Stop the Madness!

     Friday, September 21, two days ago as I write this, was International Day of Peace.  Today at my church in Monroe, Washington, USA, we had a worship service devoted to the theme of peace.  We dedicated a peace pole our children and some adult volunteers made last summer.  I gave a sermon with the title "Stop the Madness!"  It begins with a story that I have already told in this blog, in a post near the beginning of the blog back in 2010 with the title "A Day at Gettysburg."  That story is worth telling again.  The message of that story and of my sermon today, that war is madness that we simply must stop, is worth posting here.  So here is that sermon.  May it inspire at least a few to undertake the hard and necessary work of peace.

Stop the Madness!

Rev. Tom Sorenson

September 23, 2012

Scripture:  James 3:13-4:2c

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

I may have told this story here before, but on this Sunday when we mark International Day of Peace and dedicate the peace pole the children made last summer it is worth telling it again.  It was February 1991, or maybe 1992.  It doesn’t matter.  I was practicing law, and I had gone to central Pennsylvania to take some depositions in a case I was working on.  I had a free afternoon, so I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, one of our country’s first national cemeteries, and the place where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address.  It was a beautiful winter afternoon, clear, still, and cold.  Because it was a weekday in winter I had the place almost to myself.  I walked the grounds alone, in silence.  I read the Gettysburg Address inscribed on the monument erected on the spot where Lincoln gave it.  I learned the story of the battle, how over the course of three days more than seven thousand Americans died and many times that number were wounded.  I read about Pickett’s Charge, when Confederate soldiers ran headlong into the Union guns and were mowed down in their hundreds.  I saw the place where it happened, now lovely, peaceful Pennsylvania countryside; and I tried to imagine the horror that had turned those peaceful fields into an earthly hell.  I saw the graves, row upon row upon row of the graves of the Union soldiers who died there.  They didn’t bury the Confederate dead there, but I knew that even more of them died in that place. 

I was stunned.  I was overwhelmed.   I was heartsick, and one thought came to me again and again.  It wasn’t a thought about the heroism of those days, though heroism there surely was.  It wasn’t a thought about honor, for I could see no honor in what had happened there.  It wasn’t about the rightness of the Union cause and the wrongness of the Confederate cause, though surely the Confederate cause of preserving slavery was wrong—very,  very wrong.  The thought that I couldn’t get out of my head was “madness.”  The madness of what had happened there.  The madness of that battle and of that war in which more Americans died than died in all our other wars combined (World War II included), for everyone who died on both sides of the Civil War was an American.  The madness of all war, the madness of nations sending people, mostly young men, to kill and to die; and the madness of people being willing to do it.  The madness of thinking that war is a normal and acceptable human activity.  The madness of thinking that the slaughter of other human beings can be honorable and noble.  In the still, cold air of a sunny winter day in Pennsylvania I felt the madness of war in a way I never had before.  I felt it in my bones, in my heart, in my soul.  It is a feeling I have never really forgotten. 

It is a feeling that came rushing back upon me last Tuesday evening as Jane and I watched the PBS special “Death and the Civil War.”  So much death.  So much misery.  So much loss.  So much grief.  The madness of it all.  Last Tuesday, as we watched that PBS special, I had already written most of a sermon for today based on the passage we heard from James about the causes of violence.  It was a very heady sermon, analyzing how disorder in our souls produces violence in the world.  It parsed the verses where James says what the sages of other spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism, have been saying for a long time.  Our text says “For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”  And:  “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.”  And:  “You covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.”  The Buddhists say the same thing more simply:  If you want peace in the world, begin by creating peace in your soul.  External violence comes from internal violence. 

And that is true.  It is very true.  It is profoundly true.  James was speaking on the personal level, but his truth also applies to nations.  Internal disorder leads to actions that disorder the world.  We want oil, and we don’t have it.  So we invade Iraq, lose several thousand American lives, and kill many, many times that number of Iraqis.  We are attacked.  We are angry and afraid; and in our rage we invade Afghanistan, a place no foreign power has ever successfully conquered.  A place where we are still fighting, still killing, and still dying, more than ten years later, perpetuating a conflict that has killed more Afghan people than we will ever know.  A war that has created far more terrorists than it has killed.  Our spiritual disorder led us to commit acts of violence and destruction on a scale only a wealthy, technologically advanced country can commit.

And last Tuesday as Jane and I watched Death and the Civil War I realized that what our Sunday dedicated to peace needed wasn’t a heady, analytical sermon (as given as we all know I am to heady, analytical sermons) on the causes of violence.  It needed a cri de coeur, a cry of the heart.  So today I give you my cri de coeur.  My cry to myself, to you, to my country, and to the world:  Stop the madness!  Look into your hearts!  Look into your own souls for the cause of the madness, the cause of violence, the cause of war.  Discern your greed.  Discern your rage.  Discern your imperialist ambitions to dominate the world just to satisfy your own ego and your greed. 

