types who might be interested in the call to Maltby. I said I didn’t but that I’d see what I could find out. I called Mike Denton, our UCC Conference Minister. He said that of course the Conference couldn’t help directly with Maltby’s pastoral search since the church isn’t part of the UCC, but he told me to put the inquiry out on the Conference’s email list. I did. At that point it had never occurred to me to apply myself. Apparently they got one response but weren’t interested in pursuing the matter with that person.

Not much later I had a thought. I was looking for something new in my life. I was feeling like a fifth wheel in Monroe, where my wife had been the fulltime pastor for the last year and I was working only one-quarter time. The Monroe church’s finances weren’t in good shape from their trying to pay both Jane and me, and I had thought about resigning. I thought about the inquiry about UCC pastors and said: Why not me? So before I preached at Maltby the first time I asked Gordon Hamlin, a member of the church who had become my primary contact for pulpit supply purposes, to meet with me. He turns out that he is both Moderator of the congregation and chair of the pastoral search committee. He told me later he didn’t understand at first why I had asked for that meeting. After we had talked for a while he did. I asked him how he thought the church would feel about me applying for the call. He said he didn’t know but that he would see what he could find out. I gave him a brief resume I had prepared.

After I preached at Maltby on October 12, Gordon asked me if I were available to lead worship on November 2 and November 9. They especially wanted an ordained person to preside at Communion on that first Sunday in November. I talked to Jane and to the Trustees of the Monroe church about it, and they said yes, do it. So I did. Gordon then asked me if I could to all of the Sundays of Advent and Christmas Eve at the church. I said I’d have to talk to people at Monroe about it and get back to him. I called the Monroe church’s Pastor-Parish Relations Committee together to discuss the matter. At this point I had not tendered my resignation from Monroe and had not in fact decided to do tender it. Jane and the PPRC said yes, so I signed on for Advent and Christmas Eve at the Maltby church. Gordon asked me to complete the Minister Information File on the National Association’s web site, and I did.

One day I met Gordon for lunch in Monroe, and we talked a lot more. He told me that he would be my advocate for the call. On November 25 I spent nearly two hours with the Maltby pastoral search committee. They made me their candidate for the call. I haven’t pulled any punches with them, or at least not many. They know that I am a progressive Christian. Gordon at least knows that I have done same-gender weddings, but then he told me that their interim Diane had too. Gordon is reading my book Liberating Christianity and says very complimentary things about it. I have included my Christian universalism and my belief in God’s totally unconditional grace for all people in my sermons. I preached a sermon on peace in which I have them Jesus’ program of distributive justice and nonviolence as the way to peace. I was apprehensive about how that sermon would be received (mostly because so many people reject Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence), but I have rarely gotten so many positive comments after a sermon as I got after that one.

Meanwhile, back in Monroe, I tendered my resignation effective at the end of the year at the Cabinet (church council) meeting on Nov. 9, having left the Maltby church in time to get back to Monroe for that meeting. That resignation really has nothing to do with Maltby. I would have resigned even if the Maltby church and the possibility of being their pastor had never entered my life. My resignation was prompted not by Maltby but by Monroe’s financial status. The financial numbers for 2014 are bad. The church’s financial reserves are being depleted. When I saw the numbers through the end of October at the Trustees meeting early in November I knew that I had to resign. When Jane came on staff as co-pastor we pledged to each other that we would not just sit by and watch our compensation packages bleed the church dry. That’s exactly what they’re doing. I suppose having Maltby on the horizon made it easier for me to resign, but Maltby isn’t why I did it. My resignation came as a shock to most of the people in Monroe, although I can’t believe that it was a surprise to all of the Trustees, for they had seen me reacting to the bad numbers for a long time. Leaving Monroe is hard. Really hard. I love those people, and I think they love me. Still, no pastorate lasts forever, and my pastorate in Monroe ends on December 31. I will be there on Jan. 4, the first Sunday in January, for the formal termination of covenant and good-bye service. I’m not looking forward to it. It will be a time of celebration, but also a time of tears.

The Maltby pastoral search committee identified me as their candidate to the church’s Administrative Board on Dec. 10. They identified me as their candidate to the congregation at a special congregational meeting after worship on Dec. 14. It seemed the news as well received. The congregation won’t vote on the call for a while yet. Their bylaws specify that a candidate’s credentials be posted in the church for 22 days after the candidate has been identified. That makes the earliest possible date for a vote Jan.5, a Monday. Gordon has told the congregation that they will probably vote on my call either on Jan. 18 or January 25. So it’s not a done deal yet. I expect to be called, but that’s up to the congregation at this point. They will do what they will do.

