The Politics of “the Gospel”

The Politics of “the Gospel”

May, 2024

On Jan. 6 when they stormed the US Capitol, some carried crosses, flags with Christian messages, and signs with bible verses on them, making their political desires into a religious crusade.  But this was not new or surprising.  All my life I’ve known right-wing conservatives to be devout Evangelical Christians whose politics were inextricably linked to their version of the faith.  For the first half of my life, I heard the diatribes from the pulpits against “godless Communism.” Communists, after all, were atheists, anti-god, and anti-church. They imprisoned pastors, they tortured people for their faith.  I read books about bible smugglers who risked everything to nurture the faith of those poor souls who found themselves behind the “Iron Curtain.” How could you be a Christian and not understand your faith to involve the politics of opposing Communism?  

Back then, growing up in my fundamentalist home, I was too young to know about all the things my “Christian” nation was doing around the world to help God with His anti-Communist agenda: assassinating (or attempting to) foreign dictators, sponsoring coups, invading little nations, turning a blind eye to apartheid and human rights abuses, death squads, disappearances, and dirty wars.  We knew that Communists wanted to gobble up the world, that the dominos would fall, and that the Christian West could recede into a corner of persecuted insecurity. Perhaps we would end up like the early Roman Christians, furtively meeting in the catacombs and making secret fish signs in the sand with our feet to identify our comrades? (You probably had to grow up in my subculture to understand that reference).   Communists were anti-God; how could God’s A-team be non-politically neutral?  

So, the cross and the flag that co-mingled in the mobs on Jan. 6 were neither new nor unusual.  The new part was that the champion they were there to enthrone was such a non-religious, immoral man.  He famously did not even know how to say “Second Corinthians” as any child of Sunday School did. When he held up a bible in that silent scene in front of a church that he never attended, he didn’t notice it was upside down.  But, in spite of his vulgarity, infidelities, lies, and bankruptcies, he was, like the Persian king Cyrus of old, being hailed as the Messiah.  He would free the children of Israel from bondage and exile to return to the Promised Land.  He would “make America great again,”  when everyone could assume everyone else was Christian.  “Merry Christmas” could again be the greeting, without any hedging like “Happy holidays” in case the random non-Christian person were around to take offense.  

Moses and Pharaoh

But was not the marriage of politics and religion baked into the cake from the outset? Did not Moses confront the pharaoh, demanding that he “let my people go“? What was that if not direct political action? Did not the Hebrew prophets constantly confront the kings of Israel and Judah, criticizing them and demanding change? What is the cry “let Justice roll down water” if not a demand for political change? 

And did not the earliest narrative of the life of Jesus also assume that marriage? After all, the very word gospel used to describe Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God was the word commonly used in the Roman Empire for public political announcements. The gospel of Mark uses that word, as he narrates, Jesus’ initial appearance: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news (i.e. gospel) of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.’” (Mark 1:14-15) In a time in which the Roman Empire considered itself a kingdom, Jesus announced and alternative kingdom.  He could have called it, As Paul did, the “family of God“, or the “household of God“ but he didn’t. He chose the apparently intentionally provocative title “kingdom of God.” How can that be read any way other than politically?  

Theologian John Howard Yoder wrote The Politics of Jesus back in the ‘70s. People have been coupling the message with political agendas for a long time. By the time I was a college student, I had begun to drift away from the right-wing conservative, evangelical moorings I had grown up with. I started reading magazines, like Sojourners and books like Chad Meyer’s’ commentary on Mark “A Political Reading of Mark‘s Story of Jesus.“ I have been well used to hearing Jesus’ political agenda, sounding, if not, Marxist, then nearly so. I read Liberation Theology and reflected on the inclusive communities of table fellowship that Jesus established, which seemed similar to the Latin American base communities Gutierrez, and others described. That left-wing embrace of Jesus’s kingdom continues, as does its counterweight on the right.