We sang “God of Grace and God of Glory” to open our worship this morning.  I chose it because of its line “Cure your children’s warring madness.”  War is madness.  War is death and destruction.  War is pain and loss and grief.  War is lives ended and lives destroyed.  And war is unnecessary.  Nonviolent action can always prevent war if it is used creatively, assertively, consistently, and early.  War is always a failure of the human imagination, of the human spirit.  War may be the way of the world, but it is not God’s way.  It must not be our way. 

In that PBS program Death and the Civil War Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that our most sacred duty is to care for those who fought for our country and to treat the bodies of those who died fighting with dignity and respect.  My friends, that may be a sacred duty, indeed I believe that it is a sacred duty as long as we keep fighting wars; but it not our most sacred duty.  Our most sacred duty is to see to it that there are no more people who fought for our country to care for, no more dead military bodies to respect, because there are no more wars.  When will we get it?  When will we wake up?  When will we stop the madness?  The time is now, not tomorrow.  Stop the madness!  Stop it now!  Amen.

Introduction to the Bible Post Moved

I had mistakenly put a post here that I had meant to put on my church's adult education blog.  The title was Introduction to the Bible, Session 19, The Gospel of John, Part 2.  You can find that post at monroeuccadulted.blogspot.com.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1, On God

I recently gave a three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  Its first two parts lead up to part 3 that addresses the necessity of our beginning, at long last, to use female images for God.  Here's the first of those three sermons.  The other two follow below this one on the blog.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1:

On God

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 15, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Isaiah 55:6-9

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.

There is a question that I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, that I’ve wanted to preach about and not only to discuss in an adult ed. group.  It is the question of our language for God.  Now, I know that “our language for God” probably doesn’t sound like a question to you.  After all, we speak of God all the time without worrying much about the nature of the language we use.  But trust me on this one, it’s a question.  It’s a question for two primary reasons.  The first is the way in which Christians always have and still do understand the words we use for God literally.  The second is the tragic consequences of the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male titles and images for God.  I am convinced that both of these aspects of traditional Christian God talk need to be deconstructed and replaced.  So I am going to preach a three part sermon series, beginning today, on the question of our language for God. 

In this sermon series I want first to share with you some thoughts on the nature of God.  God is after all what we’re talking about when we speak of God.  God, whatever God means, is the object of our God talk, and it turns out that a proper understanding of what we mean when we say God determines how we must understand the nature of our God language.  Then, in the second part of this series next week I will address the question of what a proper understanding of the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God means for a proper understanding of the nature of the language we use when we speak of God.  Finally, in the third part of this series in two weeks, I will turn to the question of the exclusively male language that our tradition has used for God and suggest why we must change that usage to include female images.  I will suggest some appropriate female images for God that we can then start using.

To begin:  Of what do we speak when we speak of God?  A simpler if less theologically precise way of putting that question is Who or What is God?  Philosophers and theologians have grappled with that question for millennia.  They’ve give lots of different answers.  Aristotle called God “the uncaused cause.”  For the ancient Israelites God had a name—Yahweh.  For Hindus God is the ultimate oneness of all being, far beyond anything that can be named.  For Jesus God was Abba, Father.  For the Christians of the Ecumenical Councils from the fourth century CE on God was the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons.  For Muslims God is Allah, which isn’t actually a name but a contraction of Arabic words that mean “the God.”  For theologians of the High Middle Ages in Europe God was that greater than which nothing can be imagined.  For us today God is mostly just God, or the word God with some other word that names some attribute or characteristic of God—God the Father, the Almighty, the Creator, etc.  Islam actually has 99 names for God of this sort.  One of the most commonly used is Allah the Most Merciful.  Actually, Islam has 100 such names for God, but only the camel knows the 100^th.  That’s why camels look so smug and superior.  Theologians often resort to abstractions when speaking of God.   In the twentieth century God became ultimate concern, being itself, and the ground of being.  Theologians speak of the ultimate, the absolute, the infinite.  Or they use words that point to God as something beyond the physical—the spiritual or the numinous, or the transcendent for example.

Pretty obviously God is a difficult concept for us humans to get a handle on.  There is one thing about God, however, that most of these attempts to get a handle on God have in common.  They all point in one way or another to God as other.  To God as different.  To God as beyond that which we normally perceive.  Indeed, one famous definition of God from the twentieth century is “totally other,” although of course theologians insist on saying it in Latin, as if that added anything.  That, I think, is one thing that we can say about God with confidence.  God is other.  God is different.

In the end, when we try to speak of God, we are left with one abiding truth, one abiding aspect of God that remains forever.  God is mystery.  God is ultimate mystery.  Not the kind of mystery Agatha Christie wrote.  Not the kind of mystery that we are to try to figure out but a mystery that we humans can never solve.  A mystery that we should never try to resolve.  A mystery that we are to live with and within, not a puzzle to be figured out with a triumphant Ta Da at our great mental achievement.

God as mystery isn’t a new concept.  We have always somehow dimly perceived that God is ultimately beyond us.  In the Bible, for example, Isaiah has God say “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”  Isaiah 55:8  Yet we have always had reservations about God as pure mystery.  As we have sensed the ultimate unknowability of God we have nonetheless spoken a great deal about God.  We have named God.  We have spoken of God’s will and God’s grace.  We claim to know things about God even as we acknowledge the God is ultimately unknowable.  What’s up with that?  Are we stupid?  Are we nuts to hold to two things both as true when both of them cannot be true?