Being pastor of First Congregational Church of Maltby will be a challenge, assuming for the moment that I will become their pastor. The call will be half time, 20 hours a week. The compensation package is modest, to put a nice word on it. The congregation is tiny, having a membership of around two dozen. There apparently is some significant division among them between very conservative people and more progressive people. The tensions and disputes seem to have quieted down for now, perhaps in large part because that one pastor left and took many of the conservatives with him. Yet of course underground conflict can be more destructive than overt conflict, so we’ll see what happens. I am intrigued at the prospect of getting to know them better and helping them with whatever issues they face. At my meeting with their search committee one of them asked me what problems I see in the church. I said that it was too early for me to know, but I did say that perhaps they have a lack of clarity over just who they are as a church. The woman who asked the question said “You’re spot on there.” Identity was an issue for the Monroe church when I started there in 2002, so I have some experience helping churches figure that one out. I won’t push them to join the UCC, but if they want to explore that possibility I will be happy to work with on the issue and connect them with the appropriate people in the local UCC Conference.

So we’ll see what happens. I pray that God will help both the church and me with our discernment over whether we are indeed called to do ministry together. Stay tuned.

On the Constitution and The Role of Judges

On the Constitution and The Role of Judges

I’ve heard a common refrain being shouted in the public square these days by people who disapprove of same gender marriage. The federal courts keep ruling that state laws that limit marriage to mixed gender couples are unconstitutional because they violate the equal protection of the law that the United States Constitution affords to all American citizens. The common refrain that is echoing among us is that these rulings are wrong because they are made by unelected and unaccountable judges and they violate the will of the people. The proponents of discrimination in marriage loudly proclaim that judges who are appointed not elected have no business overturning the will of the people. To lay bare the specious nature of these claims we need to resort to what used to be high school civics to show just how untenable those claims are.

The claims that the judicial decisions extending marriage rights to all people are inappropriate because they are made by judges not by legislatures and violate the will of the people radically misunderstand the nature both of the judiciary and of any constitution, whether it be the federal constitution or the constitution of a particular state. We begin our high school civics course with what a constitution is. You’d think that would be pretty obvious, but clearly it isn’t. A constitution is the basic law of any jurisdiction. In our country the US Constitution is the basic law of our federal system of government. In the US the Constitution creates the basic structure of the government. The US Constitution, Article III, provides for the establishment of federal courts and provides that the judges of those courts are nominated by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and serve for life not for a specified period of time. They are never subject to election by the people.

A constitution also often specifies certain fundamental rights of the citizens that the government cannot infringe. In the US Constitution those rights are mostly spelled out in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, amendments known as the Bill of Rights. Among the rights of US citizens that the government may not legally infringe is the right to what the Constitution calls “the equal protection of the law.” There is an enormous body of jurisprudence dealing with the precise meaning of that term and how it is applied in specific circumstances, but the basic sense of the provision is that all US citizens must be equal before the law. The federal government may not treat similarly situated citizens differently without either a reasonable cause or compelling reasons depending on the circumstances of a particular distinction between citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution applies the federal provision of the equal protection of the law to the state governments as well.

In 1803, in the foundational case of Marbury v. Madison, the US Supreme Court established that the federal courts have the power to enforce the constitutionally protected rights of citizens against the government itself. That is, the federal courts have the authority to compel any governmental body, agency, or agent to respect the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the country’s citizens. Marbury v. Madison established a foundational principle of the American system of government. Some governmental agency, specifically the courts, must have the power to enforce the rights specified in the Constitution if those rights are to have any meaning at all. Our courts’ having that power is the indispensible foundation of our freedom as Americans.

There is an historical example of a system in which that was not the case that is instructive. The Soviet Union had a constitution.[1] It contained some rather lofty language about rights that were guaranteed to the citizens of the country. It guaranteed freedom of speech and of religion, for example. The Soviet courts, however, did not have the power to enforce the rights specified in the constitution in any court case. A citizen being prosecuted or discriminated against for violating the strict limitations of the freedom of religion found in Soviet law and practice, however, could not raise the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion as a defense against the charge. The USSR had nothing like Marbury v. Madison. As a result the rights mentioned in the constitution were a dead letter. The government and the Communist Party could tout them around the world for propaganda purposes, but they actually provided no protection for Soviet citizens because the courts could not enforce them. Only a handful of Americans know about the Soviet constitution and the Soviet legal system, but in our current context it is an illustrative example of how not to do constitutional government.

