"THE ERA!!!"

“THE ERA!!!”

            Caroline, Susan, and I visited DC last week as part of our Baltimore/Shenandoah Valley/DC tour, which ended with Caroline and I doing a dialogue sermon on the Palestinian woman challenging Jesus in Matthew 15:21-28.  In our sermon we had referred to her as a Gentile woman (see my previous blog), and I am grateful for my long-time friend Ed Loring offering the suggestion to see her as Palestinian in these days, which she was.

            Though I have grown cynical and jaded in my old age (especially in these days of the Trumpster), I still do get a thrill by being on the Mall in DC.  Although we are so far short of the central idea of “equality” that is part of the heart of the American experiment, I still have some hope in the possibilities.  I have this hope because so many people, who were intended by the framers to be shut out of the circle of equality, have heard their names called and have responded, refusing to be defined by the white male heritage that continues to seek to shut them out.

            One of those places of equality, just off the Mall in DC, is the Belmont-Paul National Women’s Monument.  It is actually a house which commemorates and notes the work of the women and men who enabled the 19^th Amendment to pass in 1920.  Yesterday was the 98^th anniversary of the adoption of that amendment, and we give thanks for a legion of women who led the way.  It started almost from the European beginnings of this nation, and it was kick-started by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.  We had the blessing of visiting Seneca Falls in 2009, while Susan was living in Westfield, NY.  From Lucretia Mott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul to Ida Wells to Carrie Catt to Mary Church Terrell and many others, the Belmont-Paul house is a story of perseverance, ingenuity, and endurance in seeking to expand the idea of equality to include more than propertied white men.

            We were also reminded at the Belmont-Paul house that we are now just one state short of ratifying the ERA.  I thought that was over and done with (and defeated), but most scholars believe that, with Nevada and Illinois recently ratifying the ERA, there is just one state left.  Thirteen states have yet to ratify, and to no one’s surprise, nine of those states are in the old Confederate States of America (only Tennessee has ratified it out of the Confederacy, and they later rescinded it, but that doesn’t seem to count!)  The other four are Missouri (a slave state), Oklahoma, Utah and Arizona.  Of the states left to ratify the ERA, 77% of them held slaves, and it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see the intersection between holding people as slaves and oppressing women.   So, if you are like me and live in non-ratifying state, let’s get to work!  We hope that Stacey Abrams will be elected governor of Georgia, and that will be a help to many things, including the ratification of the ERA. 

            There were other signs of hope for us in these difficult days.  One was our visit with my “adoptive” father Gay Wilmore in DC. He will be 97 in December, and  he was sharp in our visit.  He was remembering many of the struggles to break the hold of neo-slavery in the old Confederacy and to obtain the right to vote for those of African descent in the USA.   That right is always under peril, as we saw last week in the attempt to close polling places in majority-black Randolph County in my state of Georgia.  We white men see the demographics coming, and we are taking measures to blunt them, with all kinds of schemes to limit the voting power of people of color.  We talked with Gay about that, and it was good to hear him urge us to work and stay strong, even in and especially these days where we have a President who wants to be king. 

            It’s on us now, and I’ll share more of our tour from the National Postal Museum to the National Portrait Gallery to the Museum of the American Indian to Charles Town but for now, be certain that you are registered to vote and that your friends, colleagues and neighbors do the same.  These monuments remind us of how difficult it is to break into the circle of equality and of how many white men are working to kick so many people out of that circle.  Let our lives be a litany of widening the circle, not shrinking it.

"SCARIER THAN THE WALKING DEAD: JESUS AS A HUMAN BEING!"

“SCARIER THAN THE WALKING DEAD:  JESUS AS A HUMAN BEING!”

            Those of us in the church spend a lot of energy seeking to deny the reality and the importance of the life of Jesus.  The idea of Jesus being a real, live human being frightens us deeply.  We prefer the Crucified and even the Resurrected Jesus to the living Jesus.  To paraphrase Clarence Jordan, one of the principal founders of Koinonia Community in south Georgia, we have thoroughly de-humanized Jesus.  In so doing we have done a much better job of getting rid of him and his message than the Crucifixion did. 

            There are two main reasons for our dismissing the humanity and the ministry of Jesus.  First, if the importance of Jesus is to be found in his Crucifixion and Resurrection, then we don’t have to worry about the ministry of his life or about his teachings and message.  Most especially we don’t have to worry about our lives and our actions.  It is the reason that attorney general Jeff Sessions, while claiming to be a Christian, could order the kidnapping of children from their parents.  He quoted the Bible on this, but he did not quote Jesus, because he could not justify his actions if he looked at the life and ministry of Jesus.  It is the reason that people can exploit others for greed while claiming to be Christians.  It is the reason that people claiming to be Christians could hold other people as slaves.  We so prefer that Jesus be the walking dead rather than being the walking live.  

