White Supremacy vs. Liberation in Christ

I grew up in California. For the first seven years of my life (1964-1971), I lived in San Diego. The neighborhood I grew up in was in Tecalote Canyon, nestled between the University of San Diego (Jesuit) and St. Mary Magdalene Church Roman Catholic Church. The neighborhood was nicknamed "Vatican Heights" and most of the folks there were Roman Catholic (we and one other family were Lutheran). Our neighborhood had one family of color: the Glorias. They were Latinx. They had a son named David and I would play with him from time to time along with the White kids in the neighborhood ... that is until girls became "icky" to boys and vice versa. It was a time of racial turmoil in our country but as a young child, I was only vaguely aware of what was going on. Life was pretty good from a kid's perspective. I started school in San Diego and we had kids of color there, mostly Latinx, Chinese, and Filipinx.

In 1971, we moved to Concord, California, to a neighborhood called "Pepper Tree." Back then, the BART trains didn't go through and the area was mostly walnut orchards and horse country. It was a suburb of San Francisco with some fairly new housing developments. My dad worked in Walnut Creek, the neighboring town. When we moved there, our neighborhood was all White. We had a couple of families with teenage boys who were troublemakers: especially the Duffy and Schmidt boys. I remember my dad having to deal with their petty vandalism, filing complaints with the police, and nothing much got done. My school was majority White with some minority students. Our minority students were largely the same demographic as San Diego but with some kids from India too. I really hadn't had a close encounter with a Black family until the mid-1970's when the Longs moved in next door.

Bob and Evelyn Long were the first Black couple I ever really got to know. Bob was the Postmaster at the Martinez Post Office. Now, for those of you not familiar with California, Martinez was a huge operation in the USPS, a major distribution center for the mail. This was not some backwater job, it was a significant position. Evelyn was a school principal - I can't remember at what level. They had two college aged kids, so I didn't get to know them very well.

My parents went over to welcome them to the neighborhood and, over the next few years, we got to know each other as well as a Black and White family could given the baggage of our country's history. It seemed normal to me to welcome new neighbors, but I didn't know anything different. I remember my father coming home one day fuming. Apparently, Mr. Schmidt (the father of one of our neighborhood troublemakers) said to my dad, "I heard your new neighbors are N***ers! I'm selling my house and getting out of this place." My dad told him, "Good! What can I do to help you get you and your delinquent kid out?!" That was the first time I saw overt racism directed at a Black person. I saw my father's anger at it too.

I was still a kid and unaware of a lot of things. I remember we would go over to the Long's house for dinner and they would come to ours too. I don't remember details, I just remember these were just like all the other dinners when we had guests over. Mom always knew how to throw a great dinner party and make people feel welcome. One day my mom shared with me a conversation she had with Evelyn. It was a brief encounter and I think it happened in the grocery store. Mom was dressed in very casual clothes and Evelyn, as always, was dressed impeccably and professionally. My mom said something about how amazing she looked (she always did) and how my mom felt under dressed. In a moment of incredible trust and candor, Evelyn told my mom, "I can't go out in anything less to shop, otherwise I'll be followed by store security." That was my first encounter with what I would later be able to name as White privilege.

It's not that I didn't grow up steeped in White supremacy and racism. Of course I did. I'm a White American. But in my context, I encountered it towards Mexicans, Asians, and even my great-grandmother's disparaging of Native Americans (her family were White settlers in Nebraska and South Dakota). I just hadn't been directly exposed to how this impacts Black Americans until then. The fact these memories are still with me almost 50 years later says something.

The events of these past two weeks have once again ripped open the unhealed wound caused by our nation's original sin: White supremacy. This sin was exported from England and every other colonizing power that walked lock step with the Catholic Church's Doctrine of Discovery. In an unholy alliance of Church and State, Northern European traits (Whiteness) became normative and preferred and the subjugation of those who were different was politically, legally, and religiously sanctioned. It is so baked into the character and social order of colonizing countries (the United States included) that we don't even see it if we are White - that is until riots start in the Black community and other communities of color. This is why Black Lives Matter marches have broken out in former colonizing countries: England, Spain, France, Germany. Young people have learned more about this history, but I did not. Anti-racism educator, Jane Elliott, rightly said our social studies classes were actually "anti-social studies" classes because they only highlighted the stories of White men - as if that's they are the only ones who did anything in this country. Check out her video:

I have an obligation to work to dismantle White supremacy if I am to faithfully follow Jesus Christ. Not the White Jesus America portrays in images, but the brown-skinned Jesus who was also lynched by an Empire for disrupting the peace of Rome and shaking the status quo. Liberation in Christ is the message of the Gospel and means equality for all of God's beloved. Don't believe me? Try on some Scripture:

• "Jesus said, 'The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.'" (John 10:10)
• "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians 3:28)
• "Jesus said, Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away;" (John 6:37)

If we are to take a hint from the world around us, diversity is the plan of God. If Jesus came to bring all people to the Father and bring us life abundantly, how can we be silent or complacent when our BIPOC siblings are suffering? As Paul reminded the Corinthians, "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." (1 Corinthians 12:26). God's plan is not the zero sum game of this World. God's plan means we flourish together when every member is honored.