So if Jesus was political, who gets to decide which politics he would embrace in America today,?  I know which side I would like him to come down on, but understanding how confirmation bias blinds a person to the data that do not agree with them makes me suspicious of my own desires.

If we were to widen the question beyond merely Jesus, the gospel, and the kingdom of God to consider more broadly religion and politics, I believe it would become clear that there’s no way out of this morass. Religion has always been hand in glove with political power from ancient Mesopotamia, where annually at the New Year’s festival, the king was reinvested with Royal Authority to rule under Babylon’s God Marduk’s authority, to the anointing of the kings of Israel, by men of God, in the name of God.  Politics and religion, have always been united. In fact, the very notion that you could separate the church and the state as our American founders dreamed, is itself an historical anomaly. Every army that has ever taken, the battlefield has imagined its’ God on its’ side. And the kings who sent them into battle were happy to know that they thought so. It was not until the French Revolution* that the very notion that monarchs were not given their right to rule directly by God occurred to anyone. The apostle Paul believed that all ruling authority came from God, and Martin Luther was happy to agree with him when he instructed the princess to cut down the peasants whose poverty had driven them to revolution.

 We are told that one of the reasons religion has persisted is its capacity to bind large groups together in a unity far beyond kinship lines. This is an adaptive advantage. A group bound together by a common God would certainly out perform smaller less unified groups in competition for scarce resources or territory.  So, religion, harnessed to politics is an adaptive advantage to us.  

But, as everyone knows, religion can also be the reason for conflict.  Religiously based wars are also ancient.  The ideology, or rather, theology operative in the ancient world was that your god always fought the enemies’ god in the heavens as your armies battled it out on earth.  The best god won, and therefore so did the army.  Constantine believed it, when he had that famous vision of the cross by which sign he could conquer.  He had his men carve a cross on their shields, and they won.  There is no way to count all the religious wars, the crusades, the jihads, and the endless conflicts of history.  We are just a new part of an old story today.

I don’t know the way out of this.  I don’t really believe there is one.  God (whomever that may be) will continually be harnessed to political agendas (even if the “god” is officially denied and is named “historical inevitability” by Marxists or whomever).   I just want to call it out for what it is.  Have your politics; defend them, argue for them, give examples, cite evidence, and ask AI for help, but leave “god” out of it.  That’s my wish.  It won’t ever happen, I know.  

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* After writing the above I was alerted by a reader that actually the church father Tertullian argued for the separation of church and state in the second century. His argument to the Roman Empire was that Christianity should be tolerated since no one’s religion harmed anyone. Here is the money quote:

For see, we are in agreement with you when we say that it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion – to which free will and not force should lead us – the sacrificial victims even being required of a willing mind. You will render no real service to your gods by compelling us to sacrifice. And so we are of opinion that the religious observance of one man profits another not at all. –Tertullian, Apologeticus, ch. 24:

The Scandal Hiding in Plain Sight

Greatest Hits of the Hebrew Bible: 6

Sermon for Aug. 7, 2022, Pentecost 9C.

Video and Audio will be available at the website of the Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, AR following the service.

If you have been attending a church like ours it is likely that you have never heard any sermons from the prophet Amos.  Churches that follow the Common Lectionary readings, like we do most of the time, will never encounter the book of Amos.  

I find that appalling.  Even though Amos is never directly quoted by Jesus, we know that the early Christians were familiar with it; both the books of Acts and Revelation have quotations from Amos.  

I believe Jesus himself was familiar with Amos and that it formed some of the mental furniture of his mind. Why?  Because of several essential insights that Amos teaches.  

Amos had some revolutionary understandings of God’s priorities and values that Jesus fully adopted.  But Amos also had some understandings of God that Jesus flatly rejected.  We are going to look at both of these today.  

Amos prophesied in the eighth century BCE.  It was a time of great wealth, for some; that is, for a very few.  It was also a time of great poverty for many.  

