Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Luke 23:33-43
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Last Sunday, rap performer and semi-Kardashian Kanye West stood on the stage of a megachurch in Houston and told the crowd that the greatest artist God had ever created was now on God’s team. He meant himself, of course, apparently missing the Micah 6:8 memo on walking humbly with your God. In that, he was in the right place, there in a former NBA arena, for he was standing next to Joel Osteen, charlatan of the prosperity gospel, who chooses to ignore everything that Jesus said about the challenges of following the Way, all of that inconvenient stuff about being attacked for your faith. Osteen’s idea of damnation and suffering is fabric upholstery in the private jet instead of leather and off-the-rack suits.
The two are about as far from that itinerant rabbi on the dusty streets of Galilee as they could be, even further from Calvary. Jesus did not offer a get-rich-quick scam in ancient Palestine, and wealth is not a measure of righteousness. We all know or know of good people who barely get by and truly awful people who are wealthy. There simply is no correlation between faith and wealth. The reward for righteousness comes in other forms.
West, Osteen, and Paula White are a reminder to us of the captivity of the church in every age. Today’s Prosperity Jesus may be one particularly egregious example, particularly flagrant, but this is by no means our only sin. A perversion occurs every time we try to domesticate Jesus, turning him into a puppet that says what we want to say and hates who we already hate, or into a cartoon Jesus that is all “be not afraid” and “you are loved,” but that never asks for anything, no sacrifice.
This latter can be an opioid Jesus, sometimes needed in the short-term, but all too often numbing and doing more harm than good. Worse still is partisan Jesus, nationalist Jesus, racist Jesus, a blue-eyed European doppelganger for that swarthy Middle Eastern prophet.
And it is not my Jesus, for my Jesus is not mine. My Jesus belongs to a God I cannot control. My Jesus is a Jesus that gives me hope, but also a Jesus that unsettles and challenges.
And boy, do we need unsettling.
There was more than a little fear and trembling years ago when I realized that the church I had known as a child would never accept me as a gay man, that, at that point, no Christian church was ever going to accept me. But there was also a liberation in that realization. As the dogmatic house of cards came tumbling to the spiritual ground, so too did circular claims about believing the absurd in order that I might believe the absurd.
I journeyed and learned, from progressive Catholics, Zen Buddhists, humanist Unitarians. When I eventually found my way back to the pews, I did so as a person willing to do the hard work of figuring out what I could believe. That hard work took me on a path to a faith that works for me, and that is the reason I find myself on this odd fork, the trajectory of human religion that is called the United Church of Christ, an intertwining of the Reform and the Lutheran with the quantum and a postmodern edge, all out on the limb of Christianity that is itself rooted in the Hebrew tradition. For the Hebrews were religious innovators, explorers in the thin places where humans encounter transcendence, where we make meaning, for religion is the practice of humans making meaning.
It was in the Hebrew story that I found a people willing to say that their kings were not gods, that any carved representation of God would be a lie and a fraud. It was the Hebrew people that slowly came to realize that the power behind all of creation was not a bunch of eternal and powerful super-humans bickering and fighting in human ways, wasn’t even the co-dependent and temperamental divine being they had originally conceived, but that God was actually creative and nurturing and, like a parent, one who could not stop loving us, even when providing guidance and boundaries. It was the Hebrew people that turned the traditional hospitality of the ancient Near East into a radical and inclusive welcome and call for justice. It was in that Hebrew narrative tradition that women’s voices kept breaking through, subverting the patriarchy.
It was in the context of the Hebrew tradition that God subverted the scapegoating that is as ancient as human community, our willingness to blame and destroy other humans for things they did not do, for while we were working so hard to justify our lashing out, acting on our fear, an innocent man hung on a cross, and in some way we will never completely understand, death could not defeat him, could not contain him.
And this messianic branch that shared a common trunk with the Rabbinic Judaism that was being formed at the exact same time would take the Hebrew idea that God was greater than kings, would take the mocking title placed above Jesus as he was executed by the Roman occupation, and would turn it into a bold assertion that Jesus was indeed the king, the Lord, for Lord means the one to whom we owe ultimate loyalty and obedience. Christ is not a name but is a title, meaning the anointed one, after the ancient practice of anointing kings. You’ll remember the anointing for the boy David a full millennia earlier. Calling Jesus the Christ, was to say he really was the king, though, for the record, his middle initial was not “H.”
This claim that Jesus was king was a radical act, was dangerous. When they said Jesus was “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” they were claiming titles that were assigned to caesar, and in so doing, announcing their treason against false gods and the state that used religion to feed the egos of the powerful. Once, far in their distant past, the Hebrews too had believed that there was a correlation between earthly power and divine blessing and that God was co-dependent and mercurial. But they’d moved past that.
In our sermon reading for this morning, from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, we land at about the midpoint of this theological construction project, six centuries before Jesus. The prophets warns that the people have abandoned Yahweh in pursuit of false gods, and that the king has embarked on a foreign policy that is, quite frankly, stupid, that the result is going to be disaster. But even in his fury, legendary enough to give us the word jeremiad, he also offers hope for the future. He says things are dire now, and cause and effect being what they are, bad things are going to happen, but God, that loving parent who never gives up on us, will see the bad shepherd now in charge of the people brought low, will dream a new and better shepherd into the future of this imperfect and sinful people.
And, as if on a movie screen, the kaleidoscope of history spools out before us, through destruction and exile, Roman occupation and the crucified and resurrected rabbi, through Rome and knights, Enlightenment and Industrialization, and finds us in central Europe, where the nation is so divided that two elections in a single year could not produce a functional government, so the president turned to a man who promised to make the nation glorious and triumphant. The rest is horrific history.
The 28 regional Protestant councils, gathