The Romans Didn't Invent Jesus

On the Claim That the Romans Invented Jesus

So now we face the latest pseudo-scholarly attempt to discredit Christianity.  It has happened before.  In 2007, for example, the Canadian pseudo-archaeologist Simcha Jacobivici, working with James Cameron of Titanic fame of all people, released a film titled “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.”  In that film Jacobivici claimed to have discovered an ossuary, that is, a bone box, that he claimed did, or at least might have, contained the bones of Jesus.  His evidence supported no such conclusion, and his moment of fame with his unsupported theory quickly passed.  Claims of historical discoveries that somehow contradict the foundational stories of the Christian faith aren’t all that uncommon. 

The latest is a claim by Joseph Atwill that the Flavians, the imperial dynasty that ruled Rome from 69 CE and 96 CE, invented Jesus Christ as a way to pacify the restless and rebellious Jews of the Roman Empire.  Atwill’s web site, caesarsmessiah.com/blog/about, tells of nothing in Atwill’s background that qualifies him as an historian of the origins of Christianity other than his interest in the subject and his supposedly having read “hundreds of books” on the subject.  If he is a scholar at all, he is an entirely self-made one.  That in itself says nothing about his theory.  You don’t have to be an academically trained scholar to discover new historical truths.  Still, Atwill’s lack of credentials is at least a cause for caution in accepting his conclusions.  A closer review of his claims shows that much more than caution is needed in approaching them.  I readily acknowledge that I have not read Atwill’s publications on the subject.  Still, some very good people I know are very upset by his claims, so I write this review based on media reports of his work only.  If someone who has read Atwill’s work can show that something here is wrong, I’m willing to listen; but I doubt that it will happen.

Atwill claims that Christianity began not as a religion but as a propaganda campaign by the Roman government.  He notes, correctly, that many of the Jews of the Roman Empire were waiting for the appearance of a Messiah, most commonly understood to be a king in the lineage of King David.  This royal Messiah, they thought, would come and defeat the Romans in battle, then usher in the Kingdom of God.  The Jews were indeed a constant bother to the Romans.  They rebelled against Rome repeatedly, most notably in 66 CE, when the rebels gained control of Jerusalem.  It took the Romans four years to defeat them.  In 70 CE the Romans retook the city, razed it, destroyed the Temple, and dispersed the occupants of the city.  Note that 66 CE is three years before the Flavians, who Atwill says invented Jesus, came to power and that they came to power one year before the destruction of Jerusalem.  The Jews rebelled again in 132 CE under the leadership of a man known as Bar Kochba.  The Romans certainly had reason to want to pacify the Jews.  They did it, however, not through propaganda tricks but in the usual Roman way, through the massive application of military force.

Atwill apparently contends that the Romans at some point exhausted their conventional means of controlling the populace.  I take him to mean that they concluded that their violence wasn’t working and that they needed another tactic.  I am aware of no evidence that Rome ever gave up violence as the primary means of controlling their empire, so I find the contention that they concluded that they had exhausted their traditional means against the Jews to be unfounded on its face.  They sure didn’t withhold violence in dealing with the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE.  Still, Atwill contends that the Romans invented the story of what he sees as a peaceful Messiah to counter the Jewish belief in a coming violent Messiah.  One news report refers to Atwill’s belief that Jesus was a turn-the-other-cheek pacifist who encouraged people to give unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s, meaning that they should pay their taxes to Rome.  I’ll return to those contentions shortly.  They both mischaracterize Jesus quite badly.

Atwill bases his conclusions largely on what he sees as parallels between the accounts of the military campaign against the rebellion of 66 CE in a work called War of the Jews by the Jewish/Roman author Josephus and the story of Jesus in the New Testament.  Josephus is indeed a major source for the history of the Jews in the first century CE.  Scholars have used Josephus as a source for centuries.  War of the Jews was completed in 78 CE, so if the Flavians relied on it their work has to date from 78 CE or later.  The account I have of Atwill’s work doesn’t detail these parallels.  It is true, however, that scholars have long recognized patterns in the way the Gospels tell the story of Jesus that are almost certainly not historical.  One school of thought, for example, teaches that the Gospel of Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, is structured according to the liturgical year of Jewish religious observation.  My source on Atwill quotes him as saying “What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus (sic) ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] (sic) Titus Flavius as described by Josephus.”  Atwill concludes, according to this report, that “This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern.  The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, top to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”

Acknowledging once more that I haven’t read Atwill’s work, let’s look at that contention.  The Roman army that conquered Jerusalem in 70 CE advanced on Jerusalem from the north.  The Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris in Galilee, a short distance from the tiny village of Nazareth, was one of their bases of operation.  As Mark tells the story, Jesus ministry began in the north, in and around Nazareth and on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.  He then undertook a journey south to Jerusalem.  His movement was from north to south, as was the movement of the conquering Roman army in 70 CE.  Does that prove that Mark’s story of Jesus is based on the movement of the Roman army?  Hardly.  There simply is no other way to get from Galilee to Jerusalem than north to south.  Yes, the Gospel of Mark was written after the year 70 CE.  That hardly proves that it was based on Josephus’ account of the war of 70 CE.  Indeed, it is unlikely that Mark was written as late as 78 CE when The Jewish War was completed, a fact that in itself casts considerable doubt on Atwill’s theory.

That’s about as much as I know about Atwill’s contentions, but I think it is enough for me to make some more meaningful critiques of those contentions.  First of all, to believe Atwill we must disregard a couple of centuries of work by highly trained biblical scholars.  It is well established in the scholarly literature that the oldest Christian works that we have are the authentic letters of Paul, beginning with First Corinthians and ending chronologically with Romans.  There is a broad scholarly consensus that those letters date from the 50s of the first century CE into the early 60s of that century.  In other words, they all date from before the Jewish rebellion of 66 CE (although after some earlier rebellions, including one in 4 BCE), and they date well before the publication of The Jewish War.  If some later Roman wrote them he sure did an amazing job of convincing later scholars the letters are older than that Roman.  I don’t know if Atwill ever addresses these oldest Christian documents or if he only works with the Gospels.  If he ignores Paul’s authentic letters that is a major weakness of his scholarship.

Here’s another fact worth considering.  Probably the oldest and most authentic reference that we have to Christianity outside the New Testament is a statement by the Roman historian Tacitus.  Speaking of Nero’s decision to blame the Christians for the burning of Rome in 64 CE Tacitus said: 

Nero fastened the guilt…on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace.  Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of …Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, broke out again not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome…..

This reference to the Christian movement having spread even to Rome itself refers to an event from 64 CE.  That’s two years before the outbreak of the Jewish rebellion of 66 CE.  It’s fourteen years before the publication of The Jewish Wars.  There’s no way the Flavians created that reference.  Clearly Christianity was a known movement in Rome well before Atwill says the Flavians invented it.