Well no, we’re neither stupid nor nuts when we do that.  Rather, we are holding onto both sides of a paradox.  A paradox is when two things that cannot both be true are both true.  God is ultimate paradox.  God is known and unknowable.  God is transcendent and immanent.  God is personal and beyond all the limitations of personhood.  It’s not possible for God to be all of those things at once.  It’s not possible, it’s just true.  God is paradox because paradox preserves the ultimate mystery of God.  Paradox points precisely to the way that God is totally other, beyond the bounds of our usual human knowing.

And you may hear the truth that God is ultimately mystery as bad news.  You may well be asking:  If God is so mysterious, so unknowable, what use is God to  me?  It’s a legitimate question, but I think that God as ultimate mystery is actually very good news.  It’s very good news because anything that wasn’t ultimate mystery couldn’t truly be God.  Elizabeth Johnson addresses this truth by saying that rather than signify divine absence, God’s unknowability “fills the world to its depths and then overflows….”  (From The Quest for the Living God.)  God as mystery means that God is truly God.  Anything that we could finally know, could accurately name, could precisely define could not truly be God.  That’s because anything that we can know, name, and define has limits.  It has boundaries that mark it off from everything that it is not.  Yet as the Absolute, the Infinite, the Transcendent, God has no limits.  God has no boundaries.  God’s lack of boundaries and limits, God’s ultimate unknowability, means that God is not something less than God.  That we can in some sense imagine a reality without limits, a reality that we experience but which we can never pin down with our human words and concepts means that we can, however dimly, imagine that which is truly God.  The good news of God as mystery is that we can imagine and connect with a reality that is not less than God, that is indeed God.

The first step then in speaking rightly of God is precisely to realize that whatever we say about God cannot contain the fullness of God.  God transcends our words and our ideas absolutely, and that truth has profound consequences for the nature of our language about God.  To give you just a hint of where this is going, if our language cannot capture or even truly name God, then God is not male.  Which means that if male metaphors or symbols for God, like Father for example, are appropriate, and they are, female metaphors or symbols for God, like Mother for example, are also appropriate.  More about the consequences of God as mystery for our language about God is the subject of next week’s sermon.  Stay tuned.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2, On God Language

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2:

On God Language

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 22, 2012

Scripture:  Exodus 3:13-15

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.

Welcome to the second part of our three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  I want to thank Jane for stepping in for me last Sunday and reading the first sermon in the series for me.  And I want to apologize to her too.  As she said to me after the service last Sunday when we spoke on the phone, that was a very heady sermon.  I know, and I know that this whole series is pretty heady.  In other words this sermon series is very me.  It’s not very Jane, not that she disagrees with the points it makes.  In reading it she was definitely giving you me, not herself.  So Jane, thank you; and I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to give that sermon myself.

In that first sermon in this series I stressed the point that God is and always remains ultimate mystery.  Not a mystery we are to solve but an eternal mystery because God, who on the one hand is always present with us, is also and paradoxically always infinitely beyond us and our human conceptions and understandings.  I said that the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God turns out to have consequences for the nature of the language that we use when we speak of God.  Those consequences of the nature of God, and specifically of God as transcendent mystery, for the nature of our God talk are the subject of this second sermon in this series.

The human desire, indeed the human need, to speak of God is universal.  All human cultures have spoken of God.  Perhaps they have spoken of gods rather than God.  Perhaps they have spoken of Brahman or the Tao, concepts for ultimate reality that are utterly impersonal and without any human characteristics at all.  However they’ve done it, all human cultures have spoken of God.  Our does too.

Yet that human desire, that human need to speak of God presents us humans with an enormous dilemma, or at least it does if we have a proper understanding of that of which we speak when we speak of God.  God is mystery.  God is transcendent.  God is other than and beyond the created world in which we live.  That’s one prong of the dilemma.  The other is this:  We desire to speak of God, yet the only tool we have with which to do it is human language.  We wish to speak, but we can speak only in human words.  That’s the other prong of our dilemma because the human language that is the only tool we have with which to speak of God arises within and is part of the created world that God so utterly transcends.  Because God transcends creation, and because our language is part of creation, God transcends our language.  God is “totally other” than creation (to use a phrase from last week’s sermon), and God is totally other than our language.

Let me use an example to illustrate our dilemma when we try to speak of God.  Behind the house that was my parents’ in Eugene is a great tree.  It’s a tulip tree, and I have always loved that tree.  I call it my tree.  It has grown from a little sapling that we planted many years ago into a large, magnificent tree today.  I can speak with precision and accuracy about that tree.  I can speak precisely of its height, the color and shape of its leaves, the circumference of its trunk.  With a little more investigation I could describe its roots and measure their length and depth.  With more investigation and a microscope to aid my observation I could describe my tree’s cellular structure.  Well maybe I couldn’t.  I flunked plants in high school, but somebody could.  These and many more things about my tree I can observe with my human senses and describe most adequately using human language.  There is nothing about my tree and nothing about human language that means my language cannot adequately describe my tree.  It can.

