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Part 2

Part 3

This week is on money, and here’s my guarantee: you get a sermon all about money, but not a word of it will be about giving to the Church. We will be talking about living lives free from the fear or the worship of money. And there’s no better place to begin that John Wesley’s sermon “On Money”, which gives us his famous 3 rules of Christian finance:

Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can. 

In case you hadn’t guessed from the 1500 words I shoved into your email inbox on Friday, there are two sermons I want to give today; two thoughts are vying for first place in my mind as I listen for the word of God to share with you this morning.  Today is the day of my daughter’s baptism. In just a few minutes, Evelyn will be marked with the sign of God’s grace and her place in the kingdom, and whenever I think about what is about to happen, I am filled to overflowing with words of gratitude, wonder, hope, and humility.

At the same time, another word is burning in my bones, a word that has come to me through you.  Last June, when I asked each you to share with me the topic that you wanted to hear addressed in worship, two particular themes showed up most often in your responses. By far, the most common question submitted was “what happens to my loved ones when they die?”  Do they go straight to heaven? Do they become angels, and are they really watching over me?  Can their presence be here with me here on earth? We will talk about that question in a couple of weeks. The second most common theme in your questions was “race.” It came in just ahead of “Did God send the tornadoes?” which is something we’ll talk about during Easter. You asked questions like “Are inter-racial relationships Godly?” and “How should we love others no matter who they are: whatever their social/economic status, race, or background”? In addition, many of you have studied the book of Genesis in the past year and have asked about an old theory of race you once heard, based on the so-called “curse of Ham.” And so, some time ago, I set aside this Sunday to try and open up a biblical conversation about race, and I am loath to put aside those words on this Martin Luther King weekend just because it happens to be a day of baptism.

But the word that we have heard today suggests that there is some Providence – some holy leading – in these two words that I keep thinking of: race and baptism. Because the word that God has given us through the Apostle Paul reminds us that whenever the question pops into our mind – “Race?” – the answer that ought to pop right up with it is “Baptism.” In the book of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is dealing with the closest thing the New Testament has to a question about race. He is addressing a congregation that is not sure how or whether Gentiles – non-Jewish people – can belong to the church.  “Isn’t the messiah for Israel?” the people ask.  “Shouldn’t salvation be for Jews, or at least, for those who will let themselves become Jewish by circumcision?”  And how does Paul respond? He says, “Whose name was put on you at baptism? Jesus.” So, Paul concludes, if you have been baptized, you are clothed in Christ. You are wearing Jesus.  You don’t get to go out in the world and wear your white skin, or black skin, or brown skin, or foreskin, or the lack thereof the way you would wear your Roll Tide hat and the look for folks in houndstooth. You don’t get to figure out who belongs based on their color of skin or color of clothing. Your Jesus coat covers up all of that.  All you get to look for is Jesus. When you see someone wearing Jesus, you know that’s your people.  And, incidentally, when you see somebody without their Jesus on – when they are shivering under thin layers of loneliness, when they put on an awful scratchy sweater of meanness, when they are absolutely naked and exposed by their own self-destruction, then you get to look at them and think, “I’ve got a soft, warm Jesus coat that would fit them just right.” And you start thinking about how you might get them to put it on.  When you’ve been baptized, Paul says, the only people left in this world are your family and those who might be.

But alas, our history doesn’t always live up to God’s reality.  Sometimes, it just seems so much easier to believe what our eyes tell us, that there are divisions and distinctions among us that are a lot more visible than baptism. But our eyes are tricky things, and what we see with them often tells us more about the reality in our heads than reality in the world.

For example, the Scriptures don’t have much to say about race or racism because for the ancient Hebrews and Christians, race did not exist.  This wasn’t because these people were somehow morally superior to us; Bible folk fall into all kinds of prejudices along with all their other sins. It’s just that the in the world of Jesus and his ancestors, no one would have thought skin color, or hair type, or any other physical characteristic told you much about who a person was.  For the Jews – and all their contemporaries – a person’s belonging had nothing to do with their physical appearance. Identity came from three things: your land, your people, and your worship.  The Scriptures introduce us to people from all over the ancient world – e.g. Rome, Babylon, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the vaguely designated “Wise men from the East.” It never occurs to the biblical writers to lump any of these groups together.  The Hittites and the Philistines and the Ammonites are not “Semitic” or “Middle-Eastern looking.”  They are Hittites and Ammonites and Philistines, and they live in different places, under different kings, and they worship different idols. And nobody gets any points for looking more like the Israelites than the Ethiopians and the Persians do. One important consequence of building identity around land, people, and worship is that anyone might change their identity.  If an Ammonite would move into the Promised Land, live by the Jewish law (including circumcision for men) and worship Yahweh, that person could marry a Jew and be just as much Jew as anyone else.  Nowadays, we tend to ask questions like “is Judaism a religion, or an ethnicity”; in the biblical times the question would have been nonsense.  The only question mattered was “who are your people.” If you were willing to change your people – who it was you worshipped with and lived with – you could change your identity.  One of the insidious evils of thinking that such a thing as “race” exists it tempts us to “understand” or identify someone without knowing their land, their worship, or their people.  The most insidious thing about thinking that “race” exists is that we believe some part of us in unchangeable because it is embedded in our skin. And baptism has a thing or two to say to that.

So if we can’t find the word or the idea of race in the bible, it must come to us from somewhere else. It is hard to pin down exactly when it first occurred to humanity that skin color was a classification and not just a characteristic.  From what I’ve read, it seems the change has some connection to when “the known world” began to expand south of the Sahara and well east of Persia. Once the world contained more lands and peoples and gods than folks could know well, folks reduced the world by lumping people together as races.

However it happened, there’s no denying that in America the invention of “race” held particular sway because this was a country full of people who had explicitly left behind land, and people, and who wanted to worship in all sorts of ways.  If you needed to get along in this new country without having a homeland or culture or worship in common, it was really helpful to invent whiteness as the thing that the Scots-Irish and the Italians and the Germans all have in common, even if they would never have guessed it back in their homelands. And if some folks become white, then some folks become un-white, and the original sin of our country is born.  Our tendency to think and see racially led to the abomination of slavery and the distortions of racial thinking that plague us still today.

Along the way, these sins began to distort our worship and our faith.  Some folks began to teach that God created race. Among the most common justifications of racial thinking (mis)used the story of Noah’s dishonored son Ham. You may know the story. One day, Noah gets a little too deep into his vineyard, makes a fool of himself and passes out naked. His son Ham calls attention to Noah’s humiliation and so Noah curses Ham and Ham’s children.  Never mind that the Scripture never once hints at Ham’s skin color. Never mind that the Scripture goes on to say that Ham’s children included people in every region of the world. Somehow, someone began to teach that the “curse” Noah had placed on Ham was the beginning of certain races.  We don’t know exactly when this teaching began; we don’t even know that it was originally a Christian teaching.  Historians have found Islamic and Jewish sources to go with Christian ones.  It may have begun in North Africa as a way for northern Africans to justify enslaving folks from south of the Sahara.  This teaching, without a shred of sound logic or Biblical evidence to support it, became widespread in the American South, and was eventually included in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible (the most popular study bible of various fundamentalist churches).  There is dark comedy in noting that when the fundamentalist Bob Jones University came under fire in this decade for its ban on inter-racial dating, the university was caught holding a teaching that was not only unbiblical, but may have come from Islam. And this is what they call taking the bible “literally.”

But the more we believed in racial identity, the more it became real, so that we cannot say that racial divisions are imaginary. They are real, even if they are in our minds.  They are most real in the church. We all have to shop; we all have to go to school; we all (apparently) have to play or follow sports, and so these realms have made huge advances in overcoming racial divisions. But, because the church is still entirely voluntary, we remain divided. 90% of white Americans attend an all-white church. 95% of black Americans attend an all-black church.  Some of this is for reasons that appear good; the churches that carried each community through tough times are still alive and kicking, and folks don’t want to abandon the people and churches that have made them.  And yet, that cannot change the fact of our division. And there are even less holy reasons for these divisions.  We continue to distrust “the other.” We continue to see others’ ways of worship as “less than.” We continue to make broad generalizations about each other. Or, and this may be worse, we pretend that nothing is wrong because the problems seem too big or too explosive to mention.

But we, as Christians, who have been given freedom in Jesus ought not be afraid. We must be willing to confront and talk about the sin of racial thinking even when we’d rather not.  And as we do so, I think two things should guide our speech.

First is confession. We must continue to confess that all is not as God wants it and that God’s people do not yet fully live as “one in the Spirit.” We do not live according our baptism, and we have not for a long time. We must confess the part that we have played in this division and keep confessing until God heals it.

