American Madness: Freedom and the Second Amendment

American Madness: Freedom and the Second Amendment

My country is insane. It may be insane in many ways, but most of all it is insane about guns. Guns kill people every day in this country. Guns kill thousands of people a year in this country. Most murders in this country (and we have thousands of them every year) are committed with guns. Most gun killings among us go unnoticed beyond the locality in which they occur, but sometimes gun violence makes big news. Aurora, Newton, Orlando, San Bernardino, Charleston, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, the names of these towns and cities evoke images of gun-inflicted horror. It happens again and again in the US. It happens far, far more among us than it does in countries that have sensible restrictions on guns—and that’s every other advanced country in the world besides us. I have heard Canadians call us insane about guns and wonder why in God’s name we don’t do something about them. Good question. Yes, oppressive regimes like the one that ruled the Soviet Union enforce severe restrictions on private gun ownership; but democratic countries that value freedom as much as we do restrict gun ownership too. We are tragically unique among the world’s nations in the extent to which we tolerate gun violence. The rest of the world quite properly thinks we’re nuts.

So why do we tolerate the nearly unrestricted sale of all kinds of guns other than fully automatic rifles, sale of which is more strictly regulated (though not outright prohibited) than the sale of other types of weapons? The answer is the legal interpretation that the courts, up to and including the United States Supreme Court, have given to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. That Amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Resolution of the legal issue of whether or not the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms was unclear until the Supreme Court decided the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). In that case the Court held by a 5-4 vote that the Second Amendment does guarantee such a private right. In reaching that decision the Court disregarded long-accepted principles of Constitutional construction and read the first two phrases of the Amendment out of the law. It also read the word “people” to mean “persons,” which it doesn’t necessarily mean. The Heller case made it substantially more difficult for either the federal government or state and local governments to enact common sense, meaningful regulation of firearm ownership. In reaching that decision the majority of the Heller court was quite simply just wrong.

It is a well-established principle of judicial interpretation of Constitutional or statutory provisions that a court will give meaning to every part of a provision it is interpreting if it is reasonably possible for it to do so. The court assumes that the authority which enacted the provision had some reason for including everything that it put into the law. The court will not find any part of a law to be meaningless or superfluous unless it truly can find no possible reason for a particular wording in the law. The Heller court disregarded this principle in reaching its decision.

The Second Amendment does not simply say “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That wording is only part of the Amendment. Unlike most Constitutional provisions, this language of the Second Amendment has language that introduces and leads up to it. That language is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….” For purposes of Constitutional interpretation we can take as given that a well regulated militia is indeed necessary to the security of a free state. The legal issue here is whether or not that language affects the meaning of the phrase that it introduces. The legal assumption must be that it does. Otherwise, why would the drafters have put it in the Amendment? We must assume that the men who wrote the Second Amendment weren’t sitting around throwing words into an amendment for no reason. The language they put into the Amendment refers to two significant issues of government, the maintenance of a “well regulated Militia” and the security of the state, somewhat inaccurately said in the Amendment to be free. People drafting a constitution for a new country would of course be concerned with those two issues. Those issues are not peripheral to the structure and running of a country but are central to it. The opening phrases of the Second Amendment are not irrelevant to the Amendment’s meaning. They can’t be, the majority of the Heller court to the contrary notwithstanding.

So if we are to give meaning to the Amendment’s reference to a well regulated militia and the security of the state, what is that meaning? The quite obvious first meaning of that language is that the Amendment does not refer to an unlimited individual right to keep and bear firearms. Instead, the Amendment creates some kind of right to keep and bear arms in connection with the state maintaining and operating a militia and to promote the security of the state. Note: Not the security of the individual, the security of the state. To understand what that provision may have meant in the late eighteenth century when the Second Amendment was drafted, let’s consider the historical context of that amendment.

When the Second Amendment was drafted the United States had recently won its independence from England in the Revolutionary War. That war was fought in part at least by local militias. That is, it was fought by citizens who brought their own rifles—muskets actually, about which more below—to the battle. Surely the framers of the Constitution and its Amendments assumed that any threat to the security of the new nation would be met in the same way, with private citizens bringing their muskets and banding together to defend their country. So they said in the Second Amendment that the right of the people to keep and bear arms for that purpose shall not be infringed. There is no reason to believe that the men who drafted the Second Amendment intended anything other than that. Had they intended something other than that they would not have included the first two phrases in the Second Amendment.

Now, the world today is very different from the world of the late eighteenth century. The United States Supreme Court has often interpreted Constitutional provisions in ways that fit the life of the country and her people at the time the case before them arose that the framers of the Constitution never considered. A classic example is the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), which used the equal protection and due process clauses of the US Constitution to guarantee the right of marriage to same gender couples. Did the men who drafted the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution ever think that they were creating a right for same gender couples to marry? Of course not. Does that make the Obergefell decision wrong? No, it doesn’t. The world has changed since the Fifth Amendment was adopted in 1791 and the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868. Reasonable expectations around the issues of equal protection have changed. Judicial interpretation of the Constitution must and does change to reflect the changing life of the country’s people. If it did not the Constitution would quickly become a dead letter unable to regulate the common life of those people. So conservative “strict constructionists” to the contrary notwithstanding, the Constitution does grow and adapt to a changing world and a changing country.

Now consider the world in which the Second Amendment was written. National security depended on well regulated militias, as I noted above. Moreover, the “Arms” that the Amendment has in mind are muzzle loading muskets. They were the arms that existed at the time. They could at best fire perhaps one round per minute. That there would ever be such a thing as an automatic or semiautomatic rifle capable of firing multiple rounds a minute (or second) never occurred to the men who wrote that amendment. Can we say that they intended that there be a nearly unregulated right of the individual to keep and bear such modern arms of which the framers never conceived? Of course not. We cannot blindly apply their language from another era to the question of gun ownership today than we can blindly apply the equal protection language of another era to the issue of same gender marriage without considering how a changed world affects the meaning of that language. While the notion of equal protection has expanded to create previously unrecognized rights while the reality of weapons and national security has changed to make restriction of gun ownership more necessary and tenable than ever does not change the analysis. Constitutional interpretation must adapt to the changing realities of life. The realities of guns today are nothing like they were when the Second Amendment was adopted. So even if the men who wrote that Amendment thought they were creating a private, individual right to gun ownership (which they clearly weren’t), the realities today mean that that right, if it exists at all, must be strictly regulated, more strictly regulated by far than the right to bear muzzle loading muskets ever had to be.

There is no such thing as an unrestricted legal right under the United States Constitution. The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, but in Reynolds v. US, 98 US 145 (1878) the court held that freedom of religion was not a defense to a criminal complaint alleging violation of a statute against polygamy. Neither is the right of free speech totally unlimited. There is truth in the old saw that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech does not mean that the state can’t limit child pornography. It is not legal to urge the use of violence to overthrow the government of the United States. No constitutionally guaranteed right is unlimited. They are all regulated, some of them quite strictly regulated. The supposed right to keep and bear arms can be strictly regulated too.

So let’s be done with the absurd notion that the sale of rapid fire weapons, whether rifles or pistols, can’t be more strictly regulated under the Second Amendment than it is. Of course it can. The realities of life today mean that it must be strictly regulated. Indeed, those realities mean that the sale and ownership of automatic or semi-automatic rifles must be prohibited altogether. Stephen Paddock did not kill nearly sixty people in Las Vegas with a muzzle loading musket. He did it with modified semiautomatic rifles. Devin Patrick Kelly did not kill nearly thirty people in a Texas church with a muzzle loading musket. He did it with a semi-automatic rifle. These realities cannot be ignored.

This madness must be stopped. Yes, mental health issues are often in play when mass shootings happen, and our country handles mental health issues miserably. Nonetheless, the ready availability of rapid fire weapons increases the harm a mentally disturbed person, or any person for that matter, can do by orders of magnitude over what they could do with the weapons of the late eighteenth century. So let’s stop letting the NRA and its gun manufacturing sponsors decide our firearms law. Let’s get some national mental health treatment and get over our insanity about guns. Guns are designed and built for only one reason—to kill. That means that if they are to be allowed at all they must be strictly, indeed very strictly, regulated. The Heller decision to the contrary notwithstanding, the Second Amendment does not prohibit such regulation. Heller itself leaves open the question of how much regulation of the private right it creates is permissible. Our country is mentally ill about guns, and this madness must stop. May we do what is necessary to make it stop.

Letter to the Maltby Congregation

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

14751 N. Kelsey St., No. 105-384

Monroe, WA 98272

425-268-0649

pastortoms@msn.com

October 9, 2017

To the Members of

The First Congregational Church of Maltby

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:

This is to give you formal notification of my resignation as your pastor effective December 31, 2017. I think I owe it to you to give you an explanation of why I have found it necessary to resign as your pastor. The basic reason is that in recent times it has become clearer to me than ever that we simply are a bad fit as pastor and parish. We have ignored that reality for too long. That we are not a good fit doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with you. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with me. It just means that we do not fit well together. We are sufficiently different in our approaches to the church and to the Christian faith that it is not tenable for me to serve as your pastor any longer. I mean by that that it is not tenable for me. Whether or not it is tenable for you is not for me to say, although I know that it certainly is not tenable for at least a significant number of you. Let me explain to you some of the ways that I see us differing so dramatically that it is time for me to go.

I am a very progressive Christian theologian. Most of you are considerably less progressive theologically (and politically) than I am. There is of course a very broad range of opinion in the Maltby congregation, and the breadth of opinion in the church creates issues for the pastor that I am not able to negotiate while retaining my personal and professional integrity. Perhaps there is some pastor out there who can do it. I am not that pastor. I am not willing to reduce the faith to its lowest common denominator in my preaching and teaching, yet when I preach or teach something other than the lowest common Christian denominator some of you are offended, often powerfully and personally offended. It is not my call as a pastor to offend any of you, but neither is it my call as a pastor not to preach the full Gospel of Jesus Christ as I have come to understand it through years of study and work in the church. I have become convinced that I cannot do that at the Maltby church without offending some of you in ways I have no desire to continue doing. It is time for me to go.

Many of you have a very different view of the pastor’s role in the church than I do. I will focus on just one aspect of that difference as a way of illustrating the point. I am convinced that the pastor’s main responsibility is creating and leading Sunday worship, especially in a small church like Maltby Congregational. That church as an institution does not see the Sunday worship service as belonging primarily to the pastor. You see it as belonging more to the people than to the pastor. You expressed that view of the matter when you took from me responsibility for choosing the hymns for the service. I have resented that action of yours from the time you first did it. I accepted it because I didn’t want to stake my ministry with you on it, but it has never sat well with me. In addition, recently one of you put an insert in the Sunday bulletin without even telling me you were doing it. That act showed great disrespect to me as the pastor. It may have been the final straw in convincing me to resign. To me that bulletin is mine. To you it is not. That is a difference I am no longer willing to live with. It is time for me to go.

You have shown disrespect to me as the pastor in other ways as well. Recently some of you turned what I had planned as a constructive congregational gathering to talk about the church’s identity and mission into an assault on me and everything some of you think is wrong with me as pastor of the church. Those who perpetrated that assault never came to me personally to express dissatisfaction with me or anything I have done or not done. Instead they sprung it on me unannounced at an open meeting called for a different purpose. The actions of those who did that hurt me deeply, not just because of what was said but also because of how it was done. I do not need to deal with such disrespectful conduct. It is time for me to go.

Many of you accuse me of being too “political” in my preaching. My response is that I am no more political in my preaching than the gospels of the New Testament are in their proclamation of the message and mission of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently political. It is political because it is about how God calls human beings to live together, how God calls us to behave toward one another, and how God wants to see human society organized. It is about justice for the ones the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus call “the least of these.” Many of you think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is only about what we have to do to guarantee that our souls go to heaven after we die. I am convinced that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is hardly about that at all. This is a profound difference between many of you and me that we are not going to overcome. It is time for me to go.

For much of my time as your pastor I have enjoyed working with you and getting to know you. You are good people, and nothing I have said here is intended to deny that reality. You care deeply for and about one another, and that is a very good, Christian thing. I pray that you will find a way to continue forward together as Christian community, but you will be doing that without me. God will be with you as you go on both together and as individuals. I pray that you will be open to the ways in which the Holy Spirit calls you in new directions toward new life.

Yours in Christ,

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

Wicked Tenants?