It is not so with God.  God and human language are of essentially different natures.  Human language is created, God is not created.  Human language is finite, God is infinite.  Human language is a human creation, God (our friendly local atheists to the contrary notwithstanding) is not a human creation.  Human language arises out of and is part of human life within creation.  God is beyond creation.  Human language is a tool humans have the capacity to create and have created to facilitate their existence within creation.  God creates creation, is immanent in it, but ultimately remains beyond it and is different from it.

So we’re left with a big question:  If God is so transcendent of and different from our created human existence with its human language, and if human language is all we have with which to speak of God, how can we speak of God at all?  Isn’t our language, which is the only tool we have, completely inadequate for the task of speaking of God?

The answer, or at least the beginning of an answer, to that question is that indeed we cannot speak of God, indeed our language is completely inadequate for speaking of God, if we understand the statements we make about God to be the same kind of statements that I can make about my tree.  That is, we cannot speak of God, and our language is completely inadequate to speak of God, if we understand our statements about God literally, that is, if we understand them to be stating facts about God the same way my statements about my tree state facts about that tree.  If we understand our statements about God that way we are saying that God and my tree are on the same order of existence, that they exist on the same level of creation and we can talk about them the same way.  In other words, when we understand our statements about God literally, when we understand them to be stating facts about God, we bring God down to the level of my tree.  In other words, we make God a thing.  Yet of course God is not a thing.  Things are created.  There was a time when they were not.  God is not created.  There never was a time when God was not.  We cannot make literal, factual statements about God with our human language without making God less than God.

So is there no legitimate way we can make statements about God at all?  Well yes, actually, there is a legitimate way we can make statements about God.  We can make legitimate statements about God in our human language without making God less than God if we understand our language about God not literally, that is, not factually, but symbolically. 

OK, our language about God has to be symbolic.  Our words for God are symbols, but what’s a symbol?  For our purposes here a symbol is a word.  It can also be an object, like the cross, but for now we’ll consider a symbol to be a word.  A symbol is a word that isn’t taken literally but that points beyond itself to something else, something beyond itself, something transcendent, something to which the symbol can connect us but that it cannot capture, define, or fully and accurately encompass.[1] 

Again, perhaps, an example will help.  One of the most common words for God in the Christian tradition is Father.  Christians call God Father all the time—Our Father, who art in heaven; Heavenly Father; the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so on.  When we call God Father we are probably already using the word symbolically even perhaps without knowing it.  You can see the symbolic nature of the word Father for God if you will consider all of the ways that God is not your father.  God didn’t beget you biologically, a human male did.  God didn’t raise you in any human sense.  Human beings did; and probably, although not necessarily, one of those people was a man.  Ancient Israel may have thought of the god Yahweh as a male person of sorts, but I doubt that any of us really thinks God is a male person or anything much like a male person.  We call God Father all the time, but we can recognize the limitations of that word for God.  There are lots of ways in which God is not father.

So is it inappropriate to call God Father?  No, calling God Father is perfectly appropriate as long as we recognize the symbolic nature of the word father when we apply it to God.  Calling God Father is appropriate if, as many of us have, we have experienced God as present in our lives in a way that we experience as fatherly.  There is nothing wrong with calling God Father if you also recognize that God isn’t literally father but is symbolically father.  Father doesn’t pin God down.  Father isn’t God’s essence.  God as Father is a symbol not a fact.  The word father can point to something about God.  It may truly express something about our experience of God.  In that sense calling God Father may be true, but it is also necessarily false.   God may be like a father to you, but at the same time God is not a father to you.  That’s how you know that the word Father as applied to God is a symbol not a fact.

It cannot be otherwise.  Our words for God must be symbols not facts because God transcends our words absolutely.  If God did not transcend our words God would not truly be God.  God would be just another fact, and God is surely not just another fact.

Now, in preparation for next week’s final sermon in this series, I invite you to consider briefly what the symbolic nature of our language for God means for the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male images for God.  Is God male?  No, God transcends such biological distinctions as male and female.  Do our male images for God, like Father, define, capture, or fully characterize God?  No, God transcends those images absolutely.  So if we may experience God as Father but God is also not Father, are male images like Father the only appropriate images for God?  Stay tuned.

---

[1] For a fuller discussion of symbols see my book Liberating Christianity, Chapter 3.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3 She Who Is

This is the third sermon in my sermon series on our language for God.  The other two appear above.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3:  She Who Is

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 29, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Luke 15:8-10

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.

So here we are.  We’ve come to the third and final sermon in this three part series on the language we use for God.  In the first two sermons we looked at the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God and found that God, while always paradoxically present with us in the world, is ultimate mystery, transcendent, beyond, totally other.  In the second sermon we looked at what that understanding of God means for language for God and found that our God language is necessarily symbolic not factual.  Now we come to the third and final sermon, and I understand perfectly if you’re saying to yourself, or even out loud to others, Why in heaven’s name has Sorenson subjected us to these sermons that are more like theology lectures than sermons?  I freely admit that these sermons are more like theology lectures than like real sermons; but today I ask you to bear with me one more Sunday, because as heady as the subject of this series has been, this stuff is really important.  Today we turn to the necessity of using feminine images for God, and that’s really, really important.

