The Raven Foundation

I recently read an article by Ross Douthat that summarizes the thesis of his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and by the time I finished reading it I felt like the robot from the old TV show, Lost in Space, waving my arms wildly and shouting, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” As much as I usually admire and agree with Mr. Douthat’s columns, in this case I think he has completely misunderstood the cause of our current political polarization and the cure he offers is not only guilty of romanticizing the past but of promoting a dangerous religious unity.

Mr. Douthat says that since the 1950s we have witnessed a weakening of mainline Protestant denominations and an explosion of “more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith.” In his article he explains that our tolerance of religious diversity has led to a loss of a shared Christian center that we used to rely on to bridge political differences and “call people out of private loyalties to public purposes… inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, [and] inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether.” Our failure to achieve political unity to address national issues, he claims, is a result of weakened religious institutions and a resulting combative religious environment.

He points to the civil rights era as a time when religion served as a unifying force. In the 1960s, our religious institutions were still strong enough to unite people across the political spectrum, so much so that leaders of black churches were able to “shame many Southerners into accepting desegregation.” Douthat longs for that time when “the institutional churches proved their worth as both sources of moral authority and hubs of activism, and where religious witness helped forge a genuine national consensus on an issue where even presidents feared to tread.”

I do agree that the civil rights movement offers a masterful example of using faith to inspire reform, but Martin Luther King, Jr. did not accomplish that by appealing to the existing shared religious center. That shared religious center was an obstacle he had to overcome. [Cue robot arms waving wildly.] Segregation was preached as God’s will from pulpits across religious denominations and political divides. King could not appeal to the shared belief at the core of those churches, because that belief was racist at its core. And more problematic still, the racist God was also a violent God in whose name one could fire bomb black churches, murder black civil rights workers, and lynch black men as the main event at a summer picnic. These atrocities were all committed by good Christian folk who believed God was on their side and that they were acting in God’s name. Douthat may try to argue that this does not represent the essential core of Christian faith, but back then he would have a fist fight on his hands.

Martin Luther King’s success came from challenging that racist and violent faith by calling on Americans to believe in a different kind of God, a God whose mercy and love could not abide violence of any kind. Not even violence in the name of good, which is actually the only kind of violence there is. To challenge our faith in good violence, King refused to use violence as a weapon. He refused to hate his enemies or exclude them from God’s kingdom, even as they were excluding him.

The reason we are so polarized today is not that we have lost a common religious understanding or access to a shared value system, but exactly the opposite. We are at loggerheads with each other because we all believe in the God Dr. King was trying to overcome: the violent deity who is on our side and against our enemies. Despite appearances, we do have a shared national religion, and it is one that cannot tolerate any disagreement. If I am on God’s side and you are against me, I have no choice but to defeat you in God’s name. In this religion, the world is black and white, good and evil, and all differences must be violently eliminated.

What Mr. Douthat fails to see is that in our current climate, we have only the appearance of religious diversity. What has proliferated is a profusion of religious groups who all believe in the same violent God and who are trying desperately to distinguish themselves from one another by dividing the world up into good and evil. Not surprisingly, they find themselves and only themselves among the good. They have created a world of false differences to avoid seeing that nothing real distinguishes them from their so-called enemies.

Dr. King recognized that dividing the world into good and evil would only generate more division and more violence. He offered us a new kind of unity that would allow differences to flourish. Racial, cultural and religious differences would not be erased in this unity, they would become more fully alive, making the world more diverse, complex, and interesting. This other faith is what Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement offered us – a faith in a God of love and mercy who is capable of loving even those we call our enemies. The end of political polarization will not come about by a reunification of our religious center if we are gathering around a God of violence. Such an occurrence would be disastrous for us and for the world. It is what totalitarianism looks like. For a different kind of unity, I offer Dr. King’s own description of the crowd that gathered for the historic 1963 march on Washington, D.C.:

The enormous multitude… was an army without guns, but not without strength... It was white, and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 222)

Christianity is the religion of a repentant lynch mob. To follow Jesus is to take our victim as our king and to never forget how dangerous the wrong kind of unity can be.