This is the sermon I gave the day I told the First Congregational Church of Maltby that I was resigning as of the end of the year. One person called it the best sermon she ever heard me give. Others thought it was entirely inappropriate. Perhaps that will give you some idea of why I resigned.

Wicked Tenants?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 8, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 21:31-46; Isaiah 5:1-7

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

You all know that I see the Christian faith differently than some of you do. For one thing, I am much more willing to look at its failings and shortcomings than some of you are, and I’m willing to preach on them even when some of you don’t want to hear it. Well, for better or for worse I’m going to do that again today. Don’t worry. I don’t intend to give many more sermons like this one; but this one has to be said, for the passage we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew cries out for a response. That’s what I’m going to give it here. Now, there is good news in what I have to say, and I’ll get to that too. But please understand first of all that I am going to deny what this Gospel passage says. Please understand that I consider it to be un-Christian. Please understand that I agree with the scholars who say Jesus never spoke this parable. It comes from the later Christian community for whom the Gospel of Matthew was written, and they were really mad at the Jews in a way that Jesus never was. I’m going to try to explain why I find it to be so false and why seeing the matter it addresses differently opens up great good news for the world and for our Christian faith. So here goes.

The Gospel of Matthew presents this passage as a parable of Jesus. The passage is set in the temple in Jerusalem after Jesus has entered that city riding on a donkey. Matthew says Jesus is teaching in the temple, and he says that this parable is one of Jesus’ teachings. The parable posits a vineyard. A landowner develops it, then rents it to some farmers and goes away on a journey. At harvest time he sends his servants to collect his share of the harvest from the tenant farmers. The tenant farmers beat up and even kill some of the owner’s servants. So he sends another group of servants, and the tenants do the same horrible things to them. So the owner sends his son, saying those tenants will at least respect him. Of course they don’t. They kill him. So the parable says that the owner will “bring those wretches to a wretched end” and will rent to vineyard to others who will give the owner his share of the crop at harvest time.

So far there isn’t necessarily anything objectionable about this parable, although the tenants killing the owner’s son is kind of a red flag. What really makes the parable objectionable is how it ends. Matthew ends the parable this way: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him....” The way the Gospel of Matthew ends this parable turns it into a piece of nasty early Christian anti-Judaism. The Jewish leaders, the story says, knew that Jesus was talking about them. This story is of course a parable, so we need to consider just who the various figures in the parable represent to see why Matthew would say those Jewish leaders thought he was talking about them.

In Jesus’ parables a figure like a landowner can often be seen as representing God. That certainly seems to be who the landowner in this parable represents. It says he planted a vineyard. Now, Hebrew scripture sometimes portrays Israel as God’s vineyard. We saw that way of thinking about God and the people in our passage from Isaiah. There a landowner described as “my loved one” built a vineyard, tended it well, but instead of getting good grapes he got only bad fruit. The owner asks what more he could have done for his vineyard. The implied answer is nothing, but the vineyard did not produce good grapes; so that owner is going to destroy it. Then the text tells us directly: “ The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight.” So a vineyard representing Israel and its owner representing God are images the original audience for the Gospel of Matthew would have known well. We are on solid ground when we think of the landowner in Matthew’s parable as representing God.

If the landowner is God, and if the vineyard is Israel, then the tenants to whom the landowner rented the vineyard are pretty clearly the religious leaders of the Hebrew people. They are the ones in charge of the Lord’s vineyard, that is, they are the ones God has chosen to shepherd God’s people. The parable says they have done a terrible job of it. They refuse to give the landowner, that is, God, his due at harvest time. They kill the servants the landowner sends to collect his crop. Matthew’s audience would immediately have heard an echo of how the Jewish scriptures say Jerusalem kills the prophets. Then the landowner sends his son. Now, for the author of the Gospel of Matthew the landowner is God, and that makes his son Jesus Christ. The parable says the wicked tenants killed the son the landowner had sent. Matthew’s audience would have heard that the Jews kill Jesus Christ the Son of God. Never mind that it was really the Romans who killed Jesus not the Jews. The New Testament tries again and again to shift the blame for Jesus’ execution from the Romans who did it to the Jews who didn’t. This parable is part of that effort. Matthew is saying the Jews, or at least the Jewish leaders, killed Jesus, the Son of God.

The parable says that God will punish the Jews for having killed Jesus. It says “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” The early Christians thought that God’s anointing of a special people had passed from the Jews to them. That’s what the text is claiming here. The Jews have botched the job God gave them of tending the Kingdom of God, so that task has now passed to the Christians.

Texts like this that blame the Jews (or at least their leaders) for having killed Jesus and having been unfaithful to God are common in the New Testament, and they have a long and bloody history. The Holocaust didn’t spring from a vacuum. It sprung from century upon century of brutal Christian anti-Judaism. Christian anti-Judaism is a heritage we must all admit the church has, and it is one of which the church must repent in clearest and strongest terms possible. The last day of the current month is the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and beginning the Protestant Reformation. Over the next three Sundays I will have some very positive things to say about Martin Luther and his theology, but there is one aspect of Luther’s thought that we must unequivocally condemn as we praise other things about him. Luther was a horrible anti-Semite. He hated Jewish people with a passion. His writings against them are among the most disturbing—and false—writings in Christian history. Luther could use New Testament passages like the Parable of the Wicked Tenants to justify his condemnation of Jewish people. That’s why we must reject this parable.

Folks, it simply isn’t true that God abandoned the Jewish people when they declined to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Jewish faith was a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting people with God before Jesus, and it has been a valid, rich, and treasured way of connecting people with God after Jesus. Jewish faith, worship, scholarship, thought, and writing are as grace-filled as the best Christian faith, worship, scholarship, thought, and writing ever were.

Let me offer the following piece of writing by a Jewish rabbi as proof of that statement. It is by Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Executive Director of Jewish Family Services in Seattle. Rabbi Berkovitz sent it to Ed Meyer, and Ed sent it to me. Ed procured the Rabbi’s consent to my using it here. At the time of the Jewish High Holy Days this year Rabbi Berkovitz wrote:

We are living in an era when attention spans are assumed to be 140 characters or less — two bits as my dad would say. That’s how much we are willing to “pay” for our attention. In Hebrew, “pay attention” is literally translated as, “place your heart..” Placing our hearts requires effort. It requires us to focus beyond the chaotic white noise that fills so much of our lives.

Like many people, I witnessed the total eclipse. With the coyotes howling and geese taking flight, experiencing that 360-degree, midday sunset was profound. But the awareness that millions of people were experiencing the same thing was even more profound.

We were doing more than merely looking up at the same time. We were sharing a transcendent experience, a bending of the natural order. It was extraordinary that so many people, with so many different beliefs and perspectives, could pause, step outside and have a collective, uniting experience. Imagine what could happen if we made that choice again.

With the Jewish new year and the communal season of reflection upon us, we have an opportunity to make that choice. We can choose to start placing our hearts with the people around us, willingly and freely. We can choose to look up and look beyond ourselves. To have a collective moment of reflection. To place our hearts outside our expectations. To seek a fuller, deeper understanding of those around us.

Placing our hearts requires a measure of humility and an openness to encountering something beyond our expectations. Placing our hearts means imagining a world where we see people for who they really are, where we seek to understand the lived experience of those around us, from their perspective. Not with judgement (sic), but with compassion.

And then, rather than penciling in their lives from our assumptions about who they are and what they believe, we pause. We place our hearts, as individuals and as a community. We truly listen — with openness, curiosity and vulnerability. And with those first rays of new light, we can, if we choose, see our world and those around us, as if for the first time. That is the hope offered with each new year, if we are willing to choose it.

That, folks, is a grace-filled proclamation of how God calls us to live with one another. God calls us to “place our hearts” with the people around us, to listen carefully, and to accept all of God’s people as they actually are without reducing them to our own often prejudiced understanding of what we think they should be.

Does it matter that Rabbi Berkovitz is Jewish not Christian? Are his words less true because he is Jewish not Christian? Certainly not. Is he a “wicked tenant” of God’s world? Certainly not. He is a man of faith who speaks grace-filled truth and works hard to serve people in need in this area—all people in need not just Jewish people in need. Are the Jewish people with whom he serves wicked tenants of God’s world? Certainly not. They certainly are no more wicked than most of us Christians are. Thanks be to God!

So when you see the New Testament heaping scorn on Jewish people, please do not take that scorn as divine truth. It isn’t. It is rather the centuries old anger of small communities of people who were angry at larger Jewish communities from which they were being excluded because of their confession of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus never heaped scorn on Jewish people. He was one of them. Their faith was his faith. Their scripture was his scripture. He wanted to reform Judaism not destroy it. Judaism and Christianity developed into separate religions, but Judaism is still our mother faith. It always has been. It always will be. We are grounded in it. Christianity is impossible without it. My Hebrew scripture professor in seminary was fond of saying “Christianity is one way of being Jewish, but it isn’t the only way.” He was right about that. Israel’s God is our God, the one and only true God.

So when you hear anyone disparaging Judaism or Jewish people (or any other great faith tradition and its people for that matter) just say no. No, that’s not how it is. Every religion is true to the extent that it connects people with God. Judaism connects a great many people with God, and it has done so a lot longer than Christianity has. No, Jews are not wicked tenants of God’s world. They never were despite what the author of the Gospel of Matthew thought. They are as faithful people of God as the best Christians are. Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian anti-Judaism let us see how great God really is. How much God loves all people not just Christian people. Getting beyond the horrible history of Christian anti-Judaism opens our hearts to love all people, especially all people whose commitment to peace, justice, and care for all people is grounded in the love of God however they kn0w and worship God.

Folks, Christianity isn’t about discrimination against anyone. It certainly isn’t about hatred of anyone. So let’s not learn bad lessons from bad parables like the one about the wicked tenants. Let’s open our hearts and minds to all people who love God and work for good in the world. If we can do that we be truer disciples of the Jewish man we call Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

The Ten Commandments? Really?

The Ten Commandments: Really?

Republican voters in Alabama have nominated Roy Moore, twice deposed former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, as their candidate to fill the vacancy in the United States Senate created when Jeff Sessions became US Attorney General. He will face a Democratic opponent in November; but Alabama hasn’t elected a Democratic US senator in roughly forever, so it is a virtual certainty that Moore will become Jeff Sessions’ replacement in the upper chamber of our federal legislature. Moore first came to notoriety and was first removed from the state supreme court because he refused to obey an order from a federal court that he remove an installation featuring the Ten Commandments from state property. Moore is but the latest right wing Christian who has insisted that the Ten Commandments should be displayed in courthouses all over the country. Displaying them on public property is beyond any shadow of a doubt a violation of the Anti-Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I certainly object to displaying them on public property on those grounds, and I’ll come back to that objection at the end of this piece. There is however another question about the Ten Commandments. When we really understand what they are and what they say (as opposed to what we may have been told that they are and what they say or that we may want them to be or to say) it becomes clear that they are hardly the infallible guide to moral behavior that their advocates seem to think that they are. I want to share here an analysis of some of the Ten Commandments (similar to the one I included in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians). Perhaps if we better understand what the Ten Commandments are and what they say we won’t even have to get to the constitutional arguments before we will strongly oppose posting them in any courthouse.

The Ten Commandments are found first at Exodus 20:1-17.¹ Exodus says that Moses has been up on the mountain communing with God. He comes back down with the law that the people’s god Yahweh has given him. He begins to share that law with the people. Jewish tradition gives the total number of laws that Moses got from Yahweh as 613. The Ten Commandments are the first ten of those laws. To understand them we must first of all understand them in their historical context. When we do we see that some of the commandments don’t really say what we think they say because we don’t read them carefully and others don’t say what we think they say because words didn’t mean the same thing in the commandments’ original context as they do today. So let’s look at some of them and see what we can find.

The first of the Ten Commandments is one of the most misunderstood. It reads: “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:2-3² The way the word Lord is printed here tells us that the Hebrew original is the four letter name of God that we usually transliterate as Yahweh. In the very early stages of the Hebrew people’s understanding of God Yahweh was their tribal war god. We see that understanding of Yahweh a little bit earlier in Exodus in what we call Miriam’s Song. At Exodus chapter 15 the people have just successfully escaped the pursuing Egyptians through God’s trick of parting the Red Sea, then closing it down on the Egyptian army. At Exodus 15:20-21 we read:

Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing And Miriam sang to them:

‘Sing to the Lord, for he has

triumphed gloriously

horse and rider he has thrown

into the sea.’

In these lines, which may be the oldest preserved bit of oral tradition in the Bible, Yahweh, rendered here as “the Lord,” is clearly a war god. He is the god who has fought the people’s battle against the Egyptians and won it. He is not necessarily more than a war god here. In any event, he is the god of the Hebrew people who has liberated them from Egypt by drowning all of pharaoh’s soldiers.

Yahweh as the god who freed the people from Egypt appears at the beginning of the Ten Commandments too. The Ten Commandments begin: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”³Christians invariably take this commandment as containing a statement of strict monotheism. We read “you shall have no other gods” as “there are no other gods,” and we pretty much overlook the phrase “before me.” Yet this sentence clearly is not a statement of monotheism. So far from denying the reality of gods besides Yahweh it clearly assumes it. It doesn’t say “there are no other gods.” It says “you,” that is, you Hebrews, shall have no other gods before Yahweh. The text would hardly bother telling the people not to have other gods if it assumed there were no other gods. It would say there are no other gods, but it doesn’t. The first of the Ten Commandments is a statement not of monotheism but of henotheism. Henotheism is a belief about the gods that says there are lots of gods. In fact, it accepts that every people has their own gods and goddesses. Henotheism says not that there are no other gods but that a particular people shall have only one god. Let the others have their gods, it says; we have only one. In the case of the Hebrews that one was Yahweh. Does Roy Moore or any other Christian today want to put a statement of henotheism in their courthouses? I assume not. They want to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses in part because they erroneously assume that the first commandment is a statement of monotheism. It isn’t.

We run into another big problem with the Ten Commandments in the next commandment, the prohibition of idolatry. At Exodus 20:4 we read that the people shall not make for themselves an idol that looks like anything on earth. The next verses, Exodus 20:5-6, read:

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God punishes the children of wrongdoers through three and four generations though the people of those generations may have done nothing at all to offend God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians and other Americans don’t. Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God is unaffected by the sin of persons of subsequent generations descended from a person who was faithful to God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians don’t. The text of Exodus 20:5-6 expresses an ancient understanding of generational responsibility for wrongdoing, an understanding that the Bible itself reverses later on. See for example Ezekiel 18:1-4. Does Moore or anyone else really want that understanding on display in the local courthouse? I doubt it, for it simply isn’t our contemporary understanding of how God works.

Now let’s turn to Exodus 20:14: “You shall not commit adultery.” Now, I think, or at least I like to think, that all Christians and most other people believe that adultery is a bad thing (although of course it is no longer illegal under our secular law). Yet there is a hidden problem with the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery. The problem is that in the ancient Hebrew world in and for which the Ten Commandments were written adultery didn’t mean what it means to most of us today. Today to commit adultery is usually understood as being having sexual intercourse with anyone to whom one is not married. At the very least it is a married person having sexual intercourse with a person other than the person’s spouse. Both women and men can commit adultery in our understanding of the term. In the ancient Hebrew world adultery was understood much more narrowly. Adultery was only the act of a man having sexual intercourse with a woman who was married to another man. A sexual act was adultery only if the woman were married to a man other than the one with whom she had sexual intercourse. The reason for this understanding of adultery was clear enough. It had nothing to do with sexual morality per se. It didn’t even have to do with marital fidelity in anything like our sense of that virtue. It had to do with property rights. A man could be sure that a child born to his wife was really his child only if his wife never had intercourse with anyone but him. If she had sex with another man a child born to her might not be her husband’s at all. If the child were not his, his family estate would pass to someone not of his family, something the ancient Hebrew world considered to be a great evil. That’s what the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery was trying to prevent. That certainly is not why we consider adultery to be immoral today, but it is why the Ten Commandments consider adultery to be immoral.

The last of the Ten Commandments also bears some consideration. It reads: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Certainly coveting things that belong to your neighbor is a negative thing. This commandment against such coveting could work to reduce tensions and hostility within a community. But look at one thing that this commandment takes for granted. It says you shall not covet your neighbor’s “male or female slave.” The Ten Commandments take the existence and acceptability of slavery for granted. Indeed, nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery other than the slavery of the Hebrew people in Egypt. In this day and age we all (or nearly all) see slavery as an abomination, as profoundly unjust and immoral. Today we see the earlier existence of slavery in our country as something of which to be ashamed. Some of us think it is something for which we should still make reparations to the descendants of the slaves. In today’s America, where we generally reject slavery but in which racism and white supremacy are still very much with us, do we want to put an ancient document that takes slavery for granted up in our courthouses? I trust not. I sure don’t.

It is clear then I think that one problem with the Ten Commandments is that we often misunderstand them because they were written in and for a culture so different from ours. Yet even if we assume that most of the people who saw the Ten Commandments displayed in a courthouse wouldn’t understand that reality about them, putting them up in public, governmental structures is still quite obviously illegal. Roy Moore refused to recognize that truth when a federal court told him to take them down from the Alabama Supreme Court building. Yet the federal court that ordered him to so was clearly legally correct. Putting the Ten Commandments up in a courthouse is illegal first of all because a courthouse is a governmental structure. The courts are part of our system of government. They are operated for the benefit of all Americans by institutions that belong to all Americans. Because courthouses are governmental installations, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution applies to them. The First Amendment has within it what we call the “Anti-Establishment Clause.” It reads: “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” That provision of the First Amendment applies to the states through the operation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now admittedly, the Anti-Establishment Clause doesn’t seem to say much. Yet all Constitutional provisions become effective and gain their meaning from the ways the federal courts interpret and apply them. The federal courts have long held that the Anti-Establishment Clause means that no governmental agency may do anything that privileges one religion over another or that privileges religion over non-religion. So the only way that the First Amendment would not prohibit displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse would be if the Ten Commandments were not a religious document.

Yet of course the Ten Commandments are a religious document. They come from two of the books of Hebrew scripture that are part of the Torah, the most sacred texts of Judaism. Because long ago Christianity adopted Hebrew scripture as Christian scripture, they are also part of the sacred texts of the Christian religion. They appear nowhere except in the parts of the Bible that are sacred to both Christians and Jews. For many of us that means that we must treat them with great respect and deference, and I trust that I do even though I don’t accept all of them as still valid. It also means, however, that the Ten Commandments are undeniably a religious text. That the notions they express are shared by many of the world’s other religious traditions besides Judaism and Christianity is beside the point. Similar passages that might be found, say, in the Koran would also be religious texts. It would be illegal to post them in a courthouse too. Even putting up similar texts from several different faith traditions would not solve the problem, for those text too would be religious texts. The Ten Commandments are religious in their very nature. They come from sacred scripture. They talk about God. There simply is no way that putting them up in a courthouse could comply with the First Amendment of the US Constitution or with similar provisions in many state constitutions.

I could object to the idea that morality consists only of obeying the Ten Commandments on other grounds as well, but I trust the point is made. The Ten Commandments are not the pure statement of good morals that people like Roy Moore take them to be. Putting them up in any public facility violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. So let’s be done with this nonsense about putting them in courthouses, shall we? And let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who refuse to recognize the obvious truth that putting them up there is illegal. Let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who claim to be state court judges, who take an oath of office as a state court judge, then refuse to obey directives from a federal court on a matter of federal law. Moore didn’t deserve to serve on the Alabama State Supreme Court. He doesn’t deserve to serve in the US Senate either.

1They appear in virtually the same form again at Deuteronomy 5:1-22. The differences between the two versions of the Ten Commandments are not significant for our purposes.

2The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

3Exodus 20:2-3

On Racism and White Privilege

On Racism and White Privilege

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

August, 2017

I’m not happy that I have to say this, but some conversations I’ve had recently at First Congregational Church of Maltby as well as things I’ve heard in the public media convince me that a great many white Americans simply do not understand the breadth and depth of racism among us, nor do they understand the wide-ranging effects of the white privilege they all have even if they are unaware of it. So I am going to attempt here to state some basic truths about racism and white privilege in the United States of America. Only when we white Americans become more aware of and sensitive to the racism and white privilege that pervades every aspect of American life will we have any possibility of overcoming them and creating the society of which Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed, a society in which all people truly are judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

It almost sounds like a cliché to me today, but racism is America’s original sin. Those words sound like a cliché to me today, but for most of my life I probably wouldn’t even have understood what they meant. I grew up and was educated in a mostly white, mostly middle class culture in Eugene, Oregon. There were very few Black people in the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area as I was growing up there in the 1950s and early 1960s. My father was a history professor at the University of Oregon, and there were always some people of color around the university, mostly if not quite exclusively from foreign countries. There were a few Black students at South Eugene High School when I was there (class of 1964), but few if any of us whites knew them or had anything to do with them. My education began in the public schools of Eugene. Yes, we were taught American history—sort of; but the racism prevalent throughout American history was hardly mentioned. We were taught that the Civil War was about slavery, and the South was on the wrong side of that issue. Yet when South Eugene High School played its annual football game against North Eugene High School we played the South. Someone dressed in a Confederate uniform and carrying a Confederate battle flag would ride a horse around the field, and we would all cheer. That we were cheering for symbols of racism, slavery, and white supremacy never occurred to us, but of course we were. I once began a sermon on American racism with the line “I was lied to.” I was lied to mostly by silence. No one told us that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners and that Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves, a women who had no say in the matter whatsoever. We enjoyed Black entertainers. We listened to Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., and no one told us that they were not allowed to stay in the Las Vegas hotels where they performed. I received a typical white education, one that paid next to no attention to the horrors of white discrimination against Black Americans and never once hinted at the truth that white Americans committed genocide against Native Americans. That racism is America’s original sin didn’t sound like a cliché to me then. It wasn’t even a truth that I ever heard.

Consider for a moment the issues of race and slavery in the founding of our nation. In 1776 slavery was legal in all thirteen American colonies. It was far more prevalent in the southern colonies than in the northern ones, but it existed everywhere. Although not all Black people were slaves, all people who were enslaved were Black. They were Africans or the descendants of Africans forcibly brought here against their will under horrific circumstances under which many of the abducted people died before ever reaching America. Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, but so were many others of the so-called founding fathers. When our forbears drafted the US Constitution a few years after they achieved independence from Britain the issue of slavery came up, but not whether or not to abolish it. The issue was only whether or not Black Americans should be counted for purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives, where a the number of a state’s representatives was and is based on population numbers. The southern slave owners of course wanted them counted, for if they were the South would be much more heavily represented in Congress than if they weren’t. Some Northerners objected, perhaps because they objected to slavery but also because they said that since slaves weren’t really citizens and couldn’t own property or vote they shouldn’t be counted at all. The solution the framers reached was a compromise. Each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of determining Congressional representation. This provision was repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, perhaps only because after the Civil War there would be no slaves, so the provision was moot. Still, Blacks as less than fully human was written into our Constitution at the very beginning.

It is only in recent years that I have begun to learn something of the horrors of American slavery. People who were slaves simply weren’t people. They were property. They had no human rights that their owners had to respect. They could be beaten at will. They could not marry. They could not own property. It was often illegal to teach them to read and write. Slave owners did not have to respect slave families, and families were regularly torn apart when some member was sold to and taken away by another owner. It wasn’t just in the South that Blacks had no rights. In 1850 the US Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, which said not only that any escaped slave who was apprehended was to be returned to her or his owner but also that people everywhere in the country were legally obligated to cooperate in the enforcement of that law. In 1857, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, the US Supreme Court held that any “Negro,” whether free or enslaved, whose ancestors had been imported into the US and sold as slaves could not be citizens of the United States and had no standing to bring suit in federal court. Yes, in those years and earlier there was a significant abolitionist movement in the north. Most abolitionists were Christians, but then most slave owners claimed to be Christians too. Yet the abolitionist movement never succeeded in abolishing slavery in the south. That happened only after the Civil War, four years of brutal slaughter in which more Americans died than in any other American war, a ghastly statistic that is still true today.

