Good Out of Bad

Good Out of Bad

For Prospect UCC, Seattle

August 23, 2020

We aren’t exactly living in the best of times, are we. I mean, just consider how your church and so many others are doing worship these days. Somehow on line not in person. I’m grateful of course that we have the internet and can do worship this way. Back I the days before computers we probably wouldn’t be doing worship at all except maybe by radio, and there aren’t many radio preachers that I’d much care t listen to. There’s a pandemic going on. In our country alone over five million people have been infected by what they call a novel coronavirus that produces a disease syndrome called COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died from it. Worldwide over twenty-three million people have been infected and over 800,000 have died. We’re not worshiping together in person because the state has told us not to but more fundamentally because we don’t want to spread the coronavirus among us. Of course the problem isn’t just that we can’t worship in person, though if you’re like me you certainly miss worshiping in person. We’re all staying isolated as much as we can. I haven’t seen my kids or grand-kids for over five months and may not see them for another year or more except on screen. Of course, I know that that is a small loss compared to the loss of those who have had loved ones die from COVID-19, but still. All of our lives have been disrupted, and they’re going to stay disrupted for quite a while yet.

The pandemic has also disrupted our economy. Tens of millions of Americans are now unemployed. An unknown but large number of small businesses have closed, many of them never to reopen. State governments, our own included, have lost so much revenue from loss of sales and other taxes that drastic cuts in services are inevitable. A great many Americans are facing eviction or foreclosure and may end up homeless. Grocery stores run short on items that used to be readily available. All in all the world today is in appallingly bad shape—and I won’t even mention our country’s political condition.

Here’s the thing though. God has surprising ways of bringing good out of bad. Take the story of Joseph that we just heard. He’s one of the twelve sons of Jacob. In parts of his story we didn’t hear this morning he’s an arrogant jerk toward his brothers. He tells them of dreams he’s had that suggest that though he’s one of the younger sons he will somehow lord it over the others. So they decide to kill him. Now, killing your brother, or anyone else for that matter, is a very bad thing, although Josephs’ brothers’ decision to kill him is at least somewhat understandable if not excusable given the way he had behaved toward them. On of them Reuben, convinces the others not to kill him right off but to throw him into a dry pit. Reuben, we’re told, intends to return later to rescue him. Then some passing traders come by. The brothers haul Joseph out of the pit and sell him into slavery. He ends up a slave in Egypt.

Yet somehow some good comes out of these evil actions by Joseph’s brothers. In another part of the story we didn’t hear he ends up in the house of pharaoh, where he becomes so powerful that he is essentially ruling Egypt. He predicts years of famine to come. Joseph stores up huge reserves of grain to get the people through the years of hunger that lie ahead. I once heard some Republican politician, Herman Cain if I recall correctly, say that the great pyramids of Egypt were Joseph’s grain elevators. Really. Go figure.

Famine strikes back in Canaan where Joseph came from too. His brothers come to Egypt to find food. They end up appearing before Joseph. As far as they know he’s just this guy who rules Egypt for pharaoh. It’s when Joseph’s brothers appear before him that the story gets relevant for us. Joseph, who of course recognizes his brothers though they don’t recognize him, tells his brothers who he really is. He says:

I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life….So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

The brothers send for their father Jacob back in Canaan, he comes to Egypt, everyone gets fed, and they all live happily ever after, more or less. Something good came out of Joseph’s brothers’ murderous treachery. The good thing that came out of the brother’s treachery is that the family of Jacob is saved from famine, so the salvation history of Israel continues as God had promised.

Now, that’s a nice Hollywood ending, but there’s a big problem here. Joseph attributes his brothers’ treachery to God. He says: “So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” God brought me here to preserve life, he says. Now, I certainly know that it’s true that God can and does bring good out of bad. That has happened for me in my personal life. Perhaps it has happened for you too. The problem here isn’t that something good came out of something bad. The problem is that in the way Joseph interprets his story God is at best a slave trader who causes something horrific to happen so that something good can come out of it. And I just don’t think so.

God can bring good out of bad, but God doesn’t cause bad so that good can come out of it. The God we know as love in Christ Jesus would never do such a thing. God hasn’t caused the pandemic we’re suffering through. God isn’t punishing us with it. God isn’t using the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and economic collapse just so God can bring something good out of it. God just doesn’t do things like that. God didn’t sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt the way this story says God did. God would never do such a thing. Yet something good did come out of the very bad thing that happened to Joseph. His family was saved from famine. Good really can come out of evil.

So this morning I want to ask: Can anything good come out of this God-awful pandemic we’re living through? I sure understand if it doesn’t seem to you that it possibly could. If you’re like me you’re sure not experiencing the pandemic as something good, and the statistics tells us that it is indeed something very bad for a great many people. Yet if good can come out of murderous treachery the way it does in the story of Joseph, perhaps we can hope that something good can come out the way this coronavirus has turned the world upside down. God hasn’t caused the pandemic, but just maybe with God’s help we can bring something good out of it. So I invite each of you, as I have invited myself, seriously and prayerfully to consider what good could possibly come out of our present troubles for you, your family, our nation and God’s world. And I’ll share with you just a few thoughts I’ve had on the subject.

It seems to me that the most important good thing that can come out of this pandemic is a chance for us individually and as a nation to think anew about what really matters. We, or at least many of us, have had to give up so much. In person retail shopping except for necessities, and maybe not even for them. Going out for a meal at a restaurant. Perhaps working in an office or other place of employment and either working from home or not working at all. Seeing friends and family in person. Road trips. In person worship. Many of us have given up so many of the things that used to occupy our time. We could I suppose just sit around and mope about that, but we could also consider that we now have an opportunity to consider our lives in ways we, or at least I, don’t often do in normal times.

So I invite you this morning to consider what really matters to you personally. Spiritually. Economically. For your family. For the church. For us as a country. For God’s world. For any other parts of life that you can think of. Do we really need to be doing all the things we used to do? Does our country look the same to you today as it did six months ago? Or can you see failings that have become more clear so that may now we could do something about them? Things like the failure of our medical system to cover everyone? The extent of Americans’ anti-intellectualism that leads them to deny the scientists and think that their uninformed opinions are as valid as those of real experts? Does the role of the federal government look different to you today than it used to given its evident failure to deal with the pandemic in a constructive way? What does doing church electronically tell you about church? Does the church building seem as important to you as it used to? Are there other ways in which you can see the church changing because of what we’ve learned these past months and will learn before this pandemic is over?

I’ll leave it at that for now, but please take some time to consider these aspects of life. We will, with God’s help, come out of this pandemic. But we have the chance, again with God’s help, to come out of it better than we were going into it. May it be so. Amen.

The Demons Within

The Demons Within

©Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2020. All rights reserved.

I’ve written here before about the Bible story of Jesus’ exorcism of the demon named Legion from a man who lived in the tombs and whom no one could control. You’ll find it at Mark 5:1-20. Recently I have been working on revising and reissuing my book Liberating Christianity. As part of that work I started writing about that story again. I’m going to post what I wrote here because I think what I wrote is really important. I have thought for a long time that this story is key to understanding both Jesus and how God wants us to live in the world. The more I think about it the more convinced do I become that that is true. So here for what it’s worth are my latest meditations on that story.

Jesus’ teachings are radically political. They are in fact nonviolently revolutionary. Jesus wanted to transform the world in a radical way, but he wanted to do it in a radical new way too. He wanted to bring about the realm of God with its peace and justice not through violent revolution but through the radical transformation of individual hearts and minds one person at a time. We see that intent of his in this exorcism story that is little known and less understood. We need to see it as central to Jesus’ message of the realm of God. It is usually called “the healing of the Gerasene Demoniac.” I call it “the exorcism of the demon named Legion.” It goes like this.

Jesus and his disciples have been crossing the Sea of Galilee after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. A storm came up as they were out on the water that threatened to sink them. Jesus calmed the storm. They reached the other side of the lake in a place called the country of the Gerasenes. A man from the tombs with what the text calls an unclean spirit meets them. Here’s how the text described him:

He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. Mark 5:3-5.

He must have been quite the frightful sight. As Jesus comes ashore this man runs up to him and bows down before him. It seems the evil spirit within him recognized the superior divine spirit of Jesus, for as soon as Jesus called the unclean spirit out of the man that man shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” I want to ask if unclean spirits really use obscure words like “adjure,” but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Then Jesus does something unexpected. He asks the demon, “What is your name?” Mark 5:9a. Two things strike me as odd about that question. First, wouldn’t Jesus already have known the demon’s name? The demon knew his. Second, what difference could the demon’s name possibly make? Well, it turns out that the demon’s name makes all the difference in the world for the meaning of this story. The demon, still possessing the poor man, says, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” We’ll turn to the significance of that name anon. It seems there was a herd of pigs feeding on a nearby hillside. There wouldn’t have been any pigs in Israel, but recall that Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee. They are on the eastern, Gentile side of the lake. The many unclean spirits possessing the man beg Jesus to let them enter the pigs. Jesus gives them permission to do so. “And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.” Mark 5:13. A couple of verses later we’re told that the people of the region found the man whom Legion had possessed “sitting there, clothed, and in his right mind.” Mark 5:25.

This might be just another story of Jesus exorcising an evil spirit but for one thing. In this story the demon has a name. Usually demons don’t, but this one does. This demon’s name is Legion. Now the word legion has come to mean just a large number of something. In the Roman Empire, however, the word had a much more specific meaning. A legion was the major organizational unit of the Roman army. It was roughly the equivalent of a modern American army division. The size of a legion varied, and they weren’t always fully manned, but every legion consisted of at least several thousand men. The possessed man in this story was possessed by at least two thousand demons, as we see in the number of pigs the story says were on the nearby hillside that the demons entered. Together their name is Legion. When Jesus exorcised Legion out of the man he returned to his normal, healthy state.

What does this story tell us about Jesus’ program? There is no doubt that Jesus preached radical social transformation. Yet Jesus never called for violence against the oppressive, occupying Romans. This story tells us what he did call for. In the world of the possessed man Rome was out there in the world to be sure. Rome was everywhere. Rome used violence against any perceived opponent. Rome taxed the people into abject poverty. Under the Romans the economic elite prospered and everyone else suffered. That was the possessed man’s external world.

Rome was out there, but that wasn’t this man’s problem, or at least it wasn’t his primary problem. His primary problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, his primary problem was the Rome was in here. We must understand that the fact that the possessing demon was named Legion tells us that this man had internalized Rome. He had taken the violent, unjust ways of Rome into the heart, into his soul. The Legion inside made him behave like Rome outside. He was violent. No one could control him. Rome was violent. No one in the Mediterranean world could control it. No one could stop it. To the Jews the Romans were impure Gentiles. The possessed man lived in the tombs. To the Jews tombs were impure. Everyone who heard this story in first century Israel knew what a legion was. They’d immediately associate the demon in this story with the oppressive Romans.

So what does Jesus do to help the unfortunate man who had internalized Rome? He didn’t try to control him by force. Instead he exorcised unclean Rome out of the man. The unclean demons entered unclean pigs, who rushed into the lake and drowned. I worry some about whoever it was who owned the pigs. He just lost a valuable asset. That wouldn’t have been the reaction of the first century audience for this story. They would have howled with glee. They dreamed of rising up and driving the Romans into the sea. In this story the unclean Romans inside the unclean pigs got themselves into the sea, where they drowned.

What do we learn from this story? We learn that transformation of the world begins with internal transformation of the individual. Yes, Rome out there in the world was a big problem for people in Jesus’ world. Jesus knew that, but he also knew that violence wasn’t the answer. Violence against Rome was worse than pointless, as violence usually is. The Jews couldn’t defeat Rome militarily, and it was suicide to try. More fundamentally Jesus knew that violence was not the proper response to Rome because he knew that God is radically nonviolent. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence because nonviolence is the way of God.

Jesus knew that Rome was a problem out there, but the story of the demon named Legion tells us metaphorically that all of us who live in worldly empires, or for that matter who just live in the world, have a more profound problem Our true problem isn’t that empire is out there. Our true problem is that empire is in here. We have internalized the ways of the world. We have made the world’s ways of violence and injustice our ways. We are willing to fight and kill when our nation tells us to. Even if we claim to stand for justice we white Americans benefit every day of our lives from our country’s system of white supremacy and institutional racism. We consume a wildly disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources and rarely if ever give the matter a single thought. We pollute the air and warm the earth with our big, gas-guzzling cars and can’t imagine being without them. Even those of us who say we condemn the ways of empire have made the ways of empire our own. We have adopted them as our own. We have taken them into our minds, hearts, and souls. They have distorted our lives, debasing them from the life God intends for us into a demonic way of life that perpetuates the worldly ways Jesus came to transform. In our Bible story here the man from the tombs was possessed by a demon named Legion. That man is us.

Of course, our demon isn’t named Legion. It is named Uncle Sam. It  is named mammon. It is named success and prestige. It is named American First. It is named military might and the claimed right to police the world for our own benefit. It is named institutional racism. It is named American exceptionalism. It’s named massive economic inequality between the enormously wealthy few and the impoverished many. It is named homelessness and lack of medical care. It is named environmental irresponsibility. No, our demons aren’t named Legion, but we’ve got more than our share of internalized demons every bit as demonic as Legion is in the Bible story we’ve been considering.

Jesus exorcised Legion out of the Gerasene demoniac. He wants to exorcise our demons out of us too. Or rather, he wants to help us exorcise those demons ourselves. Many of us want to transform our world even in some quite radical ways. Jesus does too, but he knows what so many of us don’t. We don’t start to transform the world by attacking the world. The world has a nasty habit of attacking back. We don’t start by changing things out there. We start by changing things in here. In our minds, hearts, and souls. We do that relying on Jesus to help us and guide us, for we surely can’t do it alone. That’s the lesson we learn from the story of Jesus exorcising the demon named Legion.

Fascist police tactics

This is the text of a letter I sent to the Everett Herald, a local newspaper in my area:

The Trump administration is using fascist police tactics in Portland. Federal officers with no identification and using unmarked vehicles are arresting people on the streets of Portland without probable cause to believe that those people have committed any crime. They are using violence against peaceful demonstrators. Neither the City of Portland nor the State of Oregon has asked them to be there and both have in fact told them to leave. The State of Oregon has brought suit against the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to force them out. At first these unidentified federal troops may have been called in to protect federal property, but that is not what they are doing now. I never thought I would see federal officers acting like Mussolini’s black shirts or Hitler’s brown shirts, but that’s what these armed but unidentified men are doing. Every last American should be as angry about what is happening as they can be. We should all be afraid of the Trump administration turning America into a fascist state. We can vote Trump out of office in November. If we don’t I hate to think what my country will look like four years later. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be America.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

It's Not About Heaven and Hell

It’s Not about Heaven and Hell

Psalm 30:9

We all know what Christianity is about, don’t we? It’s about saving your soul from hell, from an eternity of fiery agony because you’re such a bad person. It’s about accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior so your soul will spend a blissful eternity inside those pearly gates walking those golden streets. (Just who would use gold to pave streets escapes me, but never mind.) There is no doubt that that is what Christianity came to be mostly about. Catholics and Protestants may give slightly different answers to the question of how we avoid hell and gain heaven, but avoiding hell and gaining heaven is what both varieties of Christianity are about, right? So for that matter is the third big variety of Christianity, eastern Orthodox Christianity. Ask almost anyone at all familiar with Christianity today and they’ll say right, that’s what Christianity is about.

The critics of Christianity, the nonbelievers, mock Christians for their conviction that their faith is about heaven and hell. All your superstitions are about is an expected afterlife, they say. You’re scared of hell. Your faith is grounded in fear of a vengeful God who’s going to let you have it after you die because you’re such terrible people! You believe, or pretend to believe, just because you’re scared. What the hell kind of faith is that? You don’t even know for sure that there is an afterlife or that heaven and hell are real. Stop living in fear! That’s no way to live, but it’s all your precious Christianity is about. Get over it!

Many of us know that gaining heaven and avoiding hell really isn’t what Christianity is about at all, but it’s easy to see how a great many people, both Christians inside the churches and people outside them, can believe that faith is indeed grounded in fear about an afterlife. Since at least the fourth century CE when Christianity became the established state religion of the Roman Empire the official voices of the faith have diverted people’s attention away from worldly issues of peace and justice toward an afterlife the nature of which depends on what you did or didn’t do in this life. They’ve told people you have to believe what we tell you to believe, do what we tell you to do, and not do what we tell you not to do or else, as the Gospel of Matthew says in a few places, you’ll be cast into a furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For centuries the most visible forms of Christianity have indeed been grounded in fear.

Yet fear of eternal suffering isn’t at all what Jesus was about. It isn’t at all what Christianity was originally about either. One good way to see that that isn’t what the faith was about is to consider the understanding of an afterlife in Christianity’s mother faith, ancient Judaism. Ancient Judaism had an understanding of sorts of an afterlife, but it didn’t include any notion of heaven and hell. We see what that great faith thought about the afterlife at Psalms 30:9. In that verse the psalmist says to God:

 

‘What profit is there in my death,

     if I go down to the Pit?

Will the dust praise you?

     Will it tell of your faithfulness?

 

“The Pit.” Sometimes the texts call it Sheol. In ancient Jewish faith it was everyone’s fate after death. It is a sort of shadowy place of pseudo-existence. It isn’t complete nonbeing. It isn’t quite nothingness, but it isn’t really life either. There is no judgment in it. It’s where everyone goes. Whatever form we may have there, we can’t actually do anything. Most of all we can’t praise God. The psalmist of Psalm 30 pleads with God to save his life so that he can continue to praise God, something he won’t be able to do after death.

Christianity developed out of a faith with that conception of the afterlife. In that way of thinking there is nothing we need to do to secure a blissful afterlife nor anything we must do to avoid a tortuous one. In Christianity’s mother faith life wasn’t about an afterlife at all. The righteous weren’t better off after death than were the unrighteous. In some ancient Jewish thought there was the idea that the righteous are rewarded and the unrighteous punished, but that reward and that punishment happened in this life not in some next life. See for example Deuteronomy 30:15-20. Christianity’s faith of origin had no conception of post-death judgment with heaven or hell as a consequence of how one had lived life on earth. Original Christianity didn’t either, or at least gaining heaven and avoiding hell was not its principal focus. Living the way God wants us to was the faith’s primary focus, but the purpose of living right wasn’t to avoid hell. Christianity originally called us to proper living not to gain heaven but as a faithful response to God’s grace.

So where did the Christian focus on gaining heaven and avoiding hell that we’re all so familiar with come from? It was a consequence of the establishment of the faith as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. When we focus on this life the way Jesus calls us to we are primarily concerned with peace and with economic justice for the poor. Empires ancient and modern (whether they call themselves empires or not) don’t like people being primarily concerned with those things. They don’t like it when people condemn their violence and call them to the ways of peace. Empires ancient and modern are based upon a radical inequality of wealth. They benefit a wealthy few at the expense of the masses of people all or most of whom are poor. Empires don’t like it when people demand justice for the disadvantaged the way Jesus did. Empires ancient and modern have no use at all for Jesus’ social and economic teachings.

In the fourth century CE the Christian church became the official church of the Roman Empire. The church reveled in its newfound lofty position of power and wealth. It sure didn’t want anyone annoying the emperor and his minions by condemning violence and demanding economic justice. So it began to tell people not to worry too much about those things beyond perhaps doing charity as a response to people’s need. Worry instead about the eternal fate of your soul after this life. Focus on gaining heaven and avoiding hell. It told people they did that by believing the right things and living the right way, but living the right way became a purely personal matter. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t lie or cheat others. Do what the church tells you to do. Do what the emperor tells you to do and don’t worry about whether that is moral or not. The churchmen said God had established the Christian empire, so to obey the empire is to obey God. What the empire is actually doing is not your concern. Read Romans 13:1-7 they said, and be obedient. Don’t try to end suffering in this life. Worry about eternal suffering in the next one.

Now, it is true that a promise of a blissful life in heaven after death can be a powerful message of comfort and hope for people who are doing nothing but suffer in this life. We mustn’t deny the power of that message for many people. Yet if grace is truly grace (and it is) that blissful afterlife isn’t anything we need worry about. It is God’s free gift for everyone. We need not live in fear of hell. Pope Paul VI said that he believed that hell is real but he wasn’t sure anyone was in it. Many of us Christians today go one step further and say hell isn’t even real. Beyond that we know that heaven and hell were not what Jesus was mostly about. He called us to live the values of the kingdom of God in this life to be sure, but he didn’t do that so we could gain heaven. We do it just to be faithful to the God who loves each and every one of us unconditionally. Yes, Matthew sometimes speaks about people being thrown into a furnace of fire or an outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, but nearly no one else in the New Testament talks that way. Jesus surely didn’t. Christianity really is mostly about peace and justice in this life not about heaven and hell in a next one.

So don’t let the cynics harm your faith. Christianity isn’t about heaven and hell. Don’t live in fear of a judgmental and vengeful God the way so many Christian preachers want you to. God isn’t judgmental or vengeful. God is love as 1 John says. God is infinite grace, infinite forgiveness. Our faith isn’t about heaven and hell. So let’s get on with living the kingdom life to which God calls us, and let’s do it not because we’re afraid but because we’re responding to love with love. May it be so.

Why Do We?

Why Do We?

July 14, 2020

It’s one of my favorite passages in the Bible, although for some reason it startles me every time I read it:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,

       come to the waters;

       and you that have no money,

              come, buy and eat!

Come buy wine and milk

       without money and without

              price.

Why do you spend your money

              for that which is not bread,

       and your labor for that which

              does not satisfy? Isaiah 55:1-2a.

Those profound words come to us from the mid-sixth century BCE, over twenty-five hundred years ago from an otherwise unknown prophet scholars call Second Isaiah, yet they sound like they could have come from some wise sage only yesterday. They originally spoke to ancient Hebrew people in forced exile and captivity in Babylon, but they speak to us today as powerfully as they did to those people so very long ago. They speak to what used to be a major issue in my life. They speak to what is a major issue in the life of my country. When I think back on my life, in particular my work life, I see that I have lived most of my life spending my labor for that which does not satisfy. I won’t go into all of the details, and I don’t say any of this because I think anyone who doesn’t know it needs to know it. I’ll share a bit of my story here because I think it is a good illustration of that major issue in the life of my country.

I  have trained professionally for three careers in my life although I’ve only practiced two of them to any meaningful extent. My first intended career was in academics. I earned a PhD in Russian history at the University of Washington under the supervision of one of the top scholars in the field. I don’t know whether a career in academics, following in my father’s footsteps as a history professor, would have satisfied my psychologically or spiritually or not. When I got my PhD in 1977 there were no real jobs available for historians of imperial Russia. Well, there were two. I applied for both and got neither. Clearly I had to find other work.

So I went to law school. I practiced law from 1981 until 2003, with the last year of that time overlapping with my next career. I’ll spare you all the gory details. I’ll just say that at first I loved it. I remember walking through downtown Seattle as a newly minted baby lawyer and finding it all so exciting I could hardly believe I was there. I worked for three different downtown law firms. I made partner at none of them, I was getting nowhere with downtown law firms, but I thought that was their mistake not mine. I still thought of myself as a lawyer. Looking back on those times I can see that I should have realized that I needed to be doing something else, but that thought never occurred to me at the time. So in 1992 I opened my own law office in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds. I set about trying to build a practice as the Law Office of Thomas C. Sorenson.

At first it went OK, partly because I got work from a couple of those downtown law firms I had worked for. All that began to change in 1994. I began having great difficulty doing the law work I had to do, and I didn’t know why. A Presbyterian minister I had gotten to know when he served as the interim minister of the United Church of Christ church I attended had also been a Jungian analyst. He gave me a book that described a kind of inner work called active imagination. You sit with some way to write, clear your mind, and ask yourself questions about whatever it is that is bothering you. For some reason you’re supposed to write down your questions and the answers you get. I tried it. Sitting in my law office I asked myself why I was having so much trouble doing my legal work. Immediately, with no time having passed in which I could have thought about an answer, the answer came booming out of my subconscious: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was shocked. What was it deep within me that was telling me I wasn’t a lawyer? Of course I was a lawyer. I was a member of the Washington State Bar Association, WSBA No. 11977. I was sitting in an office that said Law Office of Thomas C. Sorenson on the door. I had legal work in my file cabinet. Not a lot of legal work, but some. That voice from deep within me kept telling me I wasn’t a lawyer.

So I asked: “What am I?” Again the answer came booming back so fast I couldn’t possibly have created it consciously: “You’re a preacher!” I was shocked. Preacher wasn’t even a word I used. I belonged to a church and I had actually preached there once; but I called the ordained person there a minister or a pastor but not a preacher. It should have dawned on me right there and then that I was spending my labor for that which did not satisfy, although I doubt that I had ever read Isaiah at that point in my life. It didn’t dawn on me at all. I gave up and went back to trying to do my legal work, all without any noticeable success.

By early 1997 I had become essentially nonfunctional. My daughter, then in high school but already very wise, diagnosed me as clinically depressed, a diagnosis that a psychiatrist I then saw confirmed. I took antidepressant drugs and kept trying to practice law with ever diminishing success. In February, 1997 I started seeing a Jungian analyst that that Presbyterian minister I mentioned had recommended to me back in 1994. For reasons I’ll never understand I still had that analyst’s card in my wallet. I still have sessions with him today more than twenty years later. He knew what my problem was well before I did, and over the next few months he helped me see that my time as a lawyer was at an end. No matter what the difficulties might be I had to find something else to do with my life. Even as I started to realize that truth I said over and over again “You’re too old and you can’t afford it.” My analyst helped me realize that while those things may have been true they just didn’t matter.

I see now that my subconscious had been right back in 1994. I had a law degree. I’d even graduated in the top ten percent of my class. I had more than twenty years of legal experience. I had been a good, competent lawyer though never a great one. I didn’t have any other work I could do. I turned fifty in 1996, and I wasn’t making any money. All of that was true, but there was a deeper truth that I had been avoiding and resisting for years. Lawyering was for me work that did not satisfy. It did not satisfy because it clashed with who I really am. The result of my insisting on lawyering was total burnout and moderately severe clinical depression. I kept fantasizing about getting on my motorcycle, driving east until I ran out of gas, then just sitting there until the end came. I had hit bottom both personally and as a lawyer.

I closed my law office at the end of July, 1997, and in September of that year I entered the Master of Divinity program at Seattle University. Not long after that I started the approval for ordination process in the United Church of Christ. I wasn’t sure why. I just knew I had to be there. My wife, sadly since deceased, asked me how I was going to pay for it. Private universities like Seattle U are very expensive. I said I didn’t know. I said I’d go into debt if I had to, and I did go into debt. I found halftime work as a lawyer in a legal services office in central Seattle defending low income tenants in eviction cases. That at last was law that at least on occasion satisfied because it was working with real people with real problems that sometimes I could actually help. In my time at Seattle U I discovered at long last who I really am. I stopped doing work that did not satisfy. In 2002 I began my third career, this time as a parish pastor in the United Church of Christ. I have grieved deeply the death of my first wife since then, but I haven’t been depressed. I even stopped taking antidepressant medication.

I’ll say again that I tell this story here not because I think anyone who doesn’t know it needs to know it but because I think it is a good example of one of the foundational dynamics of American life today. I burned out and became depressed because I insisted on doing work that my culture honored but that did not satisfy. My country suffers cultural clinical depression because so many of us live our lives spending our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. Here are some of the ways in which our dominant white American culture drives us to do it though we would be far healthier psychologically and spiritually if we didn’t.

For our entire lives advertising tells us that our only purpose for living is to buy products whether we need them or not so that other people can make money. We live in a consumer economy and a consumer culture in which personal value is measured more by net financial worth than by anything else. Our culture tells us from the moment we’re born that the highest good is to have the fattest bank account, the biggest house, and the most expensive car. Perhaps it is still more true for us men than it is for women, but we’re all told our whole lives that our goal in life is to “get ahead.” To get ahead means to rise up the hierarchy of whatever institution we work in be that institution commercial, professional, educational, military, or of any other sort. We feel pressure to “succeed” in whatever work we do even if that work is soul killing, as so much work in the modern economy is. Consume! Produce! Succeed! That’s the message we get from our culture from our first breath to our last. It is a message that kills the spirit and stunts the soul. It gets most of us doing work that simply does not satisfy.

As our culture asserts its materialistic values it deprecates spiritual values at the same time. Few of us attend church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious institution much any more except perhaps for weddings and funerals. Don’t waste your time in school studying literature, music art, history, or religion we’re told. Study science, not because you love science or because science can be a very good thing in its own right as we are all learning anew in this time of coronavirus pandemic but because it will help you get that job at which you will be so pressured to succeed. At university we’re told don’t major in history of English, major in business administration. Not because it will feed your soul (which it almost certainly will not) but because it is practical and will help you get a job of which your culture approves, namely one devoted to physical production and making money.

There are other ways in which we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. We glamorize the military and encourage young men and women to make a career there all the while not quite mentioning the fact that the purpose of the military is to kill people and destroy property. We make idols of entertainment and sports stars while failing to recognize that they do nothing constructive in their careers except provide a little amusement, the circuses part of our bread and circuses. We make idols of the super-wealthy and allow millions of our fellow Americans to go hungry, homeless, and without decent educations or medical care. None of these things truly satisfy. They all contribute to our cultural clinical depression.

There’s another way that our culture kills spirits that Isaiah didn’t mention but that is immensely destructive among us. We tell our selves lies and convince ourselves that they are true. We say tax cuts for the wealthy help everyone. They don’t, and it’s obvious that they don’t. They help the wealthy who don’t need help and dry up government resources for people who do need help. We say the American military exists to defend our freedom. It doesn’t, not primarily anyway. It exists to assert American power around the world, which is hardly the same thing as defending our freedom. We say we are the greatest nation on earth. We aren’t. Many other nations (starting close to home with our neighbor to the north) do a far better job than we do of caring for their people while still preserving the civil liberties that we think are unique to us when they aren’t. All of this kills souls and keeps a spirit-quashing system in place and in power. There are so many ways in which we Americans spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Some of us, not nearly enough but some, have broken away from work that does not satisfy and found work that does. I did it when I left the law and became an ordained Christian minister. Others have done it by becoming teachers or artists, leaders of charitable foundations or social justice organizations. Yes, we all have to earn a living, but we don’t have to kill our souls working to earn more than we need the way so many of us do. We don’t have live the lie that mere material success produces a worthwhile life. Of course we all need a certain level of physical wellbeing, but we don’t have to deny the spiritual aspects of life to get it. We can remember that a full, complete life is full spiritually not just materially. We can remember or discover for the first time that God is real and wants fullness of life for everyone. We can overcome our selfish egos and work for the wellbeing of others. We can pray. We can learn to appreciate the finer things of life—music, art, literature, knowledge, faith. There are so many ways in which we can be so much better satisfied than most of us are.

So I ask you what I long asked myself and what the great prophet Second Isaiah asked all of us so many centuries ago: Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy? There are no good answers to that question, only bad ones. Our nation wallows in ignorance, intolerance, hatred, and spiritual malaise. We do so because we keep spending our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. We don’t have to. Better lives can be had. All it takes is for us to wake up, to start buying bread not dust, to do work that truly satisfies the soul at the deepest levels. We don’t have to spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. So let’s all stop it, shall we?

Requiem For a Heavyweight

Requiem for a Heavyweight

On the Demise of the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry

In September, 1997, I enrolled in the Master of Divinity program of the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington (IETS of STM at SU). It was the beginning of the most transformative time of my life. I’d spent a lot of time in school before I got to SU. I already had a Ph.D. in history and J.D. What I didn’t know when I first entered STM at SU (we did use a lot of acronyms there) was just how transformative and how wonderful my time there would be. Seattle University is a Jesuit university, thoroughly Roman Catholic and more specifically Jesuit in its approach to education and to life. Just a couple of months before I enrolled the SU School of Theology and Ministry had created the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies. STM had offered a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree for some time by September, 1997. The School had worked with representatives of several Protestant denominations, including my United Church of Christ, to design a way for Protestant students to earn that fully accredited degree at Seattle University. The Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies was the result. It officially opened on July 1, 1997. It was a radical, even revolutionary thing for Seattle University to do. A Jesuit university was going to be educating Protestant students and forming them for ministry in a range of Protestant denominations. It was unprecedented. As far as I know it still is.

My experience at STM wasn’t perfect. It was after all human, and nothing human is perfect. It was however beyond wonderful. When I started I wasn’t even entirely sure why I was there. I just knew I had to be. I remember seeing that the M.Div. degree required two years of field internship. I nearly decided not to go. I couldn’t possibly imagine actually arranging such a thing, but I did. The student body at STM was about half Catholic and half some sort of Protestant. Most of the professors were Catholic, with one major exception. Many of them were wonderful. Father Mike Raschko, Ph.D. was the one from whom I took the most classes, six of them as I recall. Father Raschko is brilliant. He did a wonderful job of combining deep theological thought with a pastoral emphasis. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and while he taught at STM he also served part-time as a Catholic parish priest. Father Jim Eblen was another great one. Like Father Raschko Father Eblen is a Catholic parish priest. He knows Hebrew scripture backwards and forwards, inside and out. I learned Christian sexuality from a priest and a nun who are a couple in every way except sexually. There were a couple of clunkers. A class called Group Dynamics was a total waste of time and money, and I did a lousy job of concealing my disdain for it.

Then there was MTI, a class called Ministerial and Theological Integration. It was the class that went together with the students’ first year of field work. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the name of the woman who led my section of it, but the field work program at STM was designed and led by The Rev. Dr. Richard Cunningham. Dick is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and he put together a field work program that surpasses by orders of magnitude any other I’ve heard of anywhere in the country. I’ve always called MTI the class where they cut you open, spread your guts all over the table, and put you back together as a pastor. The class that goes with the second year of field work was called Supervision. I took it from Dick Cunningham himself. I can’t tell you how many times he told me to get out of my head and show some heart. He was right. Years later, at a clergy retreat at the local UCC camp and convention center, I got talking with a woman who told me that earlier in her career she had directed the field work program at Yale. She described it to me. I hope I didn’t show it, but internally I was just shouting NO! What she described was nothing but head work. It didn’t sound like the program focused on how students actually function in ministry at all. Dick’s program at SU certainly didn’t have that problem. It was all practical. It was all integrating the student’s theological learning with practical ministry. It was mostly because of Dick’s program that the first day I walked into the church office as pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ I knew I was already a better minister than I had been ever a lawyer, my previous profession.

At STM I learned the power of listening. One of the required courses was called Pastoral Helping Skills. I remember it as a class on active listening. I learned in that class and even more so in my work as a parish pastor just how powerful actually listening to a person can be for that person. Perhaps the most important pastoral work a minister can do is to let her or his people know that the pastor will listen to them. Listen deeply. Listen not to formulate a response but simply to understand the person to whom you’re listening. My ability to do that was a gift of STM.

My fellow students were as important as the faculty in the transformation I underwent at STM. They came from a dozen or more Protestant denominations as well as the Roman Catholic Church. I learned from my interactions with them how everyone has a personal story that shapes who they are and what they are dealing with. I learned that the Catholic students didn’t know the Bible as well as the Protestant students did, but I also learned that it didn’t matter. They were wonderful people of faith both deeply committed to their Mother Church and struggling with some of its aspects. On a couple of occasions I sat with wonderful Catholic women who were in tears because they so strongly felt that the Holy Spirit was calling them to the full range of parish ministry, and their church would never let them do it. Among my classmates were Roman Catholic priests and nuns from around the world. One priest from The Philippines told a powerful story of standing up to Ferdinand Marco’s tanks along with his parishioners. My fellow students enriched my STM experience immensely.

Now, while STM is not shutting down entirely, it is drastically curtailing its offerings. The M.Div. program has been suspended. The school may do something to help current M.Div. students complete their degrees, or perhaps not. I frankly do not expect STM to survive for long under current circumstances. Seattle University as a whole faces an enormous budget deficit. Apparently enrollment at STM has declined to the point where tuition does not cover the school’s expenses. I understand that the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the ELCA Lutherans have withdrawn their support of IETS. STM will not function again the way it did when I was a student there twenty and more years ago. I find that reality to be tremendously sad.

The demise of STM is part of a larger, nationwide decline in seminary education. Many seminaries have closed. In my UCC the seminaries in Maine, Connecticut, and Missouri are closed or nearly so. My UCC Conference Minister Rev. Mike Denton says that Chicago Theological Seminary is the most viable of the remaining seminaries because it has cooperative agreements with several other universities in the Chicago area and because it does a lot of its teaching online with students around the world. Not many seminaries will be able to set up anything like that to keep them afloat.

The drastic decline of the seminaries echoes the drastic decline of the mainline denominations generally. The churches we used to call mainline have been losing members and member churches for decades now. There is no reason to believe that that trend will change any time soon. In my UCC there are nowhere near as many fulltime ministry opportunities as there used to be. Newly minted Master of Divinity degree recipients must expect that any ministry position they find will not pay enough to support them and certainly not enough to support a family. I have thought for years that if anyone talked to me about going to seminary my first question to them would be “What else are you going to do to support yourself?” Most of us in one of the declining denominations find current developments in the church to be sad at best, but there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do about it.

So rest in peace STM. You enriched my life in more ways than I can recount. You prepared me for the last career of my life, the one in which my late wife said shortly before she died that I had become who I really am. I’m retired now, but the education I received at STM and the ministry STM prepared me for continue to enrich my life and I’m sure will continue to enrich my life for as long as that life may last. With the demise of STM we are losing an educational and ministerial heavyweight. Those of us who benefitted so much from her will never forget her. We pray for those whose lives are adversely affected by this loss—students, teachers, and staff. I don’t think they’ll find anything else like STM or like STM was. No such thing exists. Rest in peace STM. You were a bright light in my life and in the lives of so many others. We will never forget you.

It Doesn't Matter

It Doesn’t Matter

July 7, 2020

1 Samuel 15:1-3, 7-23

I have heard people say that they lost their belief in God and left the Christian faith because of one particular story in the Bible. It’s the story of God’s command to King Saul to kill every living thing among a people called the Amalekites. For no apparent reason the Amalekites had attacked the Hebrews during the Exodus at a place called Rephidim. The Hebrews fended off the attack. At some time that had to be at least a couple of centuries later Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, has the prophet Samuel tell King Saul that Yahweh would punish the Amalekites “for what they did in opposing Israel when they came up out of Egypt.” 1 Samuel 15:2. Yahweh has Samuel tell Saul to attack the Amalekites “and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” 1 Samuel 15:3. Saul attacks the Amalekites as directed. He defeats them, but he doesn’t quite do what Yahweh had told him to do. He takes Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive. He also spares the best of the Amalekite livestock. 1 Samuel 15:8-9. Yahweh is not pleased that Saul hasn’t quite done everything Yahweh had told him to do. He says to Samuel: “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me, and has not carried out my commands.” Samuel tells Saul: “The Lord [Yahweh] has torn  the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” 1 Samuel 15:28. Samuel then anoints David as king in Saul’s place.

I have indeed heard people say that they lost their faith in God and left the church because of this story. Why? Why would this story cause someone to lose their faith? It is of course a horrible story. In it God commands the complete destruction of the Amalekites because many, many years earlier their predecessors has attacked Israel in the wilderness. It would be bad enough if God had just ordered Saul to defeat the Amalekites militarily, but that’s not what God does in this story. God tells Saul to kill even the children and infants of the Amalekites. Saul apparently did kill every Amalekite person of any age, children and infants included, except the Amalekite king. He didn’t quite kill all the livestock either but kept the best of it, he says, to offer as a sacrifice to Yahweh. 1 Samuel 15:21. We would accuse Saul of the war crime of killing innocent noncombatants. Not so Yahweh. Not in this story. Yahweh is so mad at Saul that he deposes him as king of Israel. It is a truly horrid story indeed.

OK, but why would it cause anyone to lose their faith? It’s just an ancient story, isn’t it? Well, yes it is. The problem however is that the Christian church has told people for a very long time that it and every other story in the Bible is more than that. The church has told people that the Bible isn’t just another book. It has called the Bible “the Word of God,” never mind that the Bible says that Jesus, not the Bible, is the Word of God. The church has told people that if the Bible says it happened then in fact it did happen just the way Bible says it did. So people read the story of Saul and the Amalekites and accept the story as historically accurate. If the Bible says God told Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites, even children and infants, then God did tell Saul to do that horrible thing, and we must accept that God did that horrible thing. These people who read the story that way and lose their faith because of it are quite properly repulsed by it. They can’t believe in a God who would order such a crime against humanity. They can’t believe that there is any truth in a religion whose God would command anyone to commit such an atrocity. So they give up on God. They give up on Christianity. They lose their faith altogether.

I can’t believe in a God who would do such a thing either. I certainly wouldn’t be an ordained minister of a faith whose God would do such a thing. Yet I do believe in God, and I am ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ. How is that possible? It’s possible because I don’t believe that God ever has or ever would tell anyone to kill anyone else. The God I know, love, and seek to serve never told Saul to kill one single Amalekite much less all of them. The Bible says God did. God didn’t.

Many Christians would find it shocking, or even blasphemy, to hear an ordained Christian minister say such a thing. In order for me to say it I have to have developed an understanding of the Bible different from the common one that says that everything in the Bible is a product of divine inspiration and therefore is and must be factually true. I have such a different understanding of the Bible. I developed in my book Liberating the Bible.[1] I explain there that belief that God wrote the Bible or that everything in it was inspired by the Holy Spirit will not survive even a modest scrutiny of what is actually in the Bible. The book is full of contradictions and impossible things the couldn’t possibly have  happened. There is no way to tell which parts of it are divinely inspired if it isn’t all divinely inspired. I won’t go into all of that here. If you’re puzzled or curious please read my book.

Here I will just give you my suggestion of how we can read the Bible without losing our faith. On the last page of Volume One of the book, in what I think is the best paragraph I’ve ever written, I say:

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on it. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same things. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God we with you in that work. Amen.[2]

Do you see how liberating that way of understanding the Bible is? There is, after all, a reason why I titled that book Liberating the Bible. When we approach the Bible this way we take everything in it seriously, but we don’t accept anything in it uncritically. We Christians at least ask of everything in it: Does this sound like Jesus? Does this story speak of God’s love and grace? If so we accept it and work with it to discern what it has to say to us and our world. If not we treat it as an historical record of ancient thought that just doesn’t ring true today.

Does the story of Saul and the Amalekites speak to us of God’s love and grace? Certainly not. The God of this story is vengeful and violent. The God we know in and through Jesus Christ is loving not vengeful, peaceful not violent. So let us relegate this story to the annals of the ancient past where it belongs. Some ancient Israelite author or storyteller thought God had told Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites. Perhaps he was simply trying to give a divine reason for something that had actually happened, or maybe not. We know how this story has come down to us over the centuries. We know what it says. Someone well over two thousand years ago understood God to be like the God of this story. We don’t. Someone many centuries ago thought that God had ordered King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites. It doesn’t matter. We can rest assured that our God of love and grace never did any such thing and never will. Thanks be to God!

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2018, Stop 11, pp. 193-211.

[2] Id. p. 211.