To move to another point:  To support his contention that the Roman government invented Christianity to counter the rebelliousness of the Jews Atwill presents a picture of Jesus as not only nonviolent but as passive.  He reads Jesus as having told people simply to accept Roman occupation and domination.  In adopting this view of Jesus Atwill is of course in good company.  That is the picture of Jesus the Christian church has propounded for a very long time.  It is, however, a rank distortion of the historical Jesus as we have him in those Gospels the Flavians supposedly made up.  In the report of Atwill that I have there is a reference to two sayings of Jesus from the Gospels.  The first is the one we usually know in its King James version:  “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  The line is found in all three Synoptic Gospels.  See Mark 12:13-17; Matthew 22:17-21; and Luke 20:22-25.  I’ll look at the oldest of those references, the one from Mark.  The entire pericope reads:

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said.  And they came and said to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth.  Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?  Should we pay them, or should we should we not?’  But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, ‘Why are you putting me to the test?  Bring me a denarius [the common Roman coin of the day] and let me see it.’  And they brought one.  Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’  They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’  Jesus said to them, ‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’  And they were utterly amazed at him.

There are several things about this story, some of them obvious and some of them perhaps hidden, that suggest that it is far from simple and that we are not to take it simply.  The Jewish leaders, both religious (the Pharisees) and political (the Herodians) come to “trap” Jesus in something he would say.  Jesus knows it’s a trap, for Mark tells us that he knew his interrogators’ “hypocrisy” and asks why they are putting him to the test.  Jesus knows that the question he is asked is far more dangerous than it probably appears to us to be.  He is caught between two very difficult realities.  Whether or not it was lawful to pay taxes to Rome was one of the hot issues in the Judaism of Jesus’ day.  It put faithful Jews in an impossible position.  If they didn’t pay Rome’s taxes they were breaking Roman law.  Rome was never loathe to apply force to get its taxes.  Refusing to pay was dangerous.  Yet many Jews believed that it violated the law of Moses, that is, the Jewish religious law, for people to pay the Roman taxes.  Rome was a pagan invader.  It’s coins, with which the tax had to be paid, were idolatrous, for they called the Emperor a son of God.  Not paying the tax violated Roman law.  Paying it violated Jewish law.  Jesus knew that if he gave a straightforward answer to the question he had been asked he would be in trouble either with the Romans or with the Jewish religious authorities, and at this point of his story he wasn’t ready to be in trouble with either of them.

So he essentially wiggles his way out of his predicament.  He shows that the Roman coin belongs to the Emperor.  The Emperor authorized it.  His image and title are on it.  So give it back to him, Jesus says.  The clear implication is that there is nothing idolatrous in using the Roman coin for that purpose despite the coin’s patent idolatry because what the coin says about the Emperor, that he is in some sense divine, is meaningless.  Jesus never condoned idolatry, and he wasn’t condoning it here.  He is saying the idolatry of the coin is nothing.  Caesar is not divine.  He may not know that, but we do; so go ahead and give him back his coin.  With that understanding you break neither Roman law and risk punishment nor Jewish law and risk committing sin.  That Jesus’ Jewish questioners understood his answer in this way is shown by what Mark says their response was:  “And they were utterly amazed at him.”  Why were they amazed?  Because they knew that his answer was a lot more complex than simply go ahead and pay the Romans their taxes.  They thought they had him trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea, and somehow he had gotten out of their trap.  So let’s not take Jesus’ statement here as simply complying with Roman demands.  It both does and it doesn’t.  It does externally:  Pay the tax.  It doesn’t internally:  Understand that Caesar is nothing.  Atwill reads Jesus’ saying here as advocating nothing but compliance with Rome.  He’s wrong.

Then there’s the notion that Atwill accepts that Jesus is a pacifist.  Apparently he relies on the famous line “turn the other cheek.”  Again he’s in good company.  The Christian church has taught a kind of worldly passivity using that line for a very long time.  Again however that teaching gets Jesus all wrong.  Jesus is nonviolent, but he isn’t passive.  Jesus actually taught active, assertive, creative resistance to evil, including evil coming from Rome.  The late, great theologian Walter Wink taught us that truth about Jesus in his exegesis of the passage from which the line “turn the other cheek” comes from.  I’ll give a brief recap of that exegesis here.

The line “turn the other cheek” comes from Matthew 5:38-44, part of the Sermon on the Mount.  Those lines read in relevant part:

‘You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile….

‘You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. 

These lines surely sound like they’re counseling passivity, but they aren’t.  First of all, the Greek word translated here as “resist” doesn’t mean don’t resist at all.  It means do not resist with military force.  It means do not resist with violence.  Next, turn the other cheek isn’t passive either.  Jesus says “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek.”  The use of the right cheek here isn’t coincidental.  It is essential to the passage’s meaning.  In Jesus’s world no one used the left hand for anything.  It was considered unclean.  The image Jesus uses is of someone being struck on the right cheek by the assailant’s right hand, which means the blow had to be with the back of the hand.  Try it, without actually hitting anyone of course, if you need a demonstration.  Striking with the back of the hand wasn’t just a physical blow, it was a putdown.  It was how a master disciplined a servant or a slave.  The image is of one in a superior social position assaulting someone below him in social standing.  When the person who is struck turns the other, that is, the left, cheek, now the assailant has an impossible choice.  Either he can break off the attack, or he can acknowledge his victim as his social equal by striking him forehand.  The subordinate person who has been attacked has turned the tables on the assailant, and he or she has done it nonviolently.  There is similar exegesis of “give your cloak as well” and “go also the second mile” that show that these two are examples of an oppressed person creatively but nonviolently turning the tables on an oppressor.[1] 

Jesus says do not resist an evildoer violently, then he gives three examples of creative nonviolent resistance.  He doesn’t say don’t resist.  He never says don’t resist.  Atwill is echoing a great deal of Christian misunderstanding of Jesus, but that doesn’t make him right.  He’s wrong.  Any Jew in first century Palestine would have understood his meaning.  We don’t because we have lost the Greek original of the sayings along with the context in which they were originally said.  There really is no doubt that the Jesus movement in its origins was radically anti-imperial.  John Dominic Crossan and others have done great work in developing the anti-imperial nature of the teachings and lives of both Jesus and Paul.  If some Roman set out to invent a Messiah who wasn’t a threat to Rome he never would have invented the Jesus we have in the Gospels.

Then there’s the question of just which Jesus the Flavians are supposed to have invented.  The New Testament hardly gives us one, consistent picture of Jesus, especially of Jesus as the Christ.  Did the Flavians invent Paul’s crucified and risen Lord, even though Paul wrote before the Flavians ever ascended to power in Rome?  Did they invent Mark’s suffering Messiah?  Or Matthew’s new Moses?  Or Luke’s Good News for the poor?  Or John’s Word of God Incarnate?  Did they invent James’ emphasis on works or Paul’s emphasis on grace?  Did they invent the Letter to the Hebrews’ picture of Jesus as the great high priest who both is and performs the ultimate sacrifice for the forgiveness of human sin?  Did they write Paul’s “In Christ there is no longer male and female,” or did they write the misogynist passages of the Pastoral Epistles?  Did they write a story of Paul constantly arrested and in prison for his anti-imperial rhetoric or did they write the comply-with-the-government passage of Romans 13:1-7?  Did they write John’s Jesus saying God did not send God’s Son into the world to condemn the world, or did they write the profoundly anti-Roman book Revelation with which the New Testament ends and that so roundly and violently condemns the world?  The New Testament is so complex, so diverse, even so contradictory within itself that it is truly impossible to believe that one group of people made it all up.  That statement and that conclusion remain true even if we limit our analysis to the Gospels.