And, as we confess, we can begin to overcome. We can begin to acknowledge the reality of race without giving into it by asking each other about his or her land, people, and worship.

Race makes a difference in how people experience life, but the differences are not universal.  I long ago gave up assuming I know anything about white people. Because I am one and have spent so much time around them, I have seen too many variations on “white” to assume anything about a person’s intelligence, history, culture or faith.  So what makes me think I can presume to know anyone else?

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend from seminary named Victor-Lamonte, who grew up in inner-city Pittsburgh. One day I mentioned as part of a story that I and my wife had been cooking collard greens a few days before.  Victor-Lamonte cut me off and said, “Wait, what white folks know about greens?” To which I replied “What does a Yankee know about them?” Race tells us nothing about each other when compared to knowing the towns and neighborhoods and homes in which we grew up. If you want to know someone, ask them about the house, and the family, and the neighbors that shaped them. Ask about the farm or the neighborhood.  In the asking and in the answering, it will become clear that we all come from diverse places, and the race is just a lazy way of summing up what those differences are. People and place do much more to tell us where someone comes from.

And if you want to know where someone is going, you need to know their worship. What are they striving for, longing for, where do they find and place their hope?  If they are worshipping the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau, Jacob, and Jesus, then you and they are headed in the same direction. When we ask others “What do you love about God; why and how do you worship him?” we are bound to learn something about the One to whom we ourselves are headed.  And when we find ourselves in His presence, we realize that our place and our people are theirs too.  We find that we all come from the blessed waters, and we know that all God’s people are the ones with whom we belong.

What is The Lectionary?

The lectionary is a series of suggested scripture readings for specific days of the year. There are weekly and daily lectionaries, and they may range in length from one to six years.

United Methodist pastors generally use The Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year lectionary created by an ecumenical group called the Consultation on Common Texts. The lectionary includes three Bible readings for every Sunday, plus readings for special holy days. Pastors may focus on one of the readings or all three during the service.

Brian Bantum is smart, and I was blessed to have him as a teacher when I was in seminary. As we continue to think about racial identity, I hope you’ll take time to read this letter to his son on what it means, theologically, to be “multi-racial.”

If being post-racial means anything, perhaps it is this: that we are always at home, and we are never home. If being a Christian means anything, it is that we are always at home, and we are never home, and because of this, the exclusion and the refusals we so often endure are never the entirety of our lives.

This week’s sermon is on race, and it is convenient that Gene Marks sparked a small internet storm with his article “If I were a poor, black kid.“ I thought the best response came from Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, which resonated with with a couple of Christian themes in my mind:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country

As Christians, we have a saying about this. We call it the “Golden Rule.”

If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary.

 

As Christians, we have a practice for this. We call it “Confession.”

I’d like to start this conversation by inviting you into a thought experiment.  Imagine you’ve been invited to a dinner party – not necessarily a fancy party or anything like that – you can imagine yourself attending in black tie or in cutoffs, doesn’t matter. What matters is that at this party you will spend the entire evening at a dinner table, stuck between two people with whom you will be forced to make pleasant conversation.  And here is all you know about the two people:  The person on your right is an atheist, but has voted the exact same ballot as you in every election of your lifetime. The person on your left, however, has voted against you on every single issue, but he or she professes Jesus Christ as Lord and is deeply faithful to seek after God in prayer, and Scripture and corporate worship. If your goal for the night is to have a pleasant conversation and find a new friend, which of these people will end up with most of your attention by night’s end?

If you suspect that you would have more in common with a fellow partisan than with a fellow Christian, then maybe you have just realized the fundamental danger lurking whenever Christians talk about politics or government. Christians are active, missionary people – we want to see the world as it is transformed into the world that God wills it to be. And since one of the purposes of government and politics is to bring order among people, it’s obvious why we might want to use them for our purposes.  After all, the political world promises “Change” and a “Mission Accomplished,” and we are hardwired as Christians to want these things. But the powers of this world are seductive little boogers and as the little thought experiment suggests, once we let the language of politics into our vision of hope it is mighty difficult to figure out if our politics come from our faith, or vice versa. To put it another way, some in the world think that government is the problem, some think it is the solution, but somehow everybody, even Christians, seems to agree that the most important question for the future is “What kind of government will we have”? We too easily think that if we can get the government to be just the right size or kind, then we have done our part for the transformation of the world.  This is made all the more obvious here in America, where have been conditioned to think that our politics determine the future, not only of this country, but of the world. Sometimes it seems that our country is so important that Jesus is incidental.  George Bush, in his Ellis Island speech of September 2002 said. “This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.” Perhaps you recognize those last two sentences. They come from the Gospel of John, chapter 1. We read them on Christmas morning, and they insist that Jesus is the only hope of the world.  I love me a president who can quote scripture, but I’d like a lot better if he didn’t turn “Jesus” into “the ideals of America.” But lest you think only one political party is capable of blasphemy, it’s worth mentioning that President Obama told David Letterman America is the “last, best hope of mankind.” Well then, who needs Easter?[1]