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^{(Washington Representative Drew Hansen. Video discussed below.)}

Can faithful Christians support same-sex marriage?

The question is coming up quite a bit these days, as states throughout the U.S. are dealing with legislation concerning the hot button issue.

I’ll go a step further in answering the question – Not only can faithful Christians support same-sex marriage, faithful Christians should support same sex marriage.

First, the can.  The Bible is often a stumbling block when it comes to this issue.  Many feel that they can’t support same sex marriage because the Bible is against homosexuality.  But what if we’ve misunderstood the Bible?  That’s the case that James Alison makes in his lectures The Shape of God’s Affection.  Alison points out that heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern concepts.  The terms were coined around the 1860s and it’s only been during the last 60 years that we’ve come to a scientific understanding of sexual orientation in general, and homosexual orientation in particular.  Pre-modern people assumed all people were naturally attracted to members of the opposite gender.  We know now that about 4% of human beings are naturally attracted to members of the same gender.  Why does that matter?  There are 7 passages (yes, only 7!) in the Bible that we moderns use to discuss homosexuality.  The problem is that the people who wrote the Bible weren’t talking about our modern concept of homosexual orientation, because they didn’t know it.  To impose our modern concept of sexuality on the Bible is to misunderstand the very important critique the Bible makes in those 7 passages.  Indeed, those passages denounce sexual sins, but they are the sins of gang rape and cultic prostitution.  The ancient Hebrews and the authors of the New Testament were concerned about sexual abuse and believed the sexual humiliation of another was a very bad thing, but they were not commenting on homosexuality as we understand it today.

Let’s take the verse most often referred to in the New Testament: Romans 1:26.  Previously, Paul stated that many have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie.”   It is “For this reason,” Paul continues, that

God gave them up to degrading passions.  Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.  Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

The New Testament scholar Neil Elliot wrote an essay called The Apostle Paul on Sexuality. The essay supports Alison’s argument that the biblical authors weren’t talking about homosexuality, but about sexual abuse.  Elliot claims that Romans 1 was principally about the Roman Emperor Nero, who led a very infamous and active sex life. Elliot quotes ancient historians and claims:

Nero's sexual passion for his own mother was “notorious,” … but then Nero “practiced every kind of obscenity,” defiling “almost every part of his body with men and women, usually under threat of force” … His cruelty and sexual predations paled, in the eyes of the Roman aristocracy, next to his profligacy with money: when he had devoured his personal fortune he turned to “robbing temples.”

In the Romans 1 passage, then, Paul is not against our modern understanding of homosexuality, but rather against sexual abuse and excessive sexual indulgence.

Now for the should.  The speech made by Washington State Representative Drew Hansen (above) provides an important theological account of what God is doing on this issue.  Representative Hansen is a Christian committed to the way of Christ who voted for Washington State’s same sex marriage bill. Hansen said, “What if God is doing a new thing in the church right now on this question?  I mean, remember, as Christians we believe that it is the stone the builder rejects that becomes the capstone.”

This is very profound and significant.  Hansen illuminating the “truth about God” that Paul referred to in Romans.  Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the One who reveals who God truly is and what it means to by truly Human, is the Stone that the builders rejected.  As the Son of God and the Son of Man, he is the capstone to our theology and to our anthropology.  By being rejected, Jesus radically identifies with those who are rejected by other human beings.  Theologian Walter Wink reflects on this principle in his essay Homosexuality and the Bible:

God sides with the powerless.  God liberates the oppressed.  God suffers with the suffering … In light of that supernal compassion, whatever our position on gays, the gospels imperative to love, care for, and be identified with their sufferings is unmistakably clear.