Now let’s shift to a deeper level of analysis.  Whatever the origins of the Christian faith were, indeed even in the seemingly impossible case that Atwill is right, one thing Atwill cannot deny is that the Christian movement spread broadly and rather rapidly through the Roman Empire.  Of course, it spread mostly through the Gentiles not through the Jews, who according to Atwill were the Flavians’ audience for their fabrication, but never mind.  Whatever the historical truth about Jesus is, the undeniable fact is that by the fourth century CE Christianity had become such a force in the Roman Empire that the Emperor Constantine had first to legalize it, then favor it.  Eventually it became the official state religion of the Empire.  More than that, Christianity survived the fall of Rome and went on to become the largest religious tradition in the history of the world.  Yes, that spread of the faith was due in part to the imperial policies of empires that came after Rome; but it is still true that Christianity functions as true faith in God for an enormous number of people, and it has functioned that way for a very long time. 

To use the language I developed in my book Liberating Christianity and that many others developed before me, Christianity has functioned as a system of true symbols and myths for more people than any other faith in the history of the world.  Whatever its origins, Christianity is true for me and countless other people because it functions to connect us to God.  It functions deep in our souls.  It’s stories and symbols touch us, move us, transform us.  Even if it were originally invented for a Roman political purpose as Atwill contends, which it wasn’t, the fact remains that people across the centuries have found their connection with God in it.  They have found salvation in it, however they have understood salvation.  All that remains true quite regardless of the truth or falsity of Atwill’s speculative conclusions.

And here’s the thing about symbols and myths, that is, about religious systems:  You can’t make them up.  Or I suppose you can.  People have; but what someone makes up doesn’t become a popular faith of any consequence unless it functions the way religious symbols and myths are supposed to function, namely, to connect people with God and God with people.  Christianity does that.  It does that because its symbols and stories touch us deep in our souls.  It has touched people deep in their souls from the very beginning.  It still does today.  I am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real human being and that the movement that became Christianity goes all the way back to him and his first followers, but Christianity is true even if that belief isn’t.  I know that Christianity is true because I have felt its power in my life.  I have seen its power in the lives of other people.  Christianity is true, and Atwill can’t make it untrue.

As a matter of history Atwill’s thesis doesn’t hold up.  More importantly, as a matter of spiritual truth Atwill’s thesis doesn’t matter.  Atwill will prove to be another rather odd flash in the pan.  About that I have no doubt.  Our great faith has survived challenges much more serious than Atwill’s.  He may crusade against it.  He will have converts, people so fed up with the abuses to which Christianity has been subjected by its own adherents that they will accept his thesis not because it holds up to critical analysis but because they like its conclusions.  So be it.  He wrong.  He’s wrong on many levels.  So pay attention to him if you want.  Then move on.  He isn’t worth more than that.

---

[1] For a discussion of Wink’s exegesis see my Liberating Christianity:  Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. 160-165.

Resist the Evildoer

I got a request at church this morning that I make the sermon I gave available.  So here it is.

Resist the Evildoer

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

September 22, 2013

Scripture:  Matthew 5:38-45; Matthew 26:47-52

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 told a couple of our members this past week that on Sunday we would do a service on peace because the previous Saturday, now yesterday, September 21, is International Day of Peace.  They laughed.  What?, they said.  Only one day for peace?  Good point.  Every should be a day of peace of course.  Still, International Day of Peace is a real thing.  The United Nations created it first in 1981.  In 2001 they fixed its date as September 21.  The UN calls for all nations and people “to commemorate the Day through education and public awareness on issues related to peace.”  This year September 21 was a Saturday, and we don’t usually gather on Saturday.  Next year September 21 will be a Sunday, but not this year.  So we’re doing September 21 on September 22.  Today we focus on peace.  In particular we focus on peace the way Jesus taught and lived peace.

The peace that Jesus taught and lived is, with regard to how we live in the world, the peace of nonviolence.  Those of you who have been around here for a while know that I preach nonviolence.  I know it’s a hard sell.  After all, we live in a nation formed through violence—the Revolutionary War, an imperial war of expansion against Mexico in 1848, the Civil War, an imperial war of expansion against Spain in 1898, military and other violent conquest of the West, including genocide against the Indian nations.  Our nation is indeed grounded in violence.  Our culture thinks violence solves problems, a fact that may well have something to do with our repeated gun tragedies like that shooting last week in the Washington, DC, Navy yard.  Our Christian tradition, or most of it, abandoned nonviolence seventeen hundred years ago when Christianity became the official state religion of the very violent Roman Empire.  I know that nonviolence is a hard sell.  Believe me, I know.  Some of you have even argued against it with me.

Nonviolence is a hard sell, but here’s the thing.  We are Christians, and Jesus Christ both taught and lived radical nonviolence.  I’m not making that up.  He just did.  Go read the Gospels again if your doubt it, and come to me with your questions.  There are a few passages that need some explanation to see that they don’t really advocate violence, but trust me, they don’t.  In the brief passage we just heard from Matthew’s story of Jesus’ arrest Jesus won’t even let his followers use violence to try to save him from arrest, torture, and execution.  Nonviolence was Jesus’ way, Reza Aslan’s wholly unconvincing argument to the contrary notwithstanding.  Nonviolence was, more than anything else, what distinguished the man Jesus of Nazareth from all of the other would-be messiahs of his day.  Jesus had a different vision from their dream of creating the kingdom of God through violence.  He had a better vision.  He knew God better than they did, so he taught and lived radical nonviolence.  He calls us to teach and live radical nonviolence too.

Nonviolence is a hard sell because our culture is a violent one.  Those of you of a certain age remember how we used to play cowboys and Indians, or cops and robbers, when we were kids.  Bang!  Bang!  You’re dead!, we’d shout.  Kill the bad guy.  Problem solved.  That was our play, and that is our culture.  That culture really doesn’t want to hear that Jesus and God are different from that.  The problem is, they are different from that.  Very different from that.  They just are.

Nonviolence is a hard sell among us because our history and our culture are violent, but there’s another reason nonviolence is a hard sell in America.  Nonviolence is a hard sell among us because people think that nonviolence means passivity in the face of evil.  And they’re right, aren’t they?  We just heard Jesus say “Do not resist an evildoer,” but turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, and go the second mile.  Passivity, right?  Acquiescence in the face of evil, right?  Just accept it and don’t resist it, right?  That’s sure what it sounds like.  Well, that may be what it sounds like, and some of you have heard me say this before; but those lines actually do not counsel passivity and non-resistance at all.  Relying on the late theologian Walter Wink, let me explain.