Anti-racism work is hard. It will take the rest of my life. It will take having the courage to engage, to try, to screw up, and to keep trying. It takes willingness to be vulnerable and not get defensive when a Black or Brown person speaks their truth and it clashes with my experience or beliefs or when they call me out for getting it wrong. It takes a lot of listening and understanding that White supremacy isn't my personal fault, not a personal attack, and not a condemnation that I am a bad person because of White supremacy. It's not about us, fellow White people. It's about being the Beloved Community and that can't happen unless Black Lives Matter as much as White ones do.

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Here are some curated resources I've found helpful:

• The Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing
• CompassPoint.org
• Showing Up for Racial Justice
• PBS - How to Talk to Your Kids about Race

Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber (ELCA) wrote a very extensive pastoral letter with an awesome list of resources which you can read here.

Christian Subjection to Government Authorities - Misquoting Paul to Serve Caesar

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoted Romans 13 in his justification of the Trump Administration's border policy of separating migrant children from their parents. This passage seems to be a favorite of Christianists who use Christian scriptures in service of the American government. It is a distortion of what Paul likely meant in his exhortation to the Roman Christians. But what did Paul mean and why does his context matter?

First, let's look at Romans 13:1-7 from the New Revised Standard translation:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God's servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them-- taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

On the surface, this passage seems to say Christians are to obey anything the governing authorities tell them to do. On the surface reading, Jeff Sessions' using this passage to justify migrant separations at the border seems to be supported. Of course, this passage was also used by those who upheld the institution of slavery in the 19th century. It seems this is the "go to" cover for any act of governing authorities, even when those authorities are acting in ways which violate "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - or even God's commandments in other parts of the Bible. The problem is these verses are being taken out of their original context and distorted in a process we call "proof-texting" - that is, looking for scriptures to justify our ways instead of letting the scriptures move us towards God's ways. If that's the case, what was Paul talking about??

First remember this: being a Christian in 1st century Rome automatically made you a criminal in the eyes of Caesar and the government authorities. That's something we forget in America because Christianity has held a place of privilege in Western Civilization since the Emperor Constantine converted in 313 CE. Christianity became the official religion of the Empire and was co-opted by it even to this day (a good read on this is Meg Gorzycki's Caesar Ate My Jesus: A Baby Boomer's Reflection on Spirituality in the American Empire). In order to really understand Paul, you have to start from the place of being a criminal. Paul was an outlaw follower of a criminal enterprise founded by a convicted Palestinian Jew named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans in collusion with the local religious authorities. Following this movement meant you were against the governing authorities by virtue of your faith and nothing more. If Paul was giving blanket approval to government authorities as one who was branded a criminal by those same authorities, well that just doesn't make much sense, right?

Paul, a Roman citizen who is a criminal by the Empire's definition, is writing this letter to fellow criminals in Rome. Since that's the case, Paul is not saying that the governing authorities are necessarily doing God's will. He is saying God has allowed them to be appointed and whatever they do to you, do not resist. This is a call to radical non-violence. If the governing authorities arrest you and put you to death for being a Christian, so be it and do not resist. Americans have a hard time wrapping their heads around the radical call to submission and non-violence. I once heard Stanley Hauerwas give a lecture on "Luther and War" wherein he said, "American Christians are more American than they are Christian." (Ouch! True but ouch). Living in a place where Christianity is nominally practiced and privileged if it conforms to the government, we struggle to understand Paul in his own context of being a criminal subject to persecution by the governing authorities.

There is also an historical context to these verses having to do with his exhortation to the Romans to pay their taxes. His comments on submission to the governmental authorities is directly tied to the matter of paying taxes. For Jews and early Christians, paying taxes was a troublesome thing because taxes supported the Roman religious cult of Caesar - whom the Romans were to worship as a living, incarnation of the Roman god Zeus. If the Romans worshiped a "god incarnate" in Caesar and Christians proclaimed the Jewish God incarnate was Jesus of Nazareth, we have competing belief systems, don't we? Belief in Jesus was a direct contradiction to worship of Caesar. If Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. Therefore, to pay taxes to Rome was to commit blasphemy in the eyes of both Jews and early Christians. So questions of paying taxes were fraught with both theological and political implications - something we Americans do not understand.