Yet the opponents of same gender marriage continue to complain about unelected judges violating the will of the people. Those complaints raise two important and closely related issues, namely, how the rights specified in the Constitution relate to the will of the people and why federal judges are appointed for life rather than elected for a specified term.

I’ll take up the question of how constitutional guarantees of rights relate to the will of the people first. The function of constitutional guarantees of certain rights is precisely to prevent the government from violating those rights when those rights aren’t popular with a majority of the people.[2] After all, what need do we have of constitutional guarantees of rights that most of the people like? Those rights don’t need legal protection because a democratic government isn’t likely to violate them. The issue of constitutionally guaranteed rights arises precisely in the context of rights that a majority of the people don’t like. The history of the civil rights movement in this country is a prime example of this truth. The Jim Crow laws of the southern states expressed the will of the people, or at least they expressed the will of a substantial majority of the white people of those states. A majority of the people of the Jim Crow states didn’t want Black people to have equal rights to education, the ballot box, employment, or public accommodations.  Nonetheless the laws that established American apartheid were not only sinfully unjust, they were unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. That a majority of the people in the affected states liked those laws didn’t make them constitutional. It didn’t matter that the people continually elected politicians who enacted those laws and vowed to maintain and defend them. George Wallace may have had great popular support as he stood in the doorway of the administration building of the University of Mississippi and attempted to prohibit a qualified Black student from registering at the school. What he did was still unconstitutional as the act of a government official denying the equal protection of the law to a citizen of his state. A majority of white Alabamans may have cheered in approval as Bull Connor and his thugs with clubs, attack dogs, and fire hoses viciously assaulting groups of citizens demanding nothing more than their rights as citizens. What he did was still unconstitutional as the act of a government official violating the equal rights of those citizens. When the federal courts and the US Justice Department intervened against these discriminatory governmental actions people shouted about the will of the people and states’ rights. They shouted about tradition. They also shouted obscene racist garbage, but then many of the people shouting about the will of the people and so-called traditional marriage today also shout obscene anti-homosexual garbage. You’d think that the parallels between the shouts of the anti-gay bigots today and the shouts of the racist bigots fifty years ago would be enough to discredit those shouts and those who shout them. Still, the shouts ring out. The unelected, unaccountable federal judges are violating the will of the people! What an outrage! How dare they! Those cries didn’t make Jim Crow constitutional, and they don’t make marriage discrimination constitutional either. When judges enforce the Constitution against the popular will the Constitution is functioning precisely as it is supposed to.

Then there’s the matter of federal judges being unelected and, as the complainers insist, unaccountable. The first thing to say is that federal judges are not purely unaccountable. They can be impeached and removed from office in the same way a President can, although that has rarely happened. More importantly, federal judges are supposed to be precisely unaccountable to the will of the popular majority. The US Constitution deliberately and explicitly sets them up that way, and it is a very good thing that it does. The rights of citizens do not depend on the will of the majority, and the tenure of the judges who have the job of protecting those rights mustn’t depend on the will of the majority either. Removing federal judges from direct accountability to the people through election to office makes it possible for them to enforce constitutional rights against popular dissatisfaction with their decisions. That federal judges are appointed for life rather than elected for a specific number of years is a crucial safeguard of all of our rights.

Emotions run very high around the issue of marriage equality, so perhaps examples from other areas of constitutionally guaranteed rights will help to illustrate the matter. Take freedom of speech, for example. I have previously used Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church as an example in this regard in this blog. I find the words and actions of Phelps and his followers to be hateful and deeply disturbing. Phelps was a bigot, and those who follow him are bigots. He spewed vicious hatred against gay and lesbian people and against this country for what he saw as its tolerance of them. I and most Americans at some level wished that we could shut him up. Yet I have argued before, and I argue again now, that Phelps’ vicious speech was protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Most people intensely disliked Phelps and his hatred. Even people who oppose marriage equality I assume could not stomach is bilious filth. Our dislike of Phelps and his words, however, did not change the fact that his speech is protected from censorship by any governmental entity by the US Constitution. His speech needed that protection precisely because so many of us wanted him to shut up. Marriage equality needs judicial protection precisely because so many people don’t want it to happen. In neither case should a judge bend to public opinion. That federal judges are appointed for life and not elected is an essential protection of the judge’s freedom to do what is right even when people don’t like it.