In most English translations we read “Do not resist an evildoer.”  It sounds pretty absolute.  The problem is, “resist” is a weak translation of the Greek word used in the original language of Matthew.  That word actually means something more like do not go out in ranks against, or do not resist with military force.  A much better translation would be do not resist an evildoer violently.  Jesus here isn’t saying do nothing.  He is saying do nothing violent.  Then he gives three examples of what he means:  When someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.  When someone sues you to take your coat, give your cloak also.  When someone makes you go one mile, go the second mile.  These examples sound like passivity to us, but that’s because we have lost the context in which Jesus originally gave them.  Someone strikes you on the right cheek?  In that world he would have done it with his right hand because the left hand was considered unclean and wasn’t used for much of anything.  To hit you on your right cheek with his right hand he’d have to do it backhand, and that was the way a master disciplined a servant or a slave.  So turn the other, that is, your left cheek.  Now if he wants to hit you again with his right hand he has to do it overhand.  That’s how equals fought.  You have said to your attacker you can either break off the attack or treat me as your equal.  I win either way.  Neat.  Give the cloak also?  Most people in Jesus’ world owned only two pieces of clothing, here called a coat and a cloak.  Someone takes your coat, or outer garment?  Give the cloak, or undergarment too.  That leaves you before your oppressor naked, and in that world your nudity would have shamed not you but the one who looked at you.  Neat.  Someone forces you to go one mile?  What in heaven’s name does that mean?  Who forces someone to go a mile?  Well, in that world a Roman soldier was authorized to force a civilian to carry the soldier’s gear for him for one mile.  One mile, not two.  If people saw him having someone carry his gear for two miles the soldier would be in a lot of trouble with his superiors.  By starting to go a second mile you have forced an armed soldier of the foreign occupier to beg you to stop, a humiliating position for the soldier to be sure.  Neat.  None of these examples are examples of passivity.  They are examples of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to oppression.  They are examples of creatively turning the tables on an attacker, a creditor, and an occupying soldier.  Jesus is saying resist, but do not resist violently.  Resist peaceably, creatively, assertively, effectively.

So what does that mean for us?  Let’s take our current situation with Syria as an example.  Let’s assume that the Assad regime in Syria did in fact commit an atrocious act, a crime against humanity, the killing of hundreds of innocent people with poison gas.  Our leader’s immediate reaction was:  Bomb them!  In other words, solve a problem by resorting to violence.  Never mind that our adding our violence to the horrible violence already being done in that divided, complex, and warring nation could do nothing but make matters worse.  See a problem?  Bomb it!  That’s the usual American response.  We always want to solve problems with violence.

But look what happened.  Russia—and we still so love to hate the Russians—stepped forward with a plan to have the Assad regime rid itself of chemical weapons.  Assad agreed.  Will he follow through?  We don’t know yet, but so far he has agreed.  The United Nations, representing all of the nations of the world, got involved.  Assad responded not to a threat of violence from someone he sees as his enemy, that is, from us.  He responded to an offer of aid from someone he sees as his friend, Russia.  He responded to the forceful but nonviolent response of the world community.  Our violence was never going to end his violence.  It just would have provoked more violence.  A nonviolent response by the world, and especially by Assad’s major international backer, seems to be ending his ability to inflict at least one kind of violence on his own people.

So why don’t we get it?  Nonviolence drove the British out of India.  Nonviolence brought down apartheid in South Africa.  Nonviolence produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in our own country.  Nonviolence brought down Communism in most of Eastern Europe.  Creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil works.  More importantly, nonviolence is the moral choice.  Nonviolence is the way of God and of Jesus Christ, violence is the way of the world, especially of the empires of the world.  I’ve given some reasons here why nonviolence is such a hard sell; but honestly, I don’t get it.  It ought to be the easiest sell in the world, especially in a Christian community.  Jesus was nonviolent.  He was nonviolent because God is nonviolent.  Nonviolence is moral.  Nonviolence works.  Nonviolence is the way of peace.  Jesus’ word of nonviolence is today what it was two thousand years ago, a new word of a new way that the world desperately needs to hear.  If we don’t hear it, we may well destroy ourselves with our violence.

So let us resist the evildoer.  Jesus doesn’t tell us not to, but let’s always do it nonviolently.  Do it creatively, assertively, consistently.  But always nonviolently.  That’s what Jesus did.  That’s what he calls us to do.  May we have the wisdom and the courage to hear and to follow.  Amen.

The Empire Within

This is the sermon I gave on June 30, 2013, on Luke's story of the demon named Legion and Jesus' approach to dealing with the issue of empire.

The Empire Within

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

June 30, 2013

Scripture:  Luke8:26-33

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 people who lived in what we call Israel in the first century CE, during the time that Jesus lived there, had a lot of problems, poverty being one of the dominant ones.  They had, however, one major problem that dwarfed all the others.  They lived under foreign military occupation.  Several decades before Jesus was born Rome occupied Israel.  Rome was at that time the greatest empire with the most powerful military establishment that the world had ever seen.  Like all empires ruling foreign lands Rome ruled for the benefit of Rome, not for the benefit of the people of the occupied land.  Israel got some benefits from Roman occupation I suppose.  The first century CE was a time of relative peace and of economic prosperity for the wealthy, albeit hardly for most of the people.  Yet the Jewish people, or at least most of them, hated Rome.  Rome exploited the land and the people economically, imposing harsh taxes that drove most of the people deeper into poverty.  Worst of all, the Romans were Gentiles.  They worshipped false gods.  They even worshipped their emperor, a mere human being.  For the Jews of the time it was an abomination for the followers of the one true God to be ruled and oppressed by infidels.  The Jews hated the Romans.  They wanted the Romans gone.  They rebelled violently against Rome several times, always with dire consequences when the Romans crushed the rebellion.  Liberation from Roman occupation was the great dream and hope of nearly all of the Jewish people.

Many of those Jewish people expressed that dream and that hope by talking about someone called the Messiah.  The Messiah was one who was to come and deliver Israel.  There were different understandings of the Messiah in circulation in Jesus’ time, but one of the major ones saw the Messiah as a new King David.  In this understanding he would raise an army and drive the Romans into the sea.  He would then reestablish the Davidic Kingdom, a long lost kingdom that the Jews had come to see as a golden age from the past and a model for liberation in the future.

Now, the Christian tradition has called Jesus the Messiah—or the Christ, the two words mean the same thing—from the very beginning.  That claim was a really hard sell to first century Jews.  It was a really hard sell because Jesus didn’t look, act, or talk anything like the Messiah so many of them were hoping for.  They wanted a Messiah who would make war on Rome and drive the Romans into the sea.  Jesus, of course, didn’t do that.  He didn’t try to do it.  He had no intention of ever doing it.  He just wasn’t that kind of Messiah. 

He wasn’t that kind of Messiah; but however one approached it Rome was Israel’s biggest problem, and any Messiah of whatever type had to deal with Rome and the Roman oppression of the Jewish people.  Any Messiah of whatever type had to give the people a way of dealing with Rome and the problems it created for them.  That, I believe, is what our story of Jesus and the exorcism of the demon named Legion is all about.  In that story we see how Jesus understood the problem of Rome and how to deal with it.

In that story a man is powerfully possessed by a demon.  The demon renders the man what we would call mentally ill.  The man couldn’t control himself.  Other people couldn’t control him either.  So Jesus comes along and exorcizes the demon out of the man.  Jesus asks the demon its name.  The demon says “Legion,” and Luke tells us that the demon’s name was Legion because many demons had entered the possessed man.  The demons get Jesus’ permission to enter a nearby herd of swine, who immediately rush into the Sea of Galilee and drown, taking the demons with them.

And you may be asking:  What does that story have to do with Rome?  The answer to that very legitimate question lies in the name of the demon, in “Legion.”  What does Legion mean?  That word has entered our language as a common word that means “a great many.”  Luke suggests that meaning of the word when he says that the demon’s name is Legion because many demons had entered the possessed man.  OK.  That explanation of the name Legion is fine as far as it goes.  The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough.  In the first century CE the word legion didn’t just mean many.  It had a related but quite specific other meaning.  Back then everyone who heard the story Luke tells would have known that a legion was a unit of the Roman army.  It was a major unit of the army, sort of like our army division, although not quite as big.  A legion consisted of three to six thousand infantry troops and one to two hundred cavalry troops.  To Jesus and his audience a legion represented the military might of the foreign power that occupied their land and oppressed them and their people.  Legion meant Roman power and Rome’s military occupation and tyrannical rule.