That may seem odd to you if you recall our discussions of the system of distributive justice in the Hebrew Bible known as the Sabbaths: release of debts every seven years and the return of property and manumission of enslaved persons every 50 years.  

Clearly, by the time of Amos, that system had completely broken down.  There had developed something that should have been impossible: a permanent poor class.  Systemic poverty is the scandal hiding in plain sight.  

As Amos describes the situation, he does so by means of prophetic speeches, called oracles.  The type of oracle he employs most is called the “woe oracle.”  A woe oracle is a threat.  God is pictured as angry and powerful.  According to this view, God can, and will use the nations of the world as instruments of punishment.  For example, Amos 2:4-5 says,    

“Thus says the LORD:

For three transgressions of Judah,

and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;

because they have rejected the law of the LORD,

and have not kept his statutes,

but they have been led astray by the same lies

after which their ancestors walked.

So I will send a fire on Judah,

and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem.”

Soon we will see that the transgressions of Judah, the specific laws and statutes they have broken, and the lies they were telling were all about injustice, oppression, and resulting systemic poverty they were causing.  

God is upset.  (By the way, people who make a difference between social concerns and spiritual concerns as if God did not care about one, simply don’t know the Bible very well.)

The threatening fire that will devour Jerusalem would be coming from an enemy nation like Assyria or Babylon.  

Maybe you could sense that there was some literary flare in that woe oracle: Israel’s prophets often wrote in poetry.  Modern versions of the Bible reveal that when they print these poems in poetic lines and stanzas.  

But before we go further we need to recognize two important facts.  First, it is clear that Jesus completely agreed with Amos’ assessment that grinding systemic poverty, especially the poverty that comes as a result of corruption or oppression is wrong; God hates it.  

Jesus said, “no one can serve two masters.”  He told parables like the rich man and Lazarus, and the one about the rich fool who died with bursting barns.  Jesus agreed with Amos that systemic poverty is God’s concern.

But second, Jesus did not believe, as Amos said, that God was behind enemy nations and their aggression.  Although the doctrine of retribution: that good deeds are blessed and bad deeds are punished, is a major theme of the Hebrew Bible, Jesus rejected it.  Like the book of Job before him, Jesus did not believe that suffering came as a punishment from God.  

Jesus specifically said, on more than one occasion, that God, 

“makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”  

(Matt. 5:45; Luke 6:35)

So we will listen to Amos’ woe oracles with the understanding that Jesus, following Job, has liberated us from that concept of a judgmental God.  

The Trial

To understand Amos we should imagine a courtroom scene.  Amos is the prosecuting attorney leveling charges against Israel.  We will walk through some of Amos’ oracles and examine the charges he makes.  To start things off, he says, 

Amos 2:6    Thus says the LORD:

For three transgressions of Israel,

and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;

because they sell the righteous for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals—

That 3 transgressions +1 is part of the poetry.  The charge is conducting debt slavery.  They sell the needy for no more than the paltry price of sandals.  Human life is cheap.  

There is no dignity, no respect for lives worth no more than used shoes.  They have abandoned the Creation theology that all persons are made in God’s image.  Amos continues his prosecution by saying:

2:7 “they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,

and push the afflicted out of the way….

8 they lay themselves down beside every altar

on garments taken in pledge;

and in the house of their God they drink

wine bought with fines they imposed.”

Garments taken in pledge were collateral.  Desperately poor people would use their outer garment, which was also their nighttime blanket, as collateral for a loan.  

According to the Law of Moses, the lender was supposed to return the cloak each evening so that the poor bower at least had a blanket. (Ex. 22:26) 

But that was not happening.  And the lenders who were sleeping on the borrower’s cloaks were the religious people: they were poetically described as sleeping beside the alter and drinking in the house of God.  The tone is bitter.

The wine they drank, Amos charges, was purchased by fines they imposed. They were manipulating the legal system to keep the poor, poor by imposing fines on them, probably for late payments.  All this simply to support their debauched lifestyles.