After the Civil War slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. During the period known as Reconstruction Blacks in the south had a freedom they had never had before. Some of them were elected to positions in state government and even became US Representatives and Senators. Yet even during Reconstruction the conditions of life for the former slaves were hardly easy. They had been freed, but they had not been given the “40 acres and a mule” that so many of them had hoped they would receive. The racism in southern whites was if anything made worse by their resentment over having lost their “property,” their former slaves. In 1876 the Democrats agreed to the disputed election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as President in exchange for a promise by the Republicans to withdraw federal troops from the former Confederate states and to end the policies of Reconstruction. Thus began the era of the “solid South,” when southern whites supported Democratic candidates because the Democrats had become the party of segregation. Blacks were excluded from public life. “Jim Crow” laws were passed in all the southern states that sought to enforce through legal means a strict separation of the races. Blacks were denied access to public services and to white businesses. Lynching of Black people, mostly but not exclusively men, became common. A Black man could be lynched simply for looking at a white woman, and many were. Schools were segregated, and Black students suffered in schools that were wholly, and intentionally, inadequate. In 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws under the specious reasoning that separate could be and presumably was equal. That hateful doctrine was overturned only in 1954 by the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

There were no Jim Crow laws in the north, but the north was hardly free from racial prejudice. Northern cities became strictly segregated. There were white parts of town and Black parts of town. Banks practiced “red lining,” the practice of refusing to give home purchase mortgage loans to Blacks seeking to move into white areas. Residential neighborhoods were segregated, and public school attendance was based on neighborhoods. Thus in the north there came to be white schools and Black schools nearly as exclusively as in the south even though there were no Jim Crow laws. Racial discrimination in housing, public services, and education may not have been legally mandated in the north; but it was perfectly legal, and it was nearly universally practiced. In American law people are free to make any decision they want on any basis they want, including a discriminatory one, unless some law provides otherwise. In the United States before 1964, there were no national laws prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, employment, or the provision of public services (although some states had such laws by then), and such discrimination was the nearly universal rule not the exception.

Throughout American history, then, whiteness has been considered the human norm. White Americans have seen Blackness as somehow deviant, a departure from the human norm, and therefore inferior. Most of us white Americans don’t like to admit that that’s how it has been with our country, but our reluctance to admit it does nothing to impair the validity of the statement. We are even less comfortable admitting that that is how we see things ourselves, yet here’s an uncomfortable truth all of us white Americans must face. We grew up and were educated in a racist culture, and we have not escaped the effects of that racist culture. Virtually all of us are racists. That doesn’t mean we hate Black people. It doesn’t mean we think discrimination against Black people is a good thing. Statistics are hard to come by and are probably unreliable, but most of us don’t think those things any more. Yet our opposition to acts of racism doesn’t mean we aren’t racists. To see if you’re a racist, don’t look at the political positions you adopt. Be honest about your first, gut reactions when you see a person of a different race, for us whites especially a Black man or woman. Do you immediately think less of that person because of her or his skin color? We have to honest in answering that question. We have to answer it yes even if we immediately become aware that our negative reaction to a person’s skin color is wrong and we are quite prepared to overcome it in our dealings with that person. The truth of the matter is that very few of us do not have that reaction. That’s because we grew up in a culture that has always said and still says in so many ways that Blacks are inferior. We whites have been conditioned by our culture to be racists, to think that it is better to be white than to be anything else. We simply must admit that truth. We will never truly overcome racism until we do.

Moreover, in a racist culture that considers white to be the human norm and Black to be a negative deviation from the norm, white privilege exists. Each and every one of us white people has it. That most of us are unaware that we have it doesn’t mean we don’t have it. We do, and we will never overcome it until we get a whole lot more honest than we have been about having it. White privilege is the ability to go through life without having to worry about how the dominant culture sees you because of your skin color. White privilege is not having to be substantially better than every other applicant to get a job for which both Black and white people have applied. White privilege is not needing affirmative action to get you into a good university. White privilege is not having landlords from whom you wish to rent an apartment give you obviously specious reasons for not renting to you when you know the real reason is your race. White privilege is having a legal system that systematically if not always consciously treats you better than it treats a Black person in the same circumstances. White privilege is not having had to grow up in a culture that makes you less just because you aren’t white. White privilege is not having to to be afraid every time a police car drives by. White privilege is not having to train your children to be afraid of the police and how to act to avoid unwarranted police attention or harassment. The manifestations of white privilege are numerous, and we white people enjoy them all the time without even thinking about them. For a long list of instances where white privilege is in play see http://www.antiracistalliance.com/Unpacking.html.

I know very few white people who are truly aware of the privilege they carry with them every minute of their lives in our racist society. Because we don’t see our privilege we don’t see how deep-seated racism is in our culture. Because we don’t see our privilege we don’t have a clue about what it means to live without that privilege. We blithely tell ourselves that we don’t hate people of color, so we convince ourselves that we aren’t racists.

We probably aren’t being totally honest with ourselves when we tell ourselves that we aren’t racists, but even if we are honest when we say it we do not deal with the institutional racism that pervades American life. Institutional racism is racism that is seen not in individual acts of discrimination but in the racially disproportionate results American institutions produce. The easiest instance of institutional racism to see is the case of the criminal justice system. Blacks consistently receive harsher punishments than whites for the same crimes. As a result, Blacks disproportionately populate our prisons. The juries who convict Blacks of crimes surely don’t think of themselves as racist. Most of the judges who determine sentences probably don’t either, yet the racially disparate results of the court system are undeniable. That’s institutional racism. It exists in our courts to be sure, but it exists in most of the systems of our society. It exists in employment. It exists in education. It exists in health care. It exists in housing. Until we white Americans become much more aware of the evils of institutional racism among us we will never overcome those evils.

So we live in a society that was formed in racism and that has lived with racism ever since. Yes, we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, we passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although the Supreme Court not too long ago took most of the teeth out of that one on the false premise that racial discrimination in voter registration and districting no longer exists among us. American society is racist to the core, and we white Americans benefit from that racism every day. Our first task is to become aware that we do. Only then can we begin to dismantle white privilege and move toward a truly equal society.

The Gospel of Justice

This is a sermon I wrote on Saturday, August 19, 2017. I didn't give it at my church. I had another one that still spoke of justice but that I thought fit my congregation better than this one would. Here it is, for your consideration.

The Gospel of Justice

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 20, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

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.

