Faithful Resistance

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Matthew 25:1-13; Luke 17:11-19

October 9, 2016

How many of you are familiar with Godwin’s Law? It’s the internet adage, coined in 1990 by American author Mike Godwin, that “as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1 in 1.”

It is the law that spawned my own internet serenity prayer, “God grant me the wisdom to avoid the comments.”

In this particular political season, Godwin’s Law has been proved over and over and over again – and, oh my, what a workout it’s getting this weekend. Both major parties, if you believe the comments – that you should never read – have nominated spawn of Hitler.

Sadly, such overheated rhetoric has become the norm in what passes for political discourse in the United States these days. The fact that we all recognize Godwin’s Law, whether or not we can name it, speaks volumes about the sorry state of our public conversation about anything that matters.

Indeed, when every conversation winds up in the same place – Nazi Germany – then none of the conversations can be taken seriously. Alas, most of our public conversations these days take place on the internet, and when the content of those conversations gets reduced, not to the least common denominator but, instead, to the most commonly named dictator, then we are getting dangerously close to becoming just like the five foolish bridesmaids: we’re wandering around in the darkness with no oil for our lamps, unable to see beyond our own narrow vision and thus completely unable to read the signs of the times.

When we have no light by which even to read then we cannot engage text or context, and thus we cannot even begin to grapple with the deadly serious questions of our time much less illuminate these questions for the broader community.

There’s talk in some theological circles about a “Bonhoeffer moment” presented by the circumstances of this fall’s presidential election. I believe that we are, in fact, in just such a moment, but I believe that most folks who are talking about it are blind to the depth of the chasm on whose brink we stand.

That is to say, I have been asked, specifically, if we are approaching or have arrived at a point when, as a matter of faith, one must oppose the candidacy of Donald Trump. Frankly, I believe that the challenge to the church in the United States is far deeper than any single candidate in any particular election. So, contrary to Godwin, I will have no truck with comparisons of Mr. Trump and Adolph Hitler.

When one speaks of a “Bonhoeffer moment” in Presbyterian circles, one turns immediately to the Theological Declaration of Barmen. Written in 1934, primarily by Bonhoefer’s friend and colleague, Karl Barth, Barmen declared that the so-called German Christian movement was fatally contaminated by Nazi ideology and had ceased to be faithful to the gospel. Through Barmen the confessing church declared that by following Nazi principles the German Christian church had ceased to be the church of Jesus Christ.

If we are at a Bonhoeffer moment for the church in the United States, the overt support from certain conservative evangelical pulpits for Donald Trump is but a symptom of a far deeper disease, and, more to the point, conservative evangelicals are not the only part of the church who suffer from it.

It’s appropriate that today’s lectionary includes one of the classic healing stories. I was going to say that we’re like the nine lepers who don’t bother to express gratitude, but actually, I fear that we in the church today don’t even know that we are sick. In our delusion, we don’t bother to cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Instead, we just shuffle merrily along not noticing that we are rotting away.

That may sound overly harsh. After all, we have a rich, vibrant, caring, and compassionate circle here. But we are just one small part of a much larger body. It doesn’t mean much to have a healthy pinky finger when your heart is failing.

Speaking just for the Presbyterian part of that larger body in the U.S., the last year the church actually gained more members than it lost I was eight years old. You could tell a similar tale for every single major part of the church in the United States, including the conservative evangelical part of it and the Roman Catholic part of it. The only difference in the stories of declining membership, finances, and social influence would be the dates that mark their respective beginnings.

Numbers are not the end-all and be-all, and membership and money were never part of Jesus’ ministry model. Nevertheless, such metrics are not meaningless. The challenge comes in understanding what they imperfectly point toward.

I believe that the vast decline in the U.S. church actually points toward a state of affairs that Jesus would have recognized quite well, and one that the brief text from Jeremiah can help us address.

The church in America is captive to American culture. A movement whose source lies in the explicitly anti-imperial project of Jesus has become captive to the American empire, and, as such, we have lost our voice. We have lost the capacity to speak an authentic critical voice condemning the none-too-subtle racism, sexism, and heterosexism of the Trump campaign because we have, historically, given the church’s blessing to precisely these attitudes that the gospel calls us to condemn.

We have lost the capacity to speak an authentic critical voice to the casual militarism of the Clinton campaign because we have ceased to read even our own confessions and ignore the words of the Confession of 1967, which explicitly demands of the church that we call upon the nations of the world – including our own – to “pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security.”