Passive Oppression Condemned

Oppression of the poor was not only an accusation leveled against the ones who actively abused them, but also against those who were passively complicit, including the wives of the oppressors.  

Amos calls them “cows.”  That is not as insulting as it sounds: well-fed cows were signs of wealth and prosperity.  Amos says, 

Amos 4:1    “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan

who are on Mount Samaria,

who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,

who say to their husbands, “Bring something to drink!”

The only thing the wives were doing was asking their husbands for a drink, but remember, the drinking money came from fines, in other words, legalized extortion.  The women knew where it came from.  They were guilty too.  Passive acceptance of oppression is wrong.

Amos asserted that the entire luxurious lifestyle of the rich, paid for by their systemic oppression of the poor proved their guilt:

6:4    Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,

and lounge on their couches,

and eat lambs from the flock,

and calves from the stall;

5 who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,

and like David improvise on instruments of music;

6 who drink wine from bowls,

and anoint themselves with the finest oils,

but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!

When people are suffering, the right response is to grieve.  Joseph, a poetic name for Israel as a nation, was being ruined.  It is wrong to party in the face of systemic poverty.

Legal System Corruption Condemned

The legal system itself perpetuated the injustices and gave them the cloak of legitimacy.  In ancient Israel, the law court was conducted at the city gate. Amos says, 

Amos 5:10    “They hate the one who reproves in the gate,

and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.”

5:12 For I know how many are your transgressions,

and how great are your sins—

you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,

and push aside the needy in the gate.

Who wants to hear the truth in court or be reproved for systemic injustice?  Clearly, not the ones running the system.  Bribery had the last word as the needy were punched down and shoved aside. 

So, Amos pronounces a woe oracle.  This one is what they call a futility curse.  Nothing you attempt will be successful.  It is an oblique prediction of coming invasion.

5:11 Therefore because you trample on the poor

and take from them levies of grain,

you have built houses of hewn stone,

but you shall not live in them;

you have planted pleasant vineyards,

but you shall not drink their wine.

How to Fix it

So how should these religious people make things right? They ask themselves how can they get God to relent from these threats of punishment?  

Maybe, they think, God wants more religious activity: festivals, solemn assemblies, sacrifices, hymns.  Amos says, not a chance.  Speaking for God he says:

5:21    I hate, I despise your festivals,

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

Well, if not more religious activity, what then does God want from them?  It is no mystery.  Amos makes it clear:

5:14    Seek good and not evil,

that you may live;

and so the LORD, the God of hosts, will be with you,

just as you have said.

15 Hate evil and love good,

and establish justice in the gate;

it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts,

will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

24 …let justice roll down like waters,

and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

Amos spoke truth to power, just as Elijah had done to King Ahab.  He was not afraid of confronting the politics of his day.  When king Amaziah ordered him to cease and desist, Amos uttered a woe oracle predicting his demise.  Amaziah had a choice.  He could “seek good and not evil,”  but that was not the choice he made.

Jesus came saying “seek first the kingdom of God and God’s justice” (Matt 6:33).  The kingdom, or the reign of God, is simply living as if God were king.  If God were king, then God’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”  That would mean establishing justice.

How did Jesus feel about religious activity?  Like Amos, he considered actions far more important.  According to the gospel accounts, Jesus was a regular at the synagogue where they read from the Torah, and discussed it.  They said prayers and sang hymns.  

But the priests and the sacrifices were exclusively located at the temple in Jerusalem.  Jesus never went there to offer sacrifices. 

Instead, the one time he did go to Jerusalem, on Passover, he shut the whole place down in a symbolic act of resistance.  The temple-bank, you will recall, is where the records of peasant debts were kept, at a time when, just as was happening in the time of Amos, the poor were becoming debt slaves and forced off of their ancestral land.  

Like Elijah and Amos, and all the other prophets of Israel, Jesus confronted the politics of his day.  He had a vision of God who loved every person made in God’s image.  That meant they could approach God knowing that they were beloved children, accepted and valued for who they were.  