So in our story the name Legion represents the Roman empire.  It represents the ways of empire.  More broadly it represents the ways of the world.  Legion stands for the world’s dominant power, and it therefore stands for the world’s ways of violence and oppression.  It stands for all of the ways of the world.  It represents considering worldly power and success to be the highest values.  It represents seeing other people as objects rather than persons, objects for us to use, exploit, and abuse as we will to achieve our own selfish purposes.  It represents all of the ways in which the world stands for values contrary to the will of God.

In our story Legion isn’t literally a division of Roman soldiers.  It isn’t an external image at all.  It is an internal one.  In the story Legion isn’t the Roman military encampment outside the city, it is Rome internalized.  In this story demonic possession by Legion represents all of the things that Legion stands for taken inside and made part of a man’s life.  In this story the worldly values that Rome represents control the man who has taken them in.  He doesn’t control them, they control him.  The possessed man’s problem isn’t so much that the Roman Empire occupies his home country as it is that the Roman Empire occupies his soul.  His problem isn’t that Rome is out there.  His problem is that Rome is in here, within himself, controlling him not from the outside but from the inside.

In this story Jesus launches not a military assault on an external Rome but a spiritual assault on an internal one.  He doesn’t drive the external Roman army into the sea.  Metaphorically speaking, he drives the internal Roman army into the sea.  He doesn’t physically attack Rome’s soldiers.  Rather, he exorcizes the Roman legion that the possessed man has internalized.  He drives that Legion into the sea.  Jesus frees the man not from external occupation by Rome but from internal possession by Rome.  Jesus deals here not with imperial possession from outside but with imperial possession from inside.

In this story Jesus shows us where our adversary really lives.  Empire, and more generally the ways and values of the world, are a problem for us not because they exist outside of us.  They are a problem for us because they exist inside us.  They are a problem because we internalize them.  Our problem isn’t that the world’s ways are what they are.  Our problem is that we take the ways of the world into our hearts.  Our problem isn’t the ways of the world per se.  It is the way we have internalized the values and methods of the world and made them our own.  This story says that the world wins not so much through brute military power as it does by capturing our minds, hearts, and souls and by bending us until the world’s ways become our ways.

The story of Jesus’ exorcism of the demon named Legion calls us to look first of all not outward into the world to find evil.  It calls us to look inward, into ourselves, into our minds and our hearts.  Have the ways of the world that contradict and deny God’s ways taken possession of us the way Legion took possession of the man in our story?  Do we support the world’s ways of violence when we think we benefit from them?  Do we dehumanize any of God’s people, seeing them as objects rather than as beloved children of God?  Do we strive for worldly success measured in money and power rather than for the wisdom and peace that come from pursuing the life of the spirit? 

Let’s be honest.  We’ve all internalized at least some of the ways of the world.  It really isn’t possible to grow up in the world and not internalize an awful lot of it.  The world of Rome possessed the man in our story.  The world today possesses us.  Jesus exorcized Rome and its world from the man in the story.  We don’t have Jesus physically present with us to exorcize our world from us.  So this story calls us to do the work of exorcism ourselves.  Jesus calls us to look deep into ourselves.  What do we see there?  The ways of the world or the ways of God?  Jesus calls us to the immensely difficult work of replacing the world in our souls with God in our souls.  For Jesus, for God, we don’t transform the world through force and violence.  We transform the world by starting with ourselves.  When we transform our hearts, when we exorcize the world’s violent and unjust ways from our souls, we transform the world.  When enough people have, with the help of God, transformed themselves, the world will be transformed.  That’s why Jesus exorcized an internalized demon named Legion and didn’t raise an army to attack Rome.  He calls us to do the same.  Amen.

Together In the Spirit

This is the sermon I gave at my wife/co-pastor's installation service on June 22, 2013.

Together in the Spirit

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

June 22, 2013

Scripture:  Romans 12:1-13; 1 Corinthians 12:1, 4-11

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

So here I am preaching at the installation service for my co-pastor Jane.  It’s weird enough preaching at the installation of your co-pastor.  I suspect it is more common in these cases, or maybe I’d just be more comfortable, to have someone else preach a word to both of the new co-pastors. Yes, preaching at the installation of your co-pastor is a bit weird, but when that co-pastor is also your wife it gets really bizarre.  I am indeed Jane’s co-pastor here in Monroe, but much more importantly she’s my wife; and preaching specifically to your wife is just wrong, maybe especially when she’s a preacher too.  It got even worse the other day, however.  Jane suggested that I preach on 1 Corinthians 7:16a.  That half verse reads “Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband.”  Let’s just say I wasn’t much taken with that suggestion.  I suggested in response that I preach on the non-Pauline insertion into that same letter at 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a:  “As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches.”  Needless to say Jane didn’t like that suggestion any more than I liked hers.  Probably less.  It’s her installation, so I really had no choice.  I’m not preaching on that verse.  But then neither am I preaching on hers.

So what can I do here this afternoon?  I don’t feel right preaching specifically to my wife, even if she is my co-pastor.  Rev. Steve Hanning, my former pastor and recently the interim pastor at our church in Everett, told me once that he has known four clergy couples who did co-ministry together.  In two of those cases it worked really well.  In the other two—the couple got divorced.  I don’t want to say anything here that might increase the chances of Jane and me ending up in that latter category of divorced former co-pastors, so I won’t presume to preach specifically to Jane.  Instead I want to say a word to our people here in the Monroe church.  The rest of you, our honored guests here this afternoon, are of course welcome to listen too.

Today we formalize and celebrate your decision to call Jane as co-pastor, together with me, of your church.  Last August we changed our pastoral staffing by adding Jane as co-pastor, but back then adding Jane was only an experiment.  We all wanted to see how having Jane as co-pastor with me would work.  We needed to see, among other things, if you were able and willing to pay the added expense of adding another pastor to the staff, even at a very modest compensation level.  That experiment was set to end at the end of May, but on Pentecost you voted to make the co-pastor arrangement with Jane and me permanent—as permanent, that is, as a church’s pastoral arrangements ever are. 

I’ve got to be frank with you.  That decision, as much as I appreciate it—and I really do—makes absolutely no sense.  That’s what the so-called experts would say.  They’d say we’re not really big enough for even one full time pastor.  We’re nowhere near big enough for a staff of more than one full time pastor.  Any consultant we might have hired to evaluate the co-pastor proposal for us would have said you’re nuts to do it—in much more professional language of course.  We wouldn’t be very happy paying for just “you’re nuts.”  Yet somehow, by the grace of God and your good will, we’ve had a full-time pastor since 2003; and since last August we’ve had more than that.  You have supported the new pastoral arrangement with your prayers, your work, and your money; and Jane and I thank you for that support with all our hearts.  You have shown what a small church that once was stagnant if not quite near closing can do with the dedication, hard work, and contributions of committed members.

And now we come to a celebration of a new phase in our life together.  You have called Jane to join me as pastor because you know her, you love her, you see her manifold gifts for ministry.  You see what she can bring to our church, and that is a very good thing.  Today we get to celebrate your decision, and we also need to recognize what that decision means for the future of our church.  The new co-pastor arrangement that you have created presents us with both great opportunities and great challenges.  With Jane as co-pastor we have the opportunity to expand the ministry of our church beyond what I have been able to do as sole pastor.  We have pastoral support for parts of the church’s ministry that, frankly, I didn’t spend as much time on before as I might have—outreach and Christian education of children and young people being good examples.  We have an expanded availability of pastoral care.  Some of you relate to Jane better than you do to me.  Others of you relate better to me than you do to Jane.  That is natural and expected, and now you all have a better chance of having a pastor you are comfortable talking to.  Jane brings new ideas to the church.  She brings new energy.  Her pastoral experience is very different from mine; so she sees things differently than I do, and her insights have been and will be of great value to us.  Jane’s presence with us opens great new opportunities before us.

It also, however, presents us with challenges.  Jane and I are still working out just how we share the pastoral responsibilities around here, and how we do that will continue to evolve in the times ahead of us.  So far our being co-pastors has in no way threatened our marriage, and Jane and I will make sure that it never does.  One of your challenges is to understand that for Jane and me our marriage comes first.  If our pastoring together ever even remotely threatens our marriage, we’ll choose our marriage over co-pastoring.  Some of the time Jane and I have together sounds a lot like a pastoral staff meeting.  So far that’s OK.  We will make sure that it continues to be OK.

Yet the greater challenge that we face is understanding just where this church is heading.  Where is the Holy Spirit calling us?  We believe that the Holy Spirit has called Jane to ordained pastoral ministry here at Monroe Congregational UCC at this time.  We must presume that the Spirit has some purpose in calling Jane as one of your pastors today.  What is that purpose?  Is it to work Jane into the life of this congregation as essentially my successor as your pastor?  Perhaps.  She is thirteen years younger than I am, and I have been your pastor for over eleven years.  I’m 66 years old, and I won’t keep working forever.  Jane as my successor isn’t set in stone, but it’s something to keep in mind.  Is it because Jane will have new ideas for new types of ministry we can do in this community?  Perhaps.  I hope so.  We’ve come a long way in the last eleven years.  Is the Spirit calling Jane to lead us in building on the work we’ve done together in that time, to take us to new places reaching new people?  Perhaps.  I hope so. 

Discerning the Holy Spirit’s purpose in calling Jane as your co-pastor is an important challenge, but in our Scripture readings this afternoon St. Paul reminds us of another important truth about our church.  In both of those passages Paul speaks of how Christians have many gifts, all given by the one Spirit.  He doesn’t talk much there about the gifts of a community’s leaders.  He talks about the gifts of the people.  It is the gifts of the people, not just the gifts of the leaders, that make a church a faithful community of Christ’s disciples.  We don’t all have the same gifts, he says.  Just as a body needs different appendages and organs to function as a body, so a church needs the many different gifts to function well as a church.  You have two pastors.  That’s an extra pastor for a church this size.  One of your most important challenges is to remember that having an extra pastor doesn’t free you from the call to bring your gifts to the life of the church.  You don’t get to sit back and say Tom and Jane can do it.  We can’t.  We can help, and we will; but we can’t do much of anything without you.  You are the church.  Jane and I are part of the church too, but only a part of it.  Jane has many gifts for ministry.  I like to think that I have some too, but you are the church.  Your gifts are the ones that matter most.  Together we can do many good things.  Alone Jane and I can really do nothing.

So today, as we celebrate the installation of Jane as co-pastor, I ask you to consider not what Jane and I can do for you but what you can do for yourselves and each other as this little church of Jesus Christ.  Do you love children?  Volunteer in the nursery or the Sunday school rooms.  Do you care about the poor and the homeless?  Volunteer with Brown Bag Brigade, or Take the Next Step, or the food banks in Monroe and Sultan.  Can you sing, or do you like to sing but aren’t sure how good you are at it?  Come to choir practice on Wednesdays at 6:30.  Do you have a strong speaking voice?  Volunteer to serve as lay leader for our Sunday worship.  Are you a teacher?  Offer a class at church on something you have a passion for, either for children, or for adults, or for both.  Are there things you’d like to see us doing?  Do you have a vision for what our church could be but you don’t know how to make it happen?  Share your ideas and your vision.  Share them with Jane, with me, and with all the people of the church.  Maybe together we can make them real. 

The examples of gifts and how to use them could go on and on.  The Spirit has indeed given us many gifts.  Today we celebrate Jane, and it is right and good that we do.  We face many challenges together, not the least of them financial.  But we have overcome harder challenges in the past.  Those challenges became opportunities for faithful ministry.  The challenges we face today can be opportunities too.  If together we pray hard and rely on God’s grace, we can do great things.  With Jane’s new leadership, and with my old leadership, let’s get on with it.  Amen.

The Kingdom of God Is Among Us

The Kingdom of God Is Among Us

Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among us.  Luke 17:20  Or perhaps he said that it is within us.  Either way, it doesn’t matter.  Either way he said the Kingdom of God “is.”  Not that it will be.  That it is.  And either way in locating the Kingdom of God Jesus pointed to us.  He didn’t point to God.  He didn’t point to heaven.  He didn’t even point to himself, although his signs or miracles clearly point to an in-breaking of the Kingdom into the world.  He pointed to us.  Jesus said the Kingdom of God is not will be, and he said that it is among or within us, and Christianity has gotten Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God almost completely wrong almost from the beginning.  Christianity has gotten Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God wrong at least since Christianity became Christendom, at least, that is, since it became the established faith of empire in the fourth century CE.  We’ve been told the Kingdom of God is really the Kingdom of Heaven (Thank you Matthew!) and the Kingdom of Heaven really means Kingdom in Heaven.  Or we’ve been told that the Kingdom of God may come to be on earth some day, but that day won’t happen until the Parousia, until the Second Coming of Jesus, that hoary Christian belief that denies the significance and the validity of Jesus’ first coming.  Yet Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among us.  Is, not will be.  Us, not heaven.

In his essay “The Mystery of the Gospel,” which is Chapter 1 of his book Waiting for Gospel, the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall says that gospel isn’t something that we are to construct, it is something that has already happened.  It is something that God has already done.  Gospel, Hall says, is.  Not that it will be.  It is.  Now.  Already.  We just don’t know it.  Hall’s words reminded me of Jesus’ words from Luke and got me thinking again about a thought I’ve had many times before.  It’s a thought about how we are to understand the Kingdom of God and the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  That thought goes like this.

The Kingdom of God  already exists.  It is already the ultimate reality of the world.  We humans of course create our own reality.  What we take to be reality is entirely of our own making.  Trees aren’t green.  They reflect certain wave lengths of light that our brains make green.  Green isn’t an objective reality, it is something our minds create.  A glorious mountain vista isn’t beautiful.  It just is what it is.  Our brains react to it with a sense that makes us appreciate the vista and call it beautiful.  Beauty isn’t an objective reality, it is something our minds create.  I don’t know the objective reality of the people in my life or in the world.  I don’t know the objective reality of what I read and hear about world history and world events.  I know only that I perceive them, and I make my perception of them my reality.  Does my perception that I call reality correspond in any meaningful way to some objective reality outside myself?  I don’t know.  I can’t know.  I have no way of knowing because my perception, which is entirely internal and subjective, is all I have.

The Kingdom of God is already real, but we humans constantly create a reality that is radically and tragically different from the Kingdom of God.  We take what we experience as the injustice, violence, environmental destruction, oppression, and exploitation of which we hear so much as reality; and we make it our reality.  We say those things are what is real.  O yes, we also say that love, care, compassion, justice, and forgiveness are real to some extent, but they aren’t enough for us to overcome our created reality of violence and oppression and to live in the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is already here.  It is already real, and we live as though it weren’t.

God calls us to live in the reality of the Kingdom of God not in the alternative reality that we call the world.  God calls us to live as though the values of the Kingdom of God were already the universal values of the world for, really, they already are.  Is there injustice in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of justice.  Justice is part of ultimate reality.  Is there violence in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of nonviolence.  Nonviolence is part of ultimate reality.  Is there judgment, condemnation, and punishment in the world?  No matter.  Live lives of acceptance and grace.  Acceptance and grace are part of ultimate reality.  God says:  I showed you what my Kingdom is when I sent you my Son.  He told you.  He showed you.  He told that that my Kingdom is already your reality, that it already is among and within you.  So listen to him as I told you to do at the Transfiguration and live in my reality.  Make the Kingdom of God your reality.  We must stop waiting for God to do it, for God has already done it.  We can’t wait for others to do it, for it is up to us to live it.  How do we make the Kingdom of God our reality?  We just do it.  We decide to do it.  We choose to do it.  We stop living by the worldly reality that we convince ourselves is real and starting living by the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God.

The world will think we’re nuts of course.  They’ll say you’re not being realistic, not realizing that we are living the ultimate reality and therefore are being the most realistic people of all.  They’ll say nonviolence doesn’t work.  No matter.  In the world’s terms it often doesn’t, not that violence does.  In the Kingdom of God nonviolence works, and more importantly in the Kingdom of God nonviolence is just what’s right.  So that’s how we live.  They’ll say oppression and injustice are unavoidable in human society.  No matter.  In the world’s terms they may be unavoidable, but they don’t even exist in the Kingdom of God.  They’ll say we can’t afford to save the environment.  No matter.  In the Kingdom of God we know that we are stewards not dominators of a world that belongs to God not to us, so we save the environment.

How do we make the Kingdom of God a reality on earth?  By realizing that it already is.  By realizing that we all create our own reality.  By simply deciding to live the Kingdom life rather than the worldly life.  There’s no need to wait.  There’s no use in waiting.  Jesus said the Kingdom of God is among and within you.  It’s already here.  So let’s live it.  Now not later.  It’s the only way to make it real.

© Thomas C. Sorenson, 2013  All rights reserved.

Love Your Enemies

This is the sermon that I gave on Sunday, May 12, which was Mothers' Day in the US.

Love Your Enemies.  Really?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 12, 2013

Scripture:  Matthew 5:43-48

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 was going to start this sermon by saying that no one ever said that being a Christian was easy, but as soon as I thought that I realized that I couldn’t say it.  It’s not true.  A great many people think that being a Christian is very easy.  A great many pastors and preachers present Christianity as being very easy.  They say:  Realize you’re a sinner.  Repent.  Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.  Done.  Problem solved.  You’re saved, and now you can relax.  Easy.  So I can’t start this sermon by saying that no one ever said being a Christian was easy.  People make being a Christian—of sorts at least—easy all the time.

Which absolutely does not change the fact that being a Christian, a real Christian, a truly faithful Christian, isn’t easy.  It just isn’t.  It isn’t because being a Christian means more than anything else following Jesus.  Not believing the right things about him, but following him.  Believing in Jesus is easy.  Listening to him and living the way he taught and showed us is hard.  It’s really hard.  It’s really hard because the life that he taught us and showed us turns everything we understand about the world on its head.  Do you know what a revolutionary is?  A revolutionary is someone who wants the world to revolve, to turn.  To turn upside down.  Jesus was a revolutionary.  That kind of revolutionary.  His teaching turns the world upside down.  He wants us to turn our world upside down, and that’s not easy.  It’s really, really hard.

Many of the things Jesus tells us to do are hard, but today I want to talk to you about what may be hardest of Jesus’ teachings of all.  We just heard it.  “Love your enemies.”  I don’t know what your reaction to that teaching is, but mine is:  Really?  You’re telling me to love my enemies?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who hate me?  Really?  You’re telling me to love people who want to kill me?  Really?  I don’t want it to be true.  I don’t want Jesus to have said it.  It makes no sense.  I don’t love people who hate me.  Almost no one loves people who hate them.  We hate those people.  That’s the only sensible thing for us to do, to return hatred for hatred, isn’t it?  People have always done it.  We can’t not do it.  Really?  You want me to love my enemies?  Really?

“Really?” has pretty much been the reaction of virtually all of Christendom since very early in the history of our faith.  At least since Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have asked Really? about Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies.  For the most part Christians have answered their Really? with a no, not really.  Jesus’ love your enemies commandment is one of his most widely ignored and disregarded sayings.  Christians on the whole have not loved their enemies any more than any other people have.  O yes, sometimes we convinced that we were loving our enemies even as we have tortured and killed them.  We did it because we love them, we’ve said.  We did it for their own good, we’ve said.  We did it to save their souls, we’ve said.  Or we say we love the sinner and hate the sin as we have condemned and excluded people different from us.  Mostly, however, we don’t even bother with such pretenses.  We just hate our enemies as much as anyone else does.  We certainly don’t love them.  We ask Jesus Really?  We’ve got to love our enemies?  We answer for him no, not Really. 

Yet there his commandment of love is.  Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you he says.  We don’t like it.  We ignore it.  But today I ask:  What if we were to stop ignoring Jesus’ command to love our enemies and lived into that command instead?  What would that look like?  What would we have to do?  How could we start?  In one short sermon I can’t do more than suggest a starting place, and here I think is a good one.  The Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches that has not turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence the way most of Christianity has, puts out a bumper sticker that reads:  “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Yeah, probably.  Don’t you think?  Don’t you think that love means at least don’t kill? 

There is no doubt that Jesus preached and lived radical nonviolence.  His directive to us to love our enemies is part of that teaching.  Christianity has mostly forgotten that teaching.  At least since establishment in the Roman Empire of the fourth century CE Christians have been at least as violent as any other people.  In our country today most of the gun nuts who run the NRA probably think of themselves as Christians and see no disparity between their dystopian world in which everyone carries an assault weapon and Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, so thoroughly has Christianity turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  Yet surely love your enemies means at least don’t inflict violence upon them. 

Today is Mother’s Day, and many of you may be unaware that the roots of Mother’s Day in this country lie in the anti-war movement.  In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, one of great witnesses for peace and for justice in our country’s history, wrote and issued her Mother’s Day Proclamation.  Hallmark would not have approved.  It isn’t sweet.  It isn’t sentimental.  It isn’t about giving cards and flowers and chocolates and going out to dinner, as nice and as appropriate as those things may be.  It is about peace.  In that Declaration Howe said:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, Disarm!’

Howe went on to  call for an international women’s congress to be held to “to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”  Mother’s Day wasn’t officially established in this country until 1914, ironically (and tragically) the year World War I began in Europe, and it had by then already lost its connection to the peace movement.  But that’s where its roots lie.  It’s about time we rediscovered them.