We have lost the capacity to speak an authentic critical voice because we have deceived ourselves into believing that the American Dream is somehow synonymous with the Kingdom of God, and that what passes for democracy in America bears some connection to God’s election. We deceive ourselves, and, as New York City AME pastor Andrew Wilkes wrote last week for Religion Dispatches:

American elections, as we can see so clearly this season, are exercises in deception. The prevailing frame of the ideal voter as middle class and the excessive attention given to our presidential candidates’ tax returns (or lack thereof) and Goldman Sachs speaking fees have obscured more pivotal realities on the other side of the asset and income scale: there is a class of citizens and residents who endure taxation without effective political representation.[1]

We suffer an imperial disease, and yet, like the citizens of Rome in Jesus’ time, we don’t know we are sick because we are so comfortable. At least, that is, until we are not.

I read the gospels, and it makes me uneasy. I read Jesus saying to Peter, “put down your sword,” and it makes me uncomfortable. I read Jesus saying, “sell all your possessions and give your money to the poor,” and it makes me uncomfortable. I read Jesus saying, over and over and over again, “follow me,” and it makes me uncomfortable.

It makes me uncomfortable because I am complicit, and deeply so. I am an incredibly privileged person. I stand in a lengthy line of college-educated white folks. My father’s father was a law-school graduate. My father’s mother was a college graduate who began her higher education career before women could vote in the United States. Oh, and her grandparents in Georgia owned slaves.

I’d like to believe that had nothing to do with my life, but then I read my own sacred texts calling for justice to roll down like a mighty water, and for good news that includes release for the captives and let the oppressed go free, and it makes me uncomfortable in my complicity.

You see, we have a history and that history has a claim on us even if we remain willfully blind to it. We live in the heart of a sprawling empire, yet we claim to follow the call of one whose very life was such a threat to the empire of his day that it put him to death on a cross. That should make us uncomfortable.

As Rick Ufford-Chase writes in the introduction to Faithful Resistance:

We are culture-bound: unable to see the ways in which we have twisted the meaning of our sacred text to justify our complicity in the Empire project. We are so caught up in all that it takes to survive in a globalized world, and so desperate in our search for meaning, that we miss the answers that are right in front of us in the sacred stories of God’s people who have struggled with similar questions across millennia.[2]

Jeremiah wrote to God’s people as they wrestled with their own relationship to an empire. They were captive to a culture that was foreign to them, to their identity as God’s people. Yet Jeremiah told them to build homes, plant gardens, raise families, and seek the welfare of the city where they were.

In other words, do not turn your back on the world nor even on the empire that has enslaved you. Instead, engage it. Live your lives where you are, and do so with the welfare of all in mind. Seek shalom – peace, right relationship, the well-being of those who live in the city where you are, for in their welfare lies your own, in their well-being lies your well-being.

But, as you build, as you sew and reap, as you pass along to the next generation, do so with another world in mind. As followers of Christ, our ultimate allegiance is not to the American empire nor to whomever we elect to lead it; our ultimate allegiance is to the one who calls us to build the Beloved Community.

We cannot build it well so long as we suffer the diseases of empire: racism, sexism, unbridled materialism, unquestioned militarism. These diseases rot away the body politic, yet it is not too late to cry out: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Our healing will not happen overnight. It will take generations, so we really ought to begin now.

Indeed, what we are building in this small part of the body is a beginning place, a small site of healing, and provisional glimpse at what shalom might look like.

When I experience even this small taste of healing, I hear a faint echo of a call and an invitation, and thus I return to this remnant of the church, this echo of Jesus’ call, if nothing else, to say “thank you.”

It is not much, but it is not nothing, for, as Henri Nouwen reminds us, gratitude is the fundamental attitude upon which all authentic religious expression rests. Gratitude, saying “thank you” pulls me out of myself as it draws me into a relationship with another upon whom I rely.

If I were to try to articulate an opposite to Godwin’s Law it would sound something like that because the project of gratitude takes one about as far from the totalitarianism of the Nazis as one can possible go.

So, here I am; here I pitch my tent; here I build; here I plant; and from here I cast my glance toward another world that remains, even now, still possible. Amen.

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[1] http://religiondispatches.org/doing-political-theology-in-an-election-season-howard-thurman-on-deception/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b428a9d501-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-b428a9d501-42411801

[2] Rick Ufford-Chase, Faithful Resistance, 12.