And it also meant they had responsibilities to each other to treat each other as neighbors.  These responsibilities are not only interpersonal, they are also structural.  The temple-system was corrupt, so Jesus resisted it.  

Our Choice

We live in far different circumstances than Amos or Jesus.  We have far more opportunities than they did to address the causes of systemic poverty today. And yet we still have systemic poverty.  It is the scandal, hiding in plain sight.  

But we live in a democracy where we have the opportunity to pass laws that would make our systems just and fair.  If collectively we want to, we can find bridges out of poverty.  

We can, if collectively we want to, provide the conditions that we know will help eliminate systemic poverty: like adequate housing and health care, quality education, and living wages.  

Like king Amaziah and King Herod, we, as a society, have the choice to

“Seek good and not evil” and to

“let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” 

And every election is our chance to confront the political powers that be in the name of the Jesus who pronounced a blessing on the poor; not on the condition of poverty, but on the poor people whom God loves.  

Embracing Diversity

Audio is here.

Video is available at the YouTube channel of the Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, AR. (after the Sunday service)

John 4:1-30

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” —although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 

The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 

The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.

God loves diversity.  I think that is one of the most obvious statements you can make as you look at creation.  What can you think of that there is only one variety of?  Plants, trees, rocks, stars, animals, fish, snowflakes, fingerprints, everywhere you look there is diversity.  Look at humans: skin color, facial features, hair characteristics, stature, sexual orientation, gender identification, all diverse.  

Human culture as well: languages, religions, clothing styles, songs, dances, gender roles, social organizational structures, laws, even morality in many respects — all diverse.  It is as if God built diversity into our system at every level.  

Even in a group of nearly identical people, for example, a  typical white Presbyterian congregation, there is a diversity of opinions, perspectives, politics, personality types, and preferences.  

Conundrums 

God’s love of diversity does create some interesting conundrums, including these:   According to the Genesis account, God created all the people of the world in God’s image and likeness but chose Abraham’s family alone to make a covenant with.  

But having chosen Abraham and Sarah’s descendants, their mandate was to “bless all the families of the earth.”  

Another conundrum: Israel alone had the temple, but the prophet Isaiah imagined a future when foreigners would be welcome to worship there.  There will be more conundrums to come in a minute. 

Jesus and Diversity

We are a community that gathers around Jesus.  We keep telling Jesus stories to remember his way of life with God and in community.  We will do that again today.  What do we see?  Although Jesus was Jewish and focused his ministry on his own people, he too demonstrated that same love of diversity that the Creator God displays.  

He was not afraid to bring God’s healing love to Roman centurions and Canaanite women.  According to the tradition Jesus fed the 5,000 on the Jewish side of the lake, then crossed over to feed the 4,000 on the gentile side.  

He embraced gender diversity too, reaching out to women as well as men. He ministered to the able-bodied and the disabled, the well and the sick, the pure and the impure, radical zealots and collaborating tax collectors.  

So, you would think that anyone who looked at creation, and even more so, those who honor the Bible, and especially followers of Jesus would easily embrace diversity in all its forms.  

But we all know the opposite is true. That is the deepest conundrum. We tend to be tribal. We group ourselves by all kinds of criteria and  we “otherize” those who do not measure up.  

That’s why we need to keep telling Jesus stories when we gather.  We need to be led by Jesus’ example of a life lived full of faith and trust in the God of Creation as he interacted with people.  

Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well

So we come to this familiar story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well.  This story can be read on several levels, both literal and symbolic.  We will only have time today to consider the literal level, but it is rich and has much to teach us about embracing diversity.

Think about all of the ways in which the unnamed woman was unlike Jesus and the disciples.  First gender: she is a woman.  

Then, ethnicity; she is Samaritan. This is not a small issue.  Racism is not a new idea.  Jews and Samaritans believed in “the separation of the races” which is an old, old human story.  