It is unmistakably clear because the particularly Jewish Jesus suffered in order to show us that God in Christ identifies with all who suffer.  In this way, African American theologians can say Jesus is Black.  In this way, GLBT theologians can say Jesus is Gay.  But here’s the next point: Jesus freely allowed himself to suffer and be rejected by his fellow human beings so that our pattern of rejecting others can be transformed into a pattern that loves and embraces others.  Refusing to allow GLBT people to participate in the joys and challenges of marriage is a way of rejecting them.  When it comes to same sex marriage, the authentic Christian response is not one of rejection, but one of love and affirmation.

And that’s why faithful Christians can and should support same-sex marriage.

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This video is for parents looking for a positive way to connect Santa Claus to the Christmas story. If your child is young enough to believe in Santa Claus this video will help you handle Santa's naughty or nice list and your child's Christmas present wish list. Santa can be a wonderful example of what the love and joy of Christmas is all about.

I’ve had a lump in my throat since I heard about the terrorist attack in Norway. Youth, for God’s sake. Talk about literally killing hope. For Americans dealing with the aftermath of our own terrorism, the implications are chilling, for this was not an Islamic terrorist. This was a Norwegian killing his own in order to promote his political agenda and he took inspiration from American right wing ideologues he found online. The New York Times printed this quote from his 1,500-page manifesto: “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.” Just when you think you know who the enemy is and where he is hiding, someone destroys your certainty.

One thread of the attempt to make sense of all this is very similar to the aftermath of the Arizona shooting in which 6 people were killed and 14 wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, by Jared Loughner. Who or what could inspire such a grotesque act of violence? It’s a natural question, and the right one to ask in both cases. The finger is being pointed at far right politicians and bloggers who proclaim that European identity must be defended against an onslaught by Islamic immigrants. For an excellent overview of the state of Islamophobia on both sides of the Atlantic, I encourage you to read Roger Cohen’s article Breivik and His Enablers. Cohen well chronicles why overt fear mongering against Islam on the part of the Christian West should remind us of facism and we should be chastened.

There’s just one thing I’d like to add to the debate. What should be making us queasy is a weird paradox: Christian and Islamic extremists insist that there is no way to compromise or co-exist with the other yet they seem strangely similar. It certainly gave pause to Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism specialist, who was quoted in the New York Times as saying that Breivik’s rhetoric reminded him of bin Laden’s and other Al Queda leaders. He said of Breivik’s manifesto, “It seems to be an attempt to mirror Al Queda, exactly in reverse.” Hegghammer misses that this is no conscious attempt on Breivik’s part, but an odd characteristic of enemy relationships. The more each side insists on its absolute difference from the other, the more the two sides mirror each other becoming what René Girard calls enemy twins. Enemy twins only appear different to each other – to outside observers who have no stake in their fight all differences vanish. Why? Because while the adversaries only hear their own voices loudly rehearsing the litany of abuse they have suffered at the hands of their opponent, all observers see is that they share a belief in the legitimacy of violence and that shared belief speaks much louder than the supposed differences between them.

The problem is actually much bigger than these particular enemy twins. The problem is the universal belief in violence as a legitimate method to achieve ends, even good ends like peace and security. The entire world is captive to a culture of violence that traps governments and good people everywhere into a perverse logic that allows us to justify our own violence while condemning that of our enemies. It is no wonder the Breivik or Loughner or Bin Laden and his deputies believe in violence, or that Americans can support drone attacks and military campaigns in which thousands of innocents, including youth, are killed. We cannot condemn them without falling under the same condemnation. If we are searching for the inspiration for acts of terrorisms, the truth is closer to home than we might want to admit. The enemy, it turns out, is us.

The only way to distinguish ourselves from violent extremists is to become truly different than they are which means we must abandon our faith in violence at both a personal and institutional level. Americans must demand that our government abandon faith in military means to achieve our ends. The Raven Foundation is inviting Americans to take the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to begin a year long examination of what it would mean for our nation to continue to pursue peace, justice and democracy for the world, but to do it by peaceful means. Please join this important conversation by going to our website, Honor Their Memory – Be a Hero for Peace to see what we can do to get the lumps out of our throats. Peaceful people need to find our voice so we can be heard in political conversations. Be a hero for peace – start today.