It’s really important because the language that we use for God matters.  It matters a lot.  As Elizabeth Johnson, one of my teachers, one of my favorite theologians, and a real hero to people of faith today because of the outrageous and unfounded attacks on her work by the Catholic hierarchy, says:

“The symbol of God functions as the primary symbol of the whole religious system, the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life, and the world.  Hence, the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicitly represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty.  She Who Is

What we say about God both reflects and shapes what we take to be good, true, and beautiful; and that really matters.  Our tradition’s history of using exclusively male images for God matters.

I hear women say that they do not feel excluded by male language for God.  Some of you have said that to me.  Good.  I’m glad you don’t feel excluded.  But I have to tell you that the issue we’re addressing of the use of feminine images for God is larger than whether individual women do or do not feel excluded by exclusively male language for God.  Like all true symbols, the symbols we use for God function, as Elizabeth Johnson says; and they function in the psyche of people and of whole cultures whether individual people are aware of their functioning or not.  The Christian tradition’s exclusive use of male language for God has cultural consequences even if on the individual level we are not conscious of those consequences.  That’s why the issue of the language we use for God is so important.

The tragic but undeniable truth is that throughout Christian history women have been and still are dismissed, diminished, and disparaged by sexist cultures in church and society.  Patrimony—rule by men, excludes them.  Androcentrism—the centrality of the male—diminishes them.  Misogyny—hatred of women—degrades and even dehumanizes them.  The sexism of the Christian tradition cannot be overemphasized.  It appears even in the later writings of the New Testament, especially in the letters known as the pastoral letters, which seek to limit the role of women in the church.  In the high middle ages St. Thomas Aquinas, still a towering figure and unavoidable authority in Catholic theology, taught that women are inferior to men in every way, that they are essentially misbegotten men.  Martin Luther, the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation, agreed, saying that women were created only to serve men and to bear children.  Our Congregationalist forbears in New England branded independent women as witches and even killed some of them.  Today by far most Christians belong to churches that will not ordain women to the full ministry of Jesus Christ, a fact we in the progressive UCC would do well to remember.  Even in our secular American society sexism persists.  Women still don’t earn equal pay for equal work, for example.  Christianity has a miserable record on its treatment of women both in the past and today.

Exclusively male language for God not only expresses Christian sexism, it is a ground of Christian sexism.  It perpetuates Christian sexism.  Over and over Christianity says God is Father.  It calls God He.  It doesn’t say God is Mother.  It doesn’t call God She.  We hear it over and over, and we learn, subconsciously perhaps but all the more powerfully for that, that God is male.  That men are more like God than women are, that God is more like men than God is like women.  Because, as Elizabeth says, our language for God reflects what we take to be the highest good and greatest beauty we learn that male is the human norm.  We learn that women somehow deviate from the human norm, are somehow less than the human norm.

Let me give you an example of how unconscious sexism works.  Have you ever noticed how our young girls, our daughters and granddaughters, call all of their stuffed animals “he”?  They do, or at least until very recently they did.  They learn very young that male is the norm.  I was pleased recently when I heard my five year old grandson call his favorite stuffed animal, called Baby Bear, she; but surely that’s an exception among us.  In our society and in our faith tradition male is the norm, and our exclusively male language for God is both a source and a buttress of that sexist conception.

We have learned that God is beyond all gender distinctions.  We have learned that our language for God is symbolic.  We have learned, I hope, that our exclusively male symbols for God are destructive.  They diminish women, whom Genesis says are made in the image and likeness of God every bit as much as men are.

So if all of that is true, and I am convinced that it is, why don’t we use female images for God?  We call God Father.  Why don’t we call God Mother?  We call God He.  Why don’t we call God She?  Some Christians do.  Elizabeth Johnson’s  primary symbol for God is “She Who Is.”  I am convinced that it is imperative that we too start using female words and images for God.

Throughout my ten and a half years here as your pastor I have actually avoided male images for God.  I have tried to use gender neutral ones; but, as Elizabeth Johnson taught me long ago, it’s not enough.  Gender neutral images aren’t enough because they don’t do enough to correct the destructive imbalance in our God image that our centuries of exclusively male language have created.  Our hymnal, the New Century Hymnal, also avoids male images for God, but it has only a few female ones.  I’ve managed to find a couple of hymns that do, and we’ll sing them in this service.  I wish there were more of them.

My friends, I intend to start using female images for God in our worship.  Not exclusively, for God isn’t female any more than God is male.  I will however continue to avoid male images because of the crying need for a corrective to all of those male images that we’ve all heard for so long.  My purpose in this whole, heady three part sermon series has been to explain the rationale, the justification, and the necessity for us to start using female words and images for God.  I didn’t want to spring them on you unawares.  So you will hear me call God Mother.  You will hear me call God She.  You will hear me start the Lord’s Prayer the way they do at University Congregational UCC in Seattle, my home church before I got the call here as your pastor, namely “Our Father, Our Mother who art in heaven….”  I hope you will understand.  More than that, I hope you will join me as we reject a harmful part of our tradition and move into new, broader, healthier, truer images of God. 