It is so hard to escape this kind of thinking, especially in a year like this one. For the last several months our televisions, radios and webpages have been overrun with news from the campaign trail. It’s not likely to change soon.   In Iowa, we watched one candidate after another rise and fall as one interest group after another tested them against various standards of their positions on abortion or taxes or immigration or whatever, each group trying to figure out which candidate will be its messiah. Not that these tests are peculiar to our day and time.  In today’s scripture, we find that even Jesus had to decide if he would sign a no-tax pledge.

As you will recall, in Jesus’ day Israel was under the rule of the Roman empire, and questions of government and politics were every bit as contentious as they are today. Of course, it wasn’t as if anyone could have voted out the Romans, but that made the stakes all the higher. The question Jesus considers in this passage, the question of the coin and the tax, was a question that had cost many people their lives. The Jews of Jesus’ day were allowed to make their own currency for common use, but when it came time to pay their census tax to Rome, everyone was required to pay with the coin that Jesus asks for, the denarius. As Jesus reminds everyone in the crowd, the Roman denarius bore the image of the emperor, which directly violated one of the Ten Commandments – thou shalt not make any graven image. To this day, Jewish synagogues avoid displaying the image of a face in their art, stained glass, and other imagery. In Jesus’ day, Jewish coins never bore the image of a person, and to carry around an image of the emperor was walk around with a portable idol. As if to make the insult even more obvious, the image on the denarius was encircled by these words: “Tiberias, the son of the God Augustus.” The Jewish people faced a constant dilemma over whether to compromise and use the coin when necessary, or whether to rebel against both Roman taxation and idolatry. In the year 6 AD, when Jesus would have been about 8 years old, a man named Judas of Galilee had led a revolt against the Roman tax, occupying the Temple and clearing it before he and his band were captured and executed by the Romans. So, when the Pharisees ask Jesus their question,they are asking “Will you dishonor God and the sacrifices of the Jewish rebels by cooperating with Rome? Or will you openly rebel against Rome and die for us?”  Of course, the Pharisees think they win either way – if Jesus loses face, they stay in control, if Jesus dies, they stay in control (or so they thought)

But here’s the thing, you can’t game Jesus. Jesus invented the game, Jesus invented power. Jesus doesn’t need the approval of the talking heads or the establishment, and he disarms them all. “Show me the coin,” Jesus says, and how conveniently a coin shows up! Now where’d that come from, do you think? Maybe one of the Pharisees “ran home,” which meant he just went around the corner and pulled the denarius out of his pocket and looked at it for a while so that folks would think he really had to search.  Maybe another one did a funny little dance with his hands in his pockets and then said, “Oh look, here’s a coin on the ground.”  Point is, the Pharisees don’t seem to have any trouble producing one of these blasphemous little demon coins, and now they are on the hot seat. Jesus lets ‘em twist in the wind for a bit– “Now, tell me again, whose face is on that coin anyway?” And the moment they say answer, these folks know they’ve been had.^[2] But in the very moment that Jesus exposes the Pharisees, he also lets ‘em off the hook. “No big deal,” he says, “If Caesar wants his coin, give him his coin. God wants bigger things from you.”

It turns out that if we are giving God all that is God’s – which is to say, everything, our time, our lives, our worship, our passion, our family, land, water, air – we won’t have too much time left over for worrying about the lesser powers of this world.  When we remember that Caesar makes the coins, and God made everything else, we rest easy in knowing that whether the government is for us or against us, nothing can thwart God’s mission.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we avoid the questions and difficulties of the world; like Jesus we are called to get involved with the world. But Jesus has shown us that we get involved in a particular way, by giving God what is God’s. And when it comes to politics, I think there are three things in particular that we can give to God.