I plan to preach this morning, but, and this sounds a little awkward, I plan to preach to the confirmation class.  So, I’m inviting the rest of us to listen in.  It might have something for you, but this sermon is primarily for the confirmation class.

Emma, Daniel, Erik, Madison, Christian, Amanda, Madeleine, and Sam, it has been a great pleasure for me to have been through this confirmation process with you.  You have been a great gift to me.  You have challenged me and have brought me to a better place.  I do this because I believe in it, and I believe in you.  For all of that, I thank you.

Confirmation Sunday always gives me a sense of hope because you have a pretty good idea of what you are getting yourselves into.  You are confirming yourselves into the church, and the rest of us are confirming you into the church at the same time.  And we all know that the church is a human community, and as a human community there are times when we fail to live up to our ideals, and there are also times when we succeed.  By confirming yourselves into the church, you are telling us that you believe in this thing.  And we ask you today to gently hold the rest of us accountable to being the church.  And we will also gently hold you accountable being the church as well.

There is a new documentary out in the theaters that speaks to what we’ve been exploring this year in confirmation class.  It’s produced by Tom Shadyac, who also produced such modern classics as Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, and, my personal favorite, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.  It’s called I Am.  It’s a fascinating documentary.  Shadyac had a horrible biking accident that caused many health issues.  He always had questions about his life, but after this traumatic event, he began to take those questions more seriously.

The documentary starts off with bad news and then discovers good news.  He looks at the violence and chaos in the world and he asks, “What’s wrong with the world?” and then asks, “What can we do about it?”  The documentary is part autobiographical and part interview.  He explores what’s wrong with the world by exploring his own life.  He came from a somewhat humble background, and then he made it big in the movie scene.  He made a lot of money.  And with that money he bought all kinds of stuff.  Mansions, and stuff to fill those mansions.  He bought cars and private jets.  He was the epitome of everything our culture tends to view as successful.  He had it all.

But he describes a moment when he bought a mansion in Beverley Hills.  The movers finished placing everything into his mansion, and he tells us how he just stood in the entrance way, feeling empty.

All of this stuff, and he felt empty.  All of this success, and he felt…depressed.

What is that about?

He goes throughout the world and interviews scientists, historians, and spiritual leaders.  One scientist claims that part of what’s wrong with the world stems from a message within modern science.  He says that much of modern science got it wrong.  What he says is that modern science told us that we are primarily individuals.  You are your own person.  The truth of who you are is located in your brain.  Indeed, a major truth statement within modern science and philosophy is, “I think, therefore I am.”  The emphasis on the individual means that when other people begin to influence you that you lose a sense of who you are.

That’s a big message of modern philosophy and science.  The problem that Shadyac experienced is that when we emphasize the individual, we lose a sense of our humanity.  When we emphasize ourselves, we can easily isolate ourselves from our fellow human beings.  Shadyac discovered that the more stuff he bought for himself, the more isolated and disconnected he became from his fellow human beings.  He had all the stuff in the world, but no meaningful relationships.

The scientists that Shadyac talks with question the individualism of modern science and philosophy.  This is the good news that Shadyac claims to have found.  The scientists he interviews claim that we are not so much “individuals” as if there is this disconnect between us.  Rather, we are all connected in a fundamental and, yet, mysterious way.  He observes that we can’t help but influence one another.  So, when we see someone suffering, we suffer too.  It’s as if we take on that suffering; it affects us.  Likewise, when we see someone happy and smiling, we’re likely to respond by smiling back.  We are wired for empathy.  We are wired to be in relationship with others.  We are wired to be influenced by one another.  One scientist even claims that what is “real” is not found in individuals.  The truth of who we are is not found in our brains.  Rather, what is real is found in the space between us, in our relationship.  The bad news is that we can work against the natural connection we have with our fellow human beings, and with the world.  We can numb ourselves to others by emphasizing our relationship with stuff as opposed to our relationship with other people.  As Shadyac found, that leads to emptiness, depression, and a lack of meaning.