Today we honor the love and care that, we pray, all mothers will have for their children.  We know that not all do, and we stand with the victims of abuse and neglect in the cause of justice.  We pray for them healing and wholeness of life.  But all people have mothers.  Our enemies have mothers.  We’ve all see the heartrending pictures of mothers in inconsolable grief over the deaths of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons killed by acts of violence, killed most of all in war.  Perhaps if war is ever to cease in this world it will be the mothers who stop it.  Mothers who know that no cause is worth the death of a beloved son or daughter.  Mothers who know that violence never brings peace.  Violence never brings justice.  Violence brings death and dismemberment and pain and emotional suffering and grief.  Perhaps it’s the mothers who know that most of all.  Maybe they will lead the way to a recovery of Jesus’ difficult commandment:  Love your enemies.  Today we can say:  Love your enemies, for they too have mothers. 

Of course it’s not easy.  No one ever said loving your enemies was easy.  No one who knew anything about it ever said that nonviolence was easy or safe.  The world teaches us to hate our enemies.  It teaches us to kill as many of them as we can.  Jesus teaches us the opposite of that worldly wisdom.  He teaches us the wisdom of our nonviolent God.  He said to those he knew in life and he says to us now:  Love your enemies.  He didn’t say it was easy.  He just said do it.  Will we?  Amen.

Called to Transformation

This is the sermon I gave on May 5, 2013, to which some have responded favorably.

Called to Transformation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 5, 2013

Scripture:  Acts 16:9-15;  Revelation 21:10, 22-26, 22:1-5

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.

Some of you already know this from Facebook, but last Sunday after we got back from Wenatchee, Jane and I got a dog.  He’s a new dog to us although he’s almost eight years old.  He lived right around the corner from the church, and he needed a new home.  He wasn’t being abused or neglected by the woman who owned him, who was also his breeder; but she couldn’t keep him and needed to find a good place for him.  I got to talking to her a couple of weeks ago as I was walking up to 7-11 to get something to drink, and Jane and I ended up adopting the dog.  Some of you have seen his picture on Facebook.  He’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi—that’s the kind without a tail.  His name is Ringo, because he has a ring of white fur around his neck.  He’s a sweetheart, and we’re delighted to have him.  Especially Jane, who’s the world’s biggest dog sap—but that’s a story for another day.

Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but he just landed in a bed of roses.  I don’t like to brag, but Jane and I are really good dog owners.  We love dogs.  We know what they need, and we make sure our dog has it.  We walk our dog at least twice a day.  We make sure his diet is healthy.  We take him to the vet regularly for checkups and vaccinations and whenever something might be wrong.  We pet him and play with him a lot.  We’re even having our little back yard fenced so Ringo can go outside by himself when he wants.  Mostly, we love our dog.  Ringo probably doesn’t know it yet, but his world just got pretty much completely transformed for the better. 

Ringo is experiencing transformation into a world that will be really good for him, yet of course he’s still a bit stressed by it all.  He knows he’s in a new place with new people, but he doesn’t know why.  He’s a dog, and you can’t really explain those things to a dog.  So he’s still a bit nervous, a bit edgy.  He hasn’t really settled into his new environment yet.  He doesn’t yet fully know our routines and patterns, and that makes him a bit uneasy.  The transformation that he’s experiencing will be really good for him, but he’s resisting it a bit.  Just a bit, not a lot; but he’s still resisting it a little, and he’s still a little uncomfortable with it.  That’s to be expected, and it will pass; but for now Ringo is finding transformation a bit difficult.

Ringo’s a dog, but he’s not the only creature who finds transformation difficult.  We humans find transformation difficult too.  We resist change.  We resist renewal.  In my line of work we call the phrase “We’ve never done it that way before” the seven last words of a dying church, but people in churches say it all the time because they don’t like change.  Institutions like churches, and governments, and just about every other kind of human institution, resist change, but so do we individually.  Psychologists tells us that things like changes in primary relationships, changes of employment, moving from one home to another or from one town to another, are among that most stressful events in a human life.  They’re stressful because we don’t like change.  We like things to stay the way they are.  Of course, not all change is beneficial, but we pretty much resist all change, even change that is beneficial.  In other words, we resist transformation.  We find change and even true transformation frightening.  They make us nervous.  They make us tense.  So we resist them.  Staying where we are is almost always more comfortable for us than is any kind of change, any kind of transformation.

We resist transformation, and that’s unfortunate.  It’s unfortunate especially for us Christians because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not a call to radical transformation.  In our Gospels Jesus more than anything else calls us to transformation.  He calls us to transform our hearts and minds.  He calls us to transform our lives.  Then he calls us to transform our world.  Jesus calls us to build the Kingdom of God.  He calls us to build it from the inside out, starting with a transformation of our hearts and ending with the Kingdom of God fully realized on earth.  That is transformation writ large, and Jesus calls us to do it.

In our two scripture readings this morning we have images of transformation.  In our story from Acts Lydia is transformed.  Her transformation is symbolized by her baptism, which comes after she accepts Paul’s teaching about Jesus Christ.  She brings the Apostle and his teaching into her home and into her life.  She is transformed.  Our reading from Revelation is an even clearer picture of transformation.  It is a vision of a world living in immediate, direct relationship with God and Jesus Christ.  In what Revelation calls the new Jerusalem there is no need, metaphorically speaking of course, of sun, moon, or lamp because everyone lives in the light of God, so close is God to all the people and all the nations.  Revelation gives us a vision of a world transformed from living apart from God to a world living intimately with God.  If that transformation were ever really to happen, the world would be a very different, a radically transformed, place indeed.

Jesus Christ calls us to transformation.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God even now when that Kingdom is so incompletely realized here on earth.  He calls us to live lives that reject violence, lift up the lowly, include the excluded, and live in tight communion with God.  He calls us to live the life of the Kingdom of God as if God’s Kingdom were already fully a reality among us.  He says the Kingdom is among us, and he calls to live the way of the Kingdom rather than the ways of the world.  In Christ we are in the world, but we are called to be of the Kingdom.  We are called to a new way of being that turns the world’s ways of being completely on their heads.  We are, in other words, called to radical transformation. 

We are called to radical transformation, and most of the time we say no.  Most of the time the thought of changing nearly everything about the way we live is too uncomfortable.  It is too scary.  We think we’d lose too much.  Most of us here are pretty satisfied with our lives the way they are.  We’ve accepted the way the world is.  We support candidates who take our country to war and spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world put together.  We don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that benefit people we don’t know.  We consume at a higher level than any other people in the world, eating up much more than our fair share of the world’s resources.  We like all of those things.  We don’t want to change them.  We so don’t want to change them that we mostly don’t even hear Jesus’ call to us to change them.  We think he’s talking about how we get to heaven, not about how God wants us to live on earth.  He isn’t, or at least he isn’t primarily.  The Kingdom of God that he proclaimed is not an earthly kingdom, but it is on the earth not in heaven; and God calls us to the transformation that is necessary to make it an earthly reality.

Ringo will get used to his new home.  I think he will be very happy in his new home.  It’ll take some time, but he’ll get there.  Will we ever get used to the new home to which God calls us?  Will we ever truly become Kingdom people in the midst of the world?  I’m afraid that’s a lot less likely than Ringo coming to like living with Jane and me.  We humans are a lot more resistant to transformation than dogs are.  We’re so good at thinking up all the reasons why we can’t and don’t have to follow God’s call.  What we think are reasons are however really only excuses, and God’s call is still there.  It still pains God that we respond to it so weakly.  We are called to transformation.  Do we hear?  Will we follow?  Amen.