She is also religiously diverse, which becomes part of their conversation.  

As the story develops, we learn that she is also morally suspect,  having had numerous failed marriages, and is now living in adultery.  I guess the only diversity category she doesn’t check off the list is disability.   

But none of these is a barrier to Jesus.  He does not let any of them keep him from engaging her.  He sees her as a human being, made in God’s image.  He sees her personal struggles, not as barriers to God’s love, but as reasons for needing God’s love.  

Jesus does not shame her, although he is bluntly honest with her.  That is true acceptance; not denial of differences, not pretending there are no issues between them, but accepting the person as a person anyway.  

Finding Common Ground

The first part of their conversation is about water.  That is the common ground: both of them have come to the well for water.  

I know we are all deeply divided in this country, but it is important to think about how much common ground we share with people who think, live, and vote differently.  All of us want security for ourselves and our families.  

All of us want decent housing, health care, good jobs, good schools, and secure retirements.  We want fairness in everything from economics to policing and criminal justice.  

We want a world at peace and we don’t want anyone to be hungry or homeless.  Yes we differ on how to get there, on what works and what doesn’t work, but let us at least start at the same well; we are all thirsty and need water.  

So as the story continues, the topic goes from literal water, that is physical needs, to living water; spiritual needs.  Again, this is also common ground.  

We all share the human condition, the sense of longing for meaning, for acceptance, for love, and for goodness, truth and beauty.  There is an ache in every heart.  We are all aware of our mortality and yet this world is not enough for us.  Spiritual thirst is also common ground, in spite of apparent diversity.  

When Jesus spoke to the woman about her husband, naming, without shaming, the center of her brokenness, her continually-frustrated quest for love and security, she realized that he was what anthropologists call a “spirit-man;” someone deeply in touch with God.  She named him, from her cultural perspective, a “prophet.” 

The Religion Issue

So she brought up another area of their difference: religion.  Samaritans had a sacred mountain that was not Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, and their own temple.  Whose religion got it right?  Which group believed the right things?

Friends, Jesus’ response is one of the most beautiful, liberating teachings he ever gave.  

“The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 

It is not a question about whose religious traditions, whose mountain, whose temple gets it right.  All of these traditions, the liturgies, these operating procedures are human-made.  

Do you think they are at the heart of God’s interest?  Is your specific beliefs, in other words, the contents of your mind, God’s greatest concern?  How could it be?

Later, James will summarize this profound insight with these words:

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

God is spirit.  Spirit is not confined to temples and rituals.  Spirit is everywhere and in everything.  Spirit resists human definition.  

Yes, we have, as T.S. Elliot said, “hints and guests.”  And yes, we humans need metaphors like “Heavenly Father or Mother” to help us, on a practical level, but we recognize that they are all analogies standing in for realities that humans cannot comprehend.  Therefore, we have religious diversity.  

So Jesus did not ask this Samaritan woman to convert to Judaism.  Nor did he ask the Roman Centurion nor the Canaanite woman to convert.  

He did, however, rejoice in the Jewish tax collector’s conversion when, at dinner at his home, he committed himself to economic repentance and restoration. That kind of conversion is what Jesus meant when he said, “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.”  He was calling for a conversion of the heart among already Jewish people.  

Why We Struggle with Diversity

Why is this teaching so hard to embrace? Why do we still put so much emphasis on correct belief, when Jesus, whom we seek to follow, did not?  

Probably it is the result of our history.  After Jesus’ earthly life, people kept puzzling about how and in what way Jesus was related to God. Some said he was just a man, but full of God’s Spirit.  Some said he was not really human at all, but God, merely seeming to be human.  There were a variety of opinions in the early years.   

Eventually, these different views were represented by different communities, each with its own bishops.  They called each other heretics.  The disagreements about what to believe became sharp.  

In time, Constantine, the pagan Roman Emperor, forced all the bishops to the little town of Nicea and coerced them into coming up with a creed they could all agree on.  That became the Nicene Creed.  