So, have the many federal judges who have overturned states’ restriction of marriage rights to mixed gender couples violated the will of the people? Yes, probably. Does that make their decisions wrong? No, absolutely not. Should the people have the power to vote them out of office because the people don’t like their decisions? No, absolutely not. The framers of the US Constitution were much wiser in this regard than are the outraged citizens and their elected representatives who scream about unaccountable judges violating the popular will. Yes, those judges, while not completely unaccountable, are not subject to popular election. Yes, many of those judges have violated the popular will in many states. For those truths we should be saying “Thank God.” Let us be thankful that we have a political system that lets those judges exercise independent judgment and enforce our rights against those who would take them away.

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[1] It actually had several over the years, but the differences between them are not significant for our purposes here.

[2] I do not meant to suggest that marriage equality is unpopular with a majority of Americans. Certainly at least in certain states that is not the case. My home state of Washington approved marriage equality by legislative action followed by a popular vote a couple of years ago. However, the cries I’m discussing here come from states where marriage inequality has been written into the law by popular vote, so the point remains valid.

A Sermon on American Racism

On Sunday, August 17, 2014, I preached this sermon in response to recent killings of unarmed Black men by police officers.

Really? I Don’t Think So

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

August 17, 2014

Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28

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.

New York City police strangled Eric Garner to death. Los Angeles police shot and killed Ezell Ford as he lay on the ground. Ferguson, Missouri, police shot and killed Michael Brown. All three of these victims were unarmed Black men. They are just recent examples of police violence against Black men that got some publicity. Various Internet sites report that a Black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28 minutes in this country. Remember Trayvon Martin? He’s just another one we heard about. Police violence against Black men doesn’t always result in death. Recently in Seattle a Westlake Mall security guard maced a Black man while ignoring white law breakers. Remember Rodney King? I used to work at Catholic Community Services in the Central District of Seattle, where the population is mostly Black. One day I was looking out a window from which I could see our parking lot. There was a Seattle police car there, and a Seattle police officer was talking to a Black man he apparently had pulled over. There was no struggle. The Black man wasn’t threatening the police officer. Nonetheless, a second police car showed up. Then a third. A co-worker who also saw what was going on said “It’s the Central District.” These are but a very few examples from America’s shameful and sinful culture of racism.

Most of us are white, and I need to ask those of us who are: Do we get it that Black Americans are afraid of the police and have good reason to be? Pastor Jane tells a story from a seminary class in which the teacher asked how the students would react to the police knocking on their door. The white students said they’ be curious and want to cooperate and help. The Black students said they’d be suspicious. Those Black students weren’t being irrational. They weren’t being paranoid. They were reacting out of their experience and the experience of Black people generally, just as the white students were reacting out of their experience and the experience of white people generally. Of course no generalization is true of every member of any group of people, and certainly not all police officers are a threat to Black people, but it is still true that on the whole Black Americans experience the police differently than white Americans do. They experience them in significant part as a threat. That’s because the police represent society at large, and our society at large is racist. It was in its origins. It still is.

Our society is racist, but just how does racism work? That’s a crucial question for us Americans today. Here’s a good answer to that question from an African-American pastor. The Rev. Tony Lee, identified in an article on The Huffington Post’s religion page as an African-American pastor of an AME church in Maryland, says that the problem of young Black men dying at the hands of the police  is an example “of daily antagonisms felt by black people on the street.” He said “This is part of a wider school-to-prison pipeline and the ghettoization and de-humanization of black bodies.” There’s the crux of the problem in one word—dehumanization. American racism does nothing less than deny the full and equal humanity of Black people. That’s how racism works.

It doesn’t just work that way in our country. We see it at work in our passage from Matthew this morning. In that reading Jesus has an encounter with a woman identified as Canaanite. That means she’s not Jewish. It means she’s from a different people than Jesus is. In this story Jesus calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Hard to believe perhaps, but Jesus calls another human being a dog. The way Matthew tells this story, for Jesus, at first at least, the Canaanite woman who asks him for help isn’t even human. When he calls her a dog he makes her less than human. He gets over it by the end of the story, but in the story he denies the full humanity of the woman with whom he’s speaking.