The issue of justice is always before us as Christians. There simply is no doubt about that. Jesus was more about justice than he was about anything else. We claim to be Christians. We claim to be followers of Jesus. Well, if we’re really going to be followers of Jesus we need to speak up and stand up for justice. The Romans didn’t execute Jesus because his death was part of some great cosmic albeit brutal plan of God. The Romans executed Jesus because he lead a justice movement. He called his vision “the kingdom of God.” The kingdom. Not the country club of God. Not even the community of God or the fellowship of God. He called it the kingdom of God, and the word kingdom is nothing if it is not political. The world in which Jesus lived and worked was organized into kingdoms. Some of them were so big they were called empires, but an empire is just an oversized kingdom. God’s kingdom is about nothing if it is not about justice. God’s kingdom is a vision of how God wants the world to be structured and run. It’s about this world, not some other world. It’s about the world restructured to be grounded in justice for all, not privilege for some and oppression for others. Today the fundamental justice issue of American life stands before us in the bright light of recent events. That issue is racism. Racists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some of them wore Nazi insignia. All of them advocated white supremacy. They came ready for violence. Right wing extremists always resort to violence. They are violent people. A crowd of peaceful people showed up to demonstrate for love and justice against those apostles of supremacy and hate. Those apostles of hate got what they wanted. There was violence. One of them rammed a vehicle into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators and killed a woman who was committing the egregious sin of walking across the street.

The racists had gathered to protest the removal of a confederate statue, a statue honoring one who was a traitor to the United States in the cause of slavery. Advocates of white supremacy put up statues like that one throughout the Confederate states during the days when Jim Crow was the law of the land; and they did it to say to Black people we rule you, we’re superior to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Everyone in that crowd was a racist. Everyone in that crowd wanted whites to be supreme in our land and Blacks to be oppressed. They want to return to the days of Jim Crow or even to the days of slavery. They were a racist rabble intent on causing nothing but trouble. Again, there simply is no doubt about that.

And the President of the United States said that there were good people among them. No, Mister President, there weren’t. No good people advocate what that mob advocated. People who support what that mob advocated are not good people. They are engaged in evil even if they themselves are not violent. The reaction against Trump’s remarks has been swift and strong, even among some members of Trump’s own political party. That is a very good thing. But most of those racists in Charlottesville claim to be Christians. Most racists throughout our country claim to be Christians. They’re not. In their hatred of many of God’s children they betray everything that Jesus came to teach us, everything Jesus stood for and stands for. So we who truly are Christians must speak up. We must speak out. We must stand up for justice against the evil some baptize with the sacred word Christian.

I have a new hero these days. His name is The Rev. Dr. William Barber. Rev. Dr. Barber is the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He heads an organization named “Repairers of the Breach” which advocates a progressive political agenda grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rev. Dr. Barber is the most powerful Christian voice for justice in our land today. He is not a politician. He is a preacher. He is a pastor. He has the potential to become today’s Martin Luther King. He is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). That’s not the denomination of my church, nor is it mine. But my United Church of Christ is closely allied with the Disciples, and as one who holds ordained ministerial standing in the UCC I also have a kind of standing in the Disciples. Rev. Dr Barber makes me proud to be a Christian. He makes me proud to be a member of a denomination closely aligned with his.

I saw Rev. Dr. Barber again on the MSNBC program “AM Joy” yesterday. In his remarks on that program he said we must be concerned not only with statues but the statutes. We must demonstrate against Confederate statues and the evil they represent, but we must also work against statutes that take away voting rights and that perpetuate poverty and discrimination. In his remarks he referred to the Judgment of the Nations parable in Matthew, and he said something important about it. It is not individuals who get separated into the sheep and the goats, into those who cared for the needy and those who did not. It is the nations that get separated that way. That text says “all the nations” will be gathered before the risen Christ as judge, not all people individually. I have always called that text the constitution of Christian social justice work. Rev. Dr. Barber called it an “evangelical” text, and I suppose it is; but mostly it is a justice text. In it Christ says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” And “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” NIV The great judgment of the nations scene calls all Christians to the work of justice. It calls us first to the work of charity, the work of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. But it also calls us to the work of justice, the work of dismantling social, economic, and political structures that keep people hungry and homeless. That deprive people of education and medical care. That depend on there being a large number of poor people so that a small number of people can be immensely rich. The events of recent days force us to decide: Are we with the blessed sheep? Or are we with the condemned goats?

Our world and our faith put that choice before us, and to decline to make a choice is itself a choice. It is a choice to stand on the side of the goats. It is a decision to stand on the side of the racists. Racism is the American norm. To say nothing is to support it. To say nothing is to let it stand as the American norm, to remain the American norm. Silence perpetuates the cultural norm. Silence props up racism. Silence props up economic disparity and cultural oppression. And yes, I know. Many of you don’t want to hear that. I don’t much want to hear it myself. Life would be so much easier if it were not true. But it is true, and people not wanting to hear it doesn’t make it false. It remains true whether we want to hear it or not.

The choice between justice and injustice is always before us. Today it is before us as sharply and forcefully as it has ever been. The highest elected official in our land refuses to denounce racism unequivocally. He starts to, then goes off script and says the violence in Charlottesville came from “many sides.” We cannot read his remarks as saying anything other than there is a moral equivalence of the haters and the lovers, the racists and the those who resist racism, the advocates of oppression and the advocates of justice. I know you don’t want to hear politics from the pulpit, but in times like these we Christians truly have no choice to be prophets of justice. Jesus, our crucified and risen Lord and Savior ,was a prophet of justice. He picked up the voice of the ancient Jewish prophets of justice—Isaiah, Amos, and Micah—and proclaimed their truth—God’s truth—to the powers of his time. As Christians we must proclaim God’s truth to the powers of our time. I have written my Congresswoman. Have you? I have spoken out in every public forum I have, limited as those are. Have you?

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not only about justice. It is also about peace both in the world and in our souls. It is about salvation, although it sees salvation mostly as something that happens in this life not some next life. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not only about justice, but it is most definitely also about justice. Our Bible tells us that God created women and men. It doesn’t say God created different races of people. In the Bible people of all nations come to the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. In the Bible both Greeks and Jews are saved. Eunuchs are blessed. Women are disciples. The downtrodden are lifted up and their oppressors are condemned. In the Bible prophets demand justice for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. In the Bible rulers act in their own interest not in the interest of the people, and the prophets damn them for it.

Folks, our country today is sliding back into the worst of our history, into racism and racial discrimination. It doesn’t have to be that way. People like us, ordinary and without great power as we are, can be part of reversing that slide. This isn’t a partisan issue. Both Republicans and Democrats have been appalled by our President’s remarks. That’s probably because Christians are both Republicans and Democrats. Rev. Dr. William Barber and so many other voices of justice, both Christian and non-Christian, call us to heed the better angels of our national character. The Gospel of Jesus Christ demands no less. So what are we going to do about it? Amen.