The year was 325; in other words, three centuries after Jesus.  Stamping out religious diversity became one of the institutional church’s primary goals.  For many, it still is.

Jesus’ Goal: Living Water

That, to me, seems to be a long way from the goal Jesus had in mind as he sat by that well in Samaria that day.  His concern was for that human being, that daughter of Eve, who was spiritually dying of thirst.  

His task was to help her to understand that the Living Water of God’s love was available for her, for her partner, and for her whole Samaritan village.  

That living water is still available for all of us.  It is flowing all around us.  We drink it when, like Jesus, we embrace diversity.  

When we cross the bridge to humans who are not like us, and treat them with dignity and respect, the water flows.  

When we love the God that made them and give thanks for the rich, colorful, diversity around us, the water flows.  

When we become aware that the diverse people who do not fit the dominant narrative have been oppressed because they are different, and when we become allies and advocates for them, the living water flows.  

This is us, being the church, as the banner says, by embracing diversity.  Not by tolerating diversity, not by ignoring diversity, but by embracing diversity.  Loving, like God does, every different creature God has made.  That is our purpose.  That is our joy.

Conversations in the Dark: mysticism and transformation

Sermon for May 30, 2021, Trinity Sunday year B

Video is here at the Central Presbyterian Church YouTube channel, on the Traditional Services playlist. A new episode is uploaded after the Sunday service. Check out our other videos too, like Circle of Friends Gathering and Thoughts for the Day.

Podcast is at Steven Kurtz’s Podcast

John 3:1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

There was a tradition of mysticism in ancient Israel that included rich, almost psychedelic visionary experiences. Isaiah’s vision of God on the throne included fiery angelic creatures, and coals of fire. 

Ezekiel’s vision of God on a mobile throne with wheels within wheels and multiple animal-like faces is even stranger. God, as king, was often described as sitting on a throne. In fact, the arc of the covenant in the holy of holies is itself a throne on which God is invisibly seated between the outstretched wings of two facing angels. 

So they call this ancient mystical practice “Throne Mysticism.” The practice included silent meditation, or contemplative prayer.  

John’s Gospel is the most mystical of our four canonical gospels. It is quite different in many ways from the others. Only in John does Jesus make long speeches and speaks of the mystical unity of himself with God the Father, the Spirit, and the disciples. John embellished the Jesus stories to reflect the growing faith of his Christian community in the second century. He loved metaphor, wordplay, and symbolism.

The Nicodemus Character

If you are watching a film in which it starts to rain, you know something bad is happening to the characters. Rain is a symbol. Similarly, in John’s Gospel, if it’s dark, then someone is in the dark, in desperate need of enlightenment. 

That is the case with the character Nicodemus whom John describes as coming to see Jesus at night.  

John loves to write characters that make the mistake of taking Jesus’ words literally when he means them figuratively. The woman at the well thinks he is talking about literal water when he says he can give living water. 

Jesus says that he will rebuild the temple in three days after it is destroyed, speaking of his body as a temple, but they take him literally and argue that the temple has been under construction for 46 years.  

So, Nicodemus falls into the same mistake. Jesus speaks of spiritual rebirth but Nicodemus thinks he means literally being born all over again. 

I do not think anyone would be that dense, but I believe Nicodemus, like many of the characters in John’s Gospel, are fictional. Nicodemus stands for a way of thinking about God and the spiritual life that is cluelessly in the dark. In this story, Jesus attempts to enlighten him.

Un-transforming Religion: A Conundrum

There is a conundrum about religion and religious people that Nicodemus illustrates. It is possible — maybe even likely — to be active in a religion without being transformed by it. 

In fact, as Richard Rohr likes to point out, religion, at immature levels, can impede transformation. If people use religious acts, even prayer, as a way of bolstering their egos, by thinking their acts make them good, or even “better than” others, then they remain spiritually immature. 