It won’t be easy.  I know that.  We are all products of a faith tradition that has never used female images for God.  We’ve never, or at best have only rarely, heard them.  They sound strange.  They grate even.  I know that.  I also know that it’s time, indeed it’s way past time, for us to take corrective action.  The symbol of God functions.  Exclusively male symbols for God function destructively.  God is neither name nor female.  Our words for God, be they male, female, or gender neutral, are symbols that point to God not facts about God.  Female images for God are every bit as appropriate as male ones, and they are much more needed today.  “In God’s image God created them.  Male and female God created them.”  Women too bear the image and likeness of God, and God may come to us in images of women and from the lives of women.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  So let us pray to God our Mother.  Let us praise the name of She Who Is, the great I AM in feminine guise.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  Amen.

On Peace

The Christian education folks at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, the church I serve as pastor, decided earlier this year that they wanted to do a vacation bible school for our children.  As they worked on that project they changed from doing a traditional vacation bible school to doing what they are calling a "peace camp."  They will teach the children about peace and will help them build a peace pole, a pole with the words "may peace prevail on earth" on it in four different languages.  They will install the pole on the grounds of the church as a permanent expression of our commitment to peace.

I can think of little more important in the world today than teaching children, and all people for that matter, about peace and specifically about the Bible's vision of peace, which is very different from the world's vision of peace.  So today, the day before our peace camp starts, I build the worship service around the theme of peace the way the Bible sees it.  Here's the sermon from that service.  May it inspire all who read it to think anew about the ways of peace.

On Peace

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 8, 2012 

Scripture:  Micah 4:3-4; Matthew 5:38-46; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

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

It doesn’t make any sense, does it.  Jesus says “Love your enemies.”  He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist an evildoer violently.  He’s kidding, right?  We’ve got no business loving our enemies.  They hate us, and the only sensible thing to do it to hate them back.  How else are we going to defend ourselves from them?  Don’t use violence to resist an evildoer?  Nothing else works!  Oh, of course all that love your enemies stuff, all that beat your swords into plowshares stuff is very nice and all; but we live in the real world, not in some fairy tale where everyone is nice and peaceful.   The world just isn’t like that.

Now let me ask you something, or rather let me ask you quietly to ask yourself something.  How many of you just now as I said those things were shaking your heads and saying yes, that’s right?  How many of you agree with that rejection of nonviolence as unrealistic and even foolish?  It’s perfectly understandable if you do.  What I just gave you is the voice of the world on the issue of violence and war, of nonviolence and peace; and we all live in the world.  We’ve all been conditioned by the world.  We’re all immersed in the world’s way of seeing things from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death.  In the world’s way of seeing things that rejection of love of enemies and nonviolence as the way to peace just makes sense.  It’s the only realistic way to see things.

But here’s the thing.  The Bible is the foundational book of our faith, and the Bible really does have a different view of the matter.  The Bible really does call us to a different view of the matter.  We call Jesus savior and Lord, and Jesus really was a prophet of nonviolence.  As we heard in our reading from 2 Corinthians Paul really did consider what the world considers weakness to be true strength.  We can just dismiss all that out of hand if we want, but we can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we take the Bible seriously.  We can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we believe that Jesus is our savior and Lord.  So I invite you now to come with me on a brief journey into the Bible’s way of seeing issues of violence and peace, into Jesus’ way of seeing issues of violence and peace, and to consider them afresh.

Jesus is the Bible’s prophet of nonviolence par excellence, but the Bible’s teachings on peace go back much farther than Jesus.  In the Psalms, for example, peace is one of God’s greatest gifts to the people.  Thus Psalm 4 says “I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”  In the Psalms peace is a goal to which all should aspire.  Thus Psalm 34 says “seek peace and pursue it.”  For the prophets too peace is God’s gift to the people.  Thus Isaiah has God say “my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed.”  Isaiah 54:10  And then there is the great prophecy of peace from Micah that we recited as our call to worship this morning:  “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation shall not life up arms against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  It is one of the most enduring images of peace in all of scripture.

Of course, the world promises people peace too, but the Bible’s vision of peace is very different from the world’s vision of peace.  Or perhaps better, the Bible’s vision of how to attain peace is very different from the world’s vision of how to attain peace.  The world seeks peace through violence.  The world thinks that war, which is the opposite of peace, can bring peace.  Thus we call a war between imperial powers that decimates a continent and kills a generation of young men a “war to end all wars.”  We fight a “war on terror,” thinking that raining death and destruction upon people who already hate us will make them stop hating us.  That is the world’s vision of peace, peace through violence, and when you boil it down to its essence like that it really doesn’t make much sense, does it.