First of all, we give God our worship.  About 120 years after Jesus’ resurrection, the church father Justin Martyr (care to guess how he ended up?) tried to describe “Christians” in a letter to the Roman emperor Antonius Pius. Justin wrote: “

To God alone we render worship, but in other things we gladly serve you, acknowledging you as kings and rulers of men, and praying that with your kingly power you be found to possess also sound judgment. But if you pay no regard to our prayers and frank explanations, we shall suffer no loss, since we believe (or rather, indeed, are persuaded) that every man will suffer punishment in eternal fire according to the merit of his deed, and will render account according to the power he has received from God, as Christ intimated when He said, “To whom God has given more, of him shall more be required.”

Rather cheeky of old Justin, to say, “We are praying for you” and then follow it with “And if you ignore us, we don’t care, because we know how the story ends.” When we worship God, and God alone, we constantly remind ourselves how the story is going to end, and so we remember where we place our trust.  When we worship God, we refuse to worship anyone else, and we refuse to look for a new messiah.  For that reason, we know that there is no such thing as the “Christian party” in politics – we know no person but Jesus is good enough to represent all of God’s will, and the example of Jesus reminds us that such a perfect person would be unelectable. Worship is a necessary reminder of where our hope lies.

Speaking of hope, I should also mention that giving God our worship should also inoculate us against fear.  The politics of our day are full of fear, and we must constantly be on the watch against that fear.  For that reason, I’d like to risk turning this sermon into a PSA and ask everyone of you to go home and bookmark the websites snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.  If you see an ad, or an email, or a YouTube video that makes a candidate or a law seem too awful to be believed, it’s probably because someone is preying on your fear.  Go to these websites to make sure that what you’ve heard is true, and please don’t bother forwarding me anything that you haven’t checked out.  Christians must not be the kind of people who trade in fear and pass along lies.

As we give God our worship and hope, we are also called to give our witness. I think it is interesting that we are so often told that the ballot box is the place where we can “make our voices heard.” When we hide in behind the curtain of a voting booth, that is the least  part of the witness and voice that God has given us.  I love the story of Bishop Elias Chacour, who was serving as a university president in Palestine when an Israeli terrorist opened fire on Muslims in worship, prompting a Palestinian terrorist to injure and kill over 80 Jews with a suicide bomb. Bishop Chacour wrote a letter to the Israeli government denouncing the violence, and shares this story of how his students demanded more:

“My students came to me. “Have you become an American?” they accused me. “When American are upset, they write a letter to their congressman. They think they have solved the problem. That is not enough.”

I asked, “what should we do?” “We want to give our blood to help the injured Jews,” said the mostly Palestinian students.

Soon after, a group of fifteen nurses pumped the blood of these students for six solid hours as a political statement of love.[3] That is a witness that doesn’t need a privacy curtain. I am also reminded of Mother Theresa’s stance on abortion: “If you are pregnant and do not want your child, give the child to me. I will care for it.”[4] These kinds of actions are unavoidably political, but they are also faithful statements that we belong to a new kingdom. St. Augustine famously boiled down Christian ethics to the statement: “Love God, and do what you will.” And I think that works as a rule for voting as well; love God with everything you have, and then vote as you will. A vote is nothing more or less than one part of the total witness we carry with us in the world.

Finally, once we’ve given God our worship and our witness, we also give God the interests of others.  In Phillippians 2, Paul reminds the Church

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,  not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

How different Paul’s good news is than the news that we hear every day about “interest groups.” We have come to understand that politics is primarily a contest of selfish interests – which interests have the most clout, money, and popular support. Our politicians have been paralyzed by the fear that a single vote against the interests of their constituents (even if that vote might lead directly in the interest of someone else), that they are totally unwilling to compromise. Which is fine, I guess, compromise is a rather weak virtue.. But sacrifice is a real and Christian virtue, and Chrsitians, of all people, should be the ones who empower their leaders to make certain sacrifices in the interest of others.

Christians are a very political people; we can’t help it. Our savior is a political prisoner who was executed for treason because he couldn’t stop saying that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. And so Jesus has shown us what it means for Christians to be political. It means that we do not shrink from the world around us; neither do we try to fix it on its own terms. Our first political duty is to be God’s kingdom, to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.  And as we work for this transformed kingdom, we vote for those things that seem to make our world more like God’s kingdom. We work with those friends we can find along the way. We even love our political enemies in the hopes that they, too, will become friends. But our allegiance does not belong to our friends or their agendas; we give that to God alone