Being in religious leadership, as Nicodemus is, can be an even greater obstacle to spiritual growth because of the way being in leadership strokes the ego.  

Here is the problem: when religion is reduced to a set of moral rules or practices to perform plus a set of ideas to believe in, no transformation of the ego happens. 

Keeping moral rules and performing rituals have their place, but they do nothing to transform the ego. Believing in the right doctrines does not transform the ego. 

If attending church is only a duty to be performed, the positive benefits of it dissipate at the door. Every religion is full of unenlightened Nicodemus-es that have never been reborn spiritually. Just look at how easy it is to get religious people whipped into a violent mob. 

If you think Christians or even Reformed people like us are an exception, read some church history; we are not. Protestants and Catholics burned each other’s churches to the ground in the post-Reformation conflicts. It was ugly.

Flesh and Blood and the Ego

The problem is the human ego. We are all born as our flesh-and-blood selves. This comes with all kinds of complications. We start life totally ego-centric. As infants, we cried when we needed food, and expected to receive it. As children, we experienced frustration and failures. People disappointed us. Even the perfect parent could not always meet every need. Nor could she prevent nightmares or school bullies.  

So we learned strategies to defend ourselves from hurt. These defense strategies become our personalities. At some level, they worked for us, but they also deceived us, because we came to believe that they are our essential selves. “I am my personality.” 

But that is not true. In your essence, you are a beloved child of God. And so is everyone else. Understanding that insight is like a re-birth; it changes everything. It is transformative. 

Our essential beloved-ness is an insight common to mystics who, by the practice of meditation, have been able to deconstruct their ego-fixations.

Salvation as Transformation 

In this text from John’s gospel, we learn that God, according to Jesus, loves the world so much that he wants everyone in it to experience that kind of transformation. That is salvation. John also calls it “eternal life.” Most people think eternal life means heaven. It does include life beyond this world, but eternal life is meant to be a quality of life that starts now. 

John’s Gospel says that eternal life is to know Jesus. To be saved by Jesus. Being saved means being rescued from the self-absorbed life, the ego-obsessed life, the self-focused life. Living that kind of ego-based life is best described as “perishing.”  

This is not to be judgmental; Jesus did not come to condemn us for being ego-driven, but to save us from perishing that way. He came to save us from all the conflicts and catastrophes that accompany an ego-driven life.

Facing What’s Killing Us

There is an odd story that Jesus alludes to in his conversation with Nicodemus. It is from Numbers in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew people are in the wilderness. Poisonous snakes are attacking them; people are dying. So Moses makes a bronze pole with a bronze serpent on it. When people look at it, they are saved from the venomous bites. 

Looking at what is killing you somehow heals you. Looking at our little defensive egos and understanding them as little defensive egos sets us free from their power over us. But it often requires the mystical practice of meditation over time to figure this out.

John uses that allusion to that story of the serpent on the pole as a foreshadowing of Jesus being lifted up on a cross. For John, Jesus is enthroned, not in a temple, but on that cross. That cross-moment becomes, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ moment of glorification. 

Why? Because Jesus was so non-ego centered he would rather die than kill. He accepted suffering and sacrifice because he was, as theologians have said, completely “a man for others.”  

That is how Jesus can be, as John’s Gospel reports him saying he is: “the light of the world, the door, the way, the truth, and the life.” The Jesus-shaped life is a life born again, born anew, born from above (all of those are implied in the original meaning of being born again) because it is a life in the Spirit. 

The Spirit, like the wind, is invisible, but it is known by its effects. The effect of the Spirit is spiritual transformation from selfishness to selflessness.  

Our challenge is to put ourselves in this story in Nicodemus’ shoes. We are religious people, but we know that there is more than moral rules and rituals. 

We are invited to know in our bones that we are beloved children of a loving God who made us for connection. 

We are invited to know ourselves as a beloved community on a mission of compassion. 

We are invited to be mystics whose practices help us to be, like Jesus, people for others.