Near the end of the documentary, Shadyac interviews a scientist and asks her “What do we do now?”  She claims that what humans need is a “Change of mind.”  Remember this – a change of the mind – it will come up in a few minutes.  She says that we need to change our minds so that we see that we are interconnected at the most fundamental level.  That when one person suffers, indeed, we all suffer.

Shadyac also interviewed many spiritual leaders.  The one person I want to point out to you is the former Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, a man named Desmond Tutu.  Tutu understands the interconnectedness of human beings; he gets it from Christian tradition.  We remember from Genesis that God created humans in the image of God, and that God breathed God’s spirit into humans.  But Tutu also gets this idea of interconnectedness through African spiritual traditions.  There is an African term that speaks to the interconnectedness of human beings.  That term is ubuntu.  Tutu claims that ubuntu recasts the modern saying “I think, therefore I am” and phrases it, “I am human because I belong.”[1] Ubuntu says that if I raise you up, I raise myself up.  On the other hand, if I diminish you, I diminish myself.

Now, how does this fit into our readings from this morning?  I want to focus on Acts.  Acts tells the story of the early church after the resurrection of Jesus.  Here we find Peter preaching to a group of people.  Peter has both good news and bad news for the group.  He starts off with the good news of resurrection; that God raised Jesus up.  For Peter, God is a God of life, not death.  The bad news comes when Peter says to the group “you crucified Jesus.”  Now, this is a very strange thing for Peter to say.  He’s preaching 50 days after Jesus was crucified, so it is very hard to believe that the people in this group were there when Jesus was crucified, or were in the crowd that yelled for Jesus to be crucified.  In fact, Peter was the one who denied Jesus three times.  But what’s even stranger, is that the group Peter preaches to says agrees with him.  In essence they say, “Yes.  We did crucify him.”

What is that about?

I think that what Peter and the group he is preaching to realize is that we all get caught up in cultural systems that lead us to forget that we are all interconnected.  Once we forget that interconnectedness, we are then able to crucify others.  Even someone like Jesus.  When we forget that what happens to you also happens to me, when we neglect that, then we can be physically, emotionally, spiritually, and economically violent with one another.

And the group says, “Yes.  We have participated in those social structures.  What do we do now?”

Peter says that what we need is a metanoia.  It’s a Greek word that often gets translated in the Bible as “repent.”  What metanoia literally means is: a change of mind, direction, or heart.  Peter tells the group that they need a change of mind.  Today, a scientist claims that what we need to do to make the world a better place is to have a change of mind so that we see the interconnectedness of all things.  2000 years ago, Peter claimed that we need to have a change of mind so that we see interconnectedness of all things and we no longer crucify one another!  We need to have a change of mind so that we see the interconnectedness of all things so that we no longer perform physical, emotional, spiritual, and economic acts of violence upon one another or upon the world.

But, we will fail.  Changing our minds is a lifelong process, and so failure is inevitable.  Peter is there to remind us that the resurrected Jesus forgave even Peter and his betrayals.  Peter tells us that God’s forgiveness is always there, waiting for us to accept it.  To paraphrase Peter, he says, “Change your minds and go in the direction of God’s forgiveness.”  Once we accept God’s forgiveness, we are free to offer forgiveness to ourselves and to others.

Science and our spiritual traditions are coming together and saying the same thing.  In fact, one person in the documentary claimed that science is just now catching up to our spiritual traditions.  What we need is a change of mind, a change of direction, so that we see that we are fundamentally interconnected to one another and to the world.  And we need you to help lead the way.

So, may you have a change of mind.

May you see that you are interconnected with all of creation.

And most importantly, may you know with certainty that you are loved by God.  And may you share that love with one another and with the world.

Amen.

[1] The Words and Inspiration of Desmond Tutu: Believe, 3.