            There is a second reason that we prefer to diminish or even deny the humanity of Jesus.   We don’t want Jesus to be a human being like us – we don’t want to believe in the idea of the incarnation, the idea that God and humanity are fused in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  We will go to just about any depth to prevent our having to consider that Jesus was a human being like us.  Caroline and I are doing a dialogue sermon this Sunday at Susan’s church in Baltimore, and we are using Matthew 15:21-28, where Jesus learns something about being a neighbor from a Gentile woman.  In this story, Jesus calls this woman a dog (wasn’t that image used again this week in the White House?).   This Gentile woman refuses to yield to this image, and in her engagement with Jesus, he learns more about her humanity and about his own.  When he begins the dialogue with her, he tells her that he can’t help her because he was sent only to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  But, she teaches him that they are neighbors, and that they belong in the same house.  By the end of the gospel of Matthew, he sends his disciples out, telling them to go to all people, not just to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I’d like to think that he learned this from the Gentile woman.

            When I preached on this passage at a Presbytery meeting in 1998, one church Session charged me with heresy because I indicated that Jesus was a human being by participating in the cultural prejudices that he received as a child.  There was shock and a big outcry over the idea that Jesus might really be a human being.   The heresy charge did not go very far because it became clear that those attacking me were actually committing heresy themselves by saying that Jesus had no humanity, that he was never prejudiced. 

            Who cares about all this theological turnings?  Those who are oppressed and dominated and marginalized – they care.  They care because the life and ministry of Jesus took him to the margins and indicated that God has a preference for those who are oppressed and exploited.   It’s why folk often talk about the black Jesus, using the term that indicates in American culture that Jesus was black.   “Blackness” here doesn’t refer to his skin color but rather to his economic status.  He was marginalized and oppressed, and his life and ministry were based there.  This theme runs all through his life – born out of wedlock on the streets, chased by government soldiers to be executed, fleeing as a refugee to Egypt (we’re glad that Sessions was not in power then), having no income, associating with people at the margins, challenging rich people to stop worshipping their money, and finally executed as a revolutionary.  Taking these themes seriously in our individual and communal lives would radically change everything, and it is why the living, human being Jesus scares the daylights out of us – we prefer him as the walking dead.

"DID JESUS REALLY LIVE?"

“DID JESUS REALLY LIVE?”

            For centuries, scholars have debated whether Jesus of Nazareth really lived.  There are very few sources outside the Biblical and extra-Biblical books that even name Jesus.  Some claim that the followers who lifted up his life and name actually made him up.  We can imagine that process happening in the internet world, but it seems highly unlikely in the pre-literate world.  Also, it seems unlikely that those who gave their lives for his name would have done so for a human creation.  So, it seems clear that Jesus of Nazareth lived and fired and inspired people with a vision of what it means to live in the vision of the Beloved Community of God.   There is much debate over the historical nature of his life and the “historical” truth of the Gospel accounts of his life and ministry.   Yet, the power of his life and ministry seem evident.

            The bigger threat to the meaning of the life and ministry of Jesus has not been the secular scholars but rather the theological tradition of the church, which has largely denied the meaning of the life and ministry of Jesus.  We have tended to emphasize the Crucifixion and the Resurrection over the life and ministry of Jesus.  Indeed, we have tended to emphasize the Cross over everything.  I have always been intrigued that the central symbol that church buildings emphasize to the world is not an empty tomb or a bowl for feeding the hungry, but rather the Cross, the Roman symbol for the death penalty.  Part of that emphasis is that the Cross turns that symbol upside down;  part of it is that the suffering of God in the Cross creates a solidarity with all those who are marginalized and oppressed and executed by the inhuman worldly systems.  Part of it is that the Roman Emperor Constantine melded the sword and the Cross into the symbol of the church. 

            The biggest theological reason for emphasizing the Cross and Resurrection is that it enables us to minimize the importance of human life and human history.   The Cross and Resurrection become guarantors of life after death, and that guarantee becomes the meaning of our lives.  The importance of human life becomes negligible if the meaning of life is to get into heaven when we die.  It is what enabled people who held other people as slaves to believe that we were following God’s will.  It is what enabled Jeff Sessions and so many other white, evangelical Christians to design and approve of the policy that separated children from their families at the borders.  It is what enables us to waste so much food while 20,000+ children die every day of starvation and malnutrition.  If the life and ministry of Jesus are not particularly important, then neither is human life and human history – it is all just part of the grand parade to the Second Coming, when the REAL Jesus will show up, the one brandishing the sword to destroy the evildoers.

            Part of the source of this issue is Paul’s letters, in which he rarely ever refers to the life and ministry of Jesus.  A larger part of it, however, is the continuing difficulties of the human heart – we want to have divine blessing for our inhumane ways and institutions.  So, in this week when we shudder to remember that we dropped two bombs in Japan in 1945 that killed over 100,000 people in an instant and many thousands more in a short amount of time, let us remember this cheapening of human life and its consequences. 

            And, let us work on seeking to recover the life and ministry of Jesus.  His life and ministry fired people up and gave them a new vision of what it meant to be alive.  Some of them left their jobs and sought to live in this new vision.  Some of the others shared what they had with others in need.  Some refused to believe in redemptive violence.  All began to hear that the center of life was not Rome or even the Temple but rather the God who was calling them into new vision in the life and ministry of Jesus.  Jesus was no educated seminary preacher, and he was not a member of the Roman Senate or even a Roman citizen.  He was a worker, and he was at the margins of life, oppressed by the Roman empire.  His life and ministry were not designed to help people get along in life, but rather a way to find life in the midst of violence, domination, and death.  As our friend Dr. Brian Wren once put it in one of his songs that he wrote for Oakhurst, “Jesus came to live!”  Let us find that life also!