Tacitus

Because of the tension around paying taxes being blasphemous, Jewish tax protests and riots broke out sporadically. The Roman historian Tacitus (b. 54 CE, d. 120 CE) wrote the history of the Empire in his work The Annals. In it, he spoke of the Emperor Nero putting down tax riots in Puteoli by the dispatch of Roman troops and "a few executions." Paul, writing to the neighboring Romans whom he had never met personally, had the matter of these Puteoli riots on his heart as he crafted his letter. At this stage of Christian history, Jews and Christians often worked closely together and, in the Holy Land, Christianity was known as "The Way of the Nazarene", a fringe sect of Judaism. Paul would have been quite concerned that the Roman Christians would be tempted to get involved in these tax protests because of a shared theological view the taxes were blasphemous.

With this event on Paul's mind, it is likely he wrote these opening lines to Romans 13 to essentially exhort the Roman Christians to stay out of these particular tax protests and riots. After all, if just being Christians makes you outlaws and criminals in the eyes of the government, why bring down Caesar's wrath if you don't have to? Taxes are not the theological hill Paul thinks the Roman Christians should die on so submit to the governmental authorities, pay your taxes, and otherwise keep your nose clean. After all, there is more important work to do for the Kingdom of God.

So the next time someone tells you that Romans 13 instructs Christians to blindly and unquestioningly obey government authorities, even when they are doing ungodly acts, share this with them. It's too bad Jeff Sessions, a member of Ashland United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama, didn't do the deep dive into the meaning of this scripture before misusing it.

It's the end of the world as we know it

The stream of consciousness 1987 REM song is a favorite of mine when I preach apocalyptic texts. When I put it into a sermon, I can even get the GenXers singing along. But what happens when the apocalypse is really happening? Will you "feel fine" with the "end of the world as we know it?"

I confess I don't feel very fine right now. There are folks in the evangelical/literalist branch of Christianity who would judge me for this and tell me it's because my faith is weak and it's all in God's plan and then spew some gnostic Rapture heresy at me. Bless their hearts.

No, I don't feel fine because I take the scriptures more seriously than this and I have read and deeply studied the WHOLE book of Revelation which includes two more chapters that evangelicals simply ignore. They stop with the Battle of Armageddon and the defeat of Satan and ignore the next two chapters about the "new heaven" and "new earth" coming towards us and how this earth will be resurrected in a new form.

"What??!!" you ask, "Wait, you mean this earth matters to God??!!"

Well, in short, Revelation says an "YES!" and might even add a "Duh!" for extra emphasis.

This week Greta Thunberg, a remarkable 16 year-old who has been striking from school over the issue of climate change since last year, has been here in America. Greta is on the autism spectrum so she has some behavior quirks that the climate deniers latched onto in order to attempt to discredit her. This was her response:

This young woman shook the pillars of the United Nations with her speech to the climate summit:

And she is right. She should not have to be doing this! We are failing our children. We are failing them because of bad theology, willful stupidity, and corporate greed.

As sentient beings, our sacred texts tell us that we are made in the image of God - the ultimate Sentient Being. Science is telling us the truth about what is happening to our only home. Scientists are using their God-given sentience and intelligence as prophetic witnesses of our greed, our pride and our selfishness. Science is not in opposition to God's will - our greed, pride, and selfishness are the sins which oppose God's will!

Evangelicals who gleefully hope for a destruction of this earth are preaching heresy and are putting God to the test by their recklessness. We are commanded not to test God (Deuteronomy 6:16) and testing God by trashing the earth in hopes you can force the Second Coming is horrible theology. Remember, John 3:16 actually says "For God so love the cosmos" - the whole of God's creation was loved and is why Jesus came so the whole of creation may have eternal life beginning right here and now.

We are partners in defeating the evil we face. God will not magically fix this for us and scripture tells us God's will is for a new heaven and new earth to come to us - it's not a magic "escape plan" for a select few. The evil of sinful greed has been fed by an unsustainable model of capitalistic extraction technologies. It can be redeemed but only if we repent - turn around and seek another way which follows God's will for all to have abundant life. This will require sacrifice. It will not be easy but the alternative won't be easy either.

The earth can and will press the "reset" button on our stupidity. It comes through mass extinction. I don't want to face my children, or anyone's children for that matter, and say, "Well, we didn't do anything about this and it's your problem now." I cannot face anyone and candy-coat this with some story about how believers will be saved from the hellish nightmare of global collapse because it's crappy theology and just not true. The Bible has many stories of how God let the chosen people live with the consequences of their actions to the point of suffering and death.

Jesus followers, it's time we stand up against forces which are killing our planet. Every single one of us has the capacity to act in our own sphere of influence. Yesterday was the first day of Autumn and it was 92 degrees in Ellicott City, Maryland. This is not normal and the time has passed for "business as usual." The "end of the world as we know it" is here, but it does not have to conclude with the destruction of the earth - the greatest gift our God has given us.