The Bible has a different vision, and a much better one.  The Bible envisions peace attained not through the opposite of peace but through the ways that truly make for peace, namely through economic justice and nonviolence.  We see the justice part of the Bible’s vision very clearly in our call to worship from Micah.  The prophet envisions a world free from war, and he sees how such a world can be created.  He prophesies peace, then says “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.”  Using an agricultural image like his image of the implements of war turned into the implements of peaceful and productive agricultural pursuits, Micah prophesies a world that is at peace, without the need for the implements of war, because it a world of distributive economic justice.  That is, it is a world in which all have enough.  All are secure in their material needs.  It is a world without poverty.  It is a world in which the rich do not exploit the poor.  That kind of justice, economic, distributive justice, may be a consequence of policies that may be pursued in peacetime, but the Bible knows that such justice is also and more importantly a cause of peace, a prerequisite of peace, a sine qua non of peace.

And the Bible knows that a true lasting peace cannot be created through violence.  A true lasting peace must be achieved through nonviolence.  That is Jesus’ message especially but not only in the brief passage we heard from the Sermon on the Mount.  There Jesus says “love your enemies.”  As a bumper sticker put out by the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches (which the UCC is not but I wish it were) says “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Jesus says “do not resist an evildoer,” and the word translated as “resist” means to resist violently, to resist through military force, as the late, great Walter Wink has taught us.  When he says turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, go the second mile Jesus gives us examples of how we are to resist evil.  Not with violence but through creative, assertive nonviolent resistance.  (If you’re not familiar with that interpretation of Jesus’ sayings on nonviolence please let me know.  I’ll be happy to explain it to you in greater detail after the service.)  The Bible’s vision of peace is a vision of nonviolence.  It is a vision of a world of economic justice and peace achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil.

And many people respond:  Well, isn’t that nice.  It’s nice they say, but it’s wildly unrealistic.  It can’t be done.  It doesn’t work, not in this world anyway.  Maybe in some ideal world up in heaven, but not here.  That’s what advocates of the Bible’s vision of peace always hear, but let me ask you something:  Has the world’s way of violence ever brought lasting peace?  The only possible answer to that question is no, it hasn’t.  Violence has defeated enemies, but it has never put an end to violence.  That “war to end all wars” ended in 1918 and led directly to an even bigger war that killed even more millions of people a few short years later.  Since then our country has bounced from one war to another—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, and those are only the major ones.  There have been lots of minor ones too.  We always say our wars are necessary to bring peace, and they never bring true peace.  They never result in an end to war.  It’s only a matter of time, and usually not very much time at that, before we’re back at war again.  People say nonviolence doesn’t work.  I say how do you know?  Have we ever really tried it?  And I say why is it so hard for the world to understand that it is precisely violence that doesn’t work?  I don’t see how history teaches any other lesson.

The Bible has a better vision than the world’s vision.  Jesus had a better vision than the world’s vision.  It is a vision of real peace, lasting peace, just peace.  It is a vision of peace through justice for all God’s people and of nonviolence as both its end and as its means.  It is a vision of peace that says you attain peace by being peaceful not by being violent.  It is a vision that knows with the sages of many times and many faith traditions that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Starting tomorrow many of our children will spend four days studying peace.  They will create a peace pole, a symbol of our faith’s abiding commitment to peace.  To peace the way the Bible sees it.  To peace the way Jesus saw it.  Peace the way God lives it and calls us to live it.  May they learn well.  May we learn well.  Amen.

Great Commission Baptists? Really?

The Southern Baptist Convention is a Christian denomination founded upon racism and the defense of slavery. That's not a slander of the SBC, it is merely a statement of historical fact. It took the Southern Baptists until 1995 to renounce slavery and until 2009 to apologize for their earlier support of it. The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the most theologically Fundamentalist denominations in the country. In recent times it has tried to drive women out of the pastorate. It has tried to enforce a narrow, anti-intellectual Biblical literalism on its seminaries. It was the only American denomination to endorse President George W. Bush's illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is adamantly opposed to equal civil rights for sexual minorities. In short, the Southern Baptist Convention is and has been consistently reactionary in its politics and in its theology.

For all that, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. At its recent national gathering in New Orleans it elected a Black man as its leader. We can hope that that election represents a true change of heart on the part of Southern Baptists, although I suspect that it actually represents no more of a change in racial attitudes in the denomination than the election of Barack Obama as president represents the end of racism in the country at large, which is to say not much.

At that recent national gathering the Southern Baptists did something else that I find more interesting and more revealing about that denomination. The delegates at the gathering voted by a narrow margin to permit Southern Baptists to call themselves “Great Commission Baptists.” They didn't change the name of the denomination, and use of Great Commission Baptists is permitted not required. Still, there is apparently some unease in the denomination with its association with the South. Apparently some Southern Baptists think that association is an obstacle to evangelization, to the growth of the denomination in the country as a whole. So they wanted something else to call themselves. What they chose is Great Commission Baptists. That choice, so far from being an improvement, points to the profound ways in which the conservative theology of the Southern Baptist Convention is out of step with the world today and is still in a reactionary stance against the changes taking place in the postmodern world.