That’s how racism works. For a racist a member of the other race isn’t fully human. That’s how human cruelty usually works, especially when it’s practiced on a huge scale. For the Nazis the Jews were less than fully human. How else could they slaughter so many millions of them? For American racists Black people aren’t fully human. How else can we lynch so many of them? How else can we deny them equal opportunity in employment, housing, health care, and especially legal justice? If a leader wants people to brutalize another people that leader has to start by dehumanizing the people he wants brutalized. Back in the 1960s we called Vietnamese people “gooks.” I did it myself. We were killing Vietnamese people in huge numbers, so we dehumanized them. Dehumanizing them made it easier for us to kill them. It made it possible for those of us who weren’t personally directly involved in killing them to live with the way our country was killing them. Racism dehumanizes. That’s its primary sin. It makes human beings less than human. It calls people dogs.

Jesus got over it in our little story, thank God, but how he did raises an important issue for us. In the story the Canaanite woman basically outwits Jesus. When he calls her a dog she says yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table. Jesus is impressed, calls her a woman not a dog, and gives her the help she has requested. In the story the dehumanized one brings about a change of consciousness in the one doing the dehumanizing. I’m really glad Jesus gets over his dehumanizing of this woman in our little story, but we need to be really careful about how that happens. You see, the racism of white Americans isn’t a problem for Black Americans to solve. It is a problem for us white Americans to solve, as our colleague the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams, a Black pastor in our Conference, recently reminded us. Jesus’ failure to recognize the full humanity of the Canaanite woman was really his problem to solve, not hers. So let’s take this story as a warning, not as a model.

Speaking now as a white person and to those of you who are white, if our racism is our problem to solve, how do we do it? I have no magic answers to that question. We’ve all grown up in a radically racist culture. Yes, racism isn’t as bad—or at least isn’t as overt—as it used to be, but our culture is still radically racist. You don’t get over a history of centuries of virulent racism in a few decades, maybe not even in a few centuries. So getting over American racism is not a simple task, and there are no simple means of doing it. This morning I want to suggest just one basic but indispensible step.

You white folk among us, how many of you, how many of us, understand that we have white privilege every moment of our lives? We’ve all got it whether we’re aware of it or not. If you’re not doing anything wrong, like speeding say, do you get nervous every time you see a police officer? No? That’s white privilege. When you apply for a job do you think that you have to be much more qualified than the applicants of another race if you stand a chance of getting hired? No? That’s white privilege. Have you been turned down for rental housing on some obviously made up excuse? No? That’s white privilege. If you’ve ever been involved in any kind of court case civil or criminal, have you thought the court was going to rule against you just because of the color of your skin? No? That’s white privilege. We white people have it, every last one of us.

It is so easy for us white Americans to convince ourselves that racism is a problem of the past not of our present. Heck, we’ve even got a Black President, right? So how can our society be racist? Well, whether we like Obama as a President or not I trust we’re all glad that his race didn’t stop him from getting elected, but one election doesn’t wipe out racism. Lots of people still voted against Obama quite without regard for his politics just because he’s Black. Moreover, it’s so easy for us to point to Obama as proof that we aren’t racist, then go on with our usual racism with nothing really changed. It is white America’s denial of its racism that is the biggest obstacle to overcoming it.

We’re not going to solve American racism here this morning. Far from it. We can however stop lying to ourselves. We live in a racist culture. It’s not our fault that we do, but we do. Overcoming racism has to start with us becoming more aware of that foundational fact of American life. We white people have to start admitting our white privilege. And we have to stop dehumanizing people of color. I’m sure we would all say yes, of course, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown people are all human beings. We’d all say it, but do we really get what it means? Do we really get what true equality means? When you see a Black person on the street who you don’t know can you really say to that person Namaste, the God in me greets the God in you? Maybe we’d all answer yes; but when I hear that yes part of me wants to say Really? I don’t think so. I think we’ve all got racism in our bones because we all grew up in a racist culture. The only way we’ll ever get over it is to start by admitting it. So let’s admit it, shall we? Maybe if enough of us do fewer unarmed Black men will die at the hands of the police. Amen.