The term “Great Commission” may mean something to many Southern Baptists, but I'm sure it means nothing to most Americans. The phrase refers to the end of the Gospel of Matthew. There the risen Christ says to his Disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore 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 that I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:18-20 This commandment of the risen Christ in Matthew has long been known in the church as the “Great Commission.” It is the primary biblical foundation for missionary work among non-Christians that has as its aim converting them to Christianity. It has been a charter for Christian imperialism all over the world. It was one thing when the author of the Gospel of Matthew wrote those words in and for a small and powerless community of Christians near the end of the first century CE. It became quite another thing when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire and remained the de jure or de facto established faith of western Europe and North America. Backed by the power of empire, Christian missionaries across the centuries and across the globe stopped at nothing to get non-Christians to convert to Christianity, using not only moral persuasion but on occasion force to effect the Great Commission. Yes, they thought they were doing good. They thought they were doing God's will. They thought they were saving the souls of their converts. Yet they destroyed indigenous cultures around the world, trying to make native peoples not only Christian but essentially European or North American in their culture as well as their religion. Worse, they were operating from a modernist mindset that believed that salvation was possible only for professed Christians, that people who worshiped using other myths and symbols, other faith traditions, were doomed to spend eternity in torment in hell. The Great Commission is the biblical warrant (or at least one of them) for Christian exclusivism of the narrowest sort. It is one of the Bible's blood stained verses, of which there tragically are quite a few.

The world has moved beyond that kind of religious exclusivism. So has the more enlightened part of Christianity. Christian exclusivism cannot be maintained in the light of post-modern ontology and epistemology.¹ It cannot be maintained in the world today where we are in daily contact with people of other faith traditions, people we know to be good, moral people of faith who just happen to practice faith in a tradition other than ours. Christian exclusivism is a relic of an earlier time, a time that has passed.

Into that world in which Christian exclusivism is no longer tenable (if indeed it ever was) comes the Southern Baptist Convention and identifies itself with a foundational text of Christian exclusivism. The identification of the denomination as Great Commission Baptists says that what is important in Christianity, what Christianity is all about, what Christians are called most of all to be involved in, is conversion of non-Christians to Christianity. The notion that that is what Christianity is mostly about is an anachronism at best. Converting people was never mostly what Christianity was about. Christianity is mostly about God's unconditional and unmerited grace and about God's call to God's people to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. Any non-Christian who doesn't know what the Great Commission is will learn nothing about the Southern Baptists from that appellation. Non-Christians who do know what the Great Commission is will hear in that name a spiritual aggression that denies the validity of spiritual paths other than Christianity. It seems highly unlikely that a shift from Southern Baptists to Great Commission Baptists will do much to improve the Southern Baptists' image among non-Christians or non-Southern Baptist Christians.

If the Southern Baptists wanted to give themselves a new name that refers to one of the so-called “great” statements of Jesus in the Bible there is another candidate that would, I'm sure, be a lot more appealing to a lot of people. It is the Great Commandment. In addition to a Great Commission Christianity has had from the very beginning a Great Commandment. It appears in all three Synoptic Gospels in one form or another. It's oldest and best statement is in the Gospel of Mark. It goes like this:

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, 'Which commandment is the first of all?' Jesus answered, 'The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.' Mark 12:28-31

Jesus' own words put this commandment above all others, including the Great Commission.

Conservative Christians may honestly believe that loving non-Christians means converting them to Christianity in order to save their souls, but whether or not our attitudes toward another truly express love often depends more on how the other experiences us than on our personal justification for what we are doing. Few followers of other spiritual paths, or of no spiritual path, are not likely to perceive aggressive proselytizing by zealous Christians as a truly loving attitude toward them. They will surely experience it as arrogant and as demeaning the path they have been on in their lives. They will, of course, experience it that way because that's what it is.

Seeing another as needing to convert to one's own belief system is arrogant and demeaning. Approaching another out of love of God and true love of the other is neither. Approaching another according to the Great Commandment rather than according to the Great Commission is an approach that respects the other and seeks a relationship of mutuality. Love genuinely seeks to help where help is needed and possible. Love of God and neighbor sees the other as beloved of God regardless of who the other is, regardless of the other person's belief system. It does not put the one approaching the other above the other. It does not claim spiritual superiority over the other the way proselytizing usually does. It's first words aren't “I have something you need.” Its first words are “can we get to know each other and then perhaps see how we may help each other?” A Great Commandment church would be one that could do good things in the world. A Great Commission church mostly isn't.

So I don't think “Great Commission Baptists” is an improvement over Southern Baptists. Rather than make the denomination more appealing it points to the way the Southern Baptists remain out of step with the postmodern world and with the most insightful and constructive developments in contemporary Christian theology. Being southern isn't per se the Southern Baptists' problem. Bad theology is.  A new name isn't what the Southern Baptist Convention needs. A new understanding of Christianity is.

1For an explanation of the claim see Section 3 “THE UNIVERSALITY OF SALVATION” in Chapter 10, “The Dynamics of Salvation,” in my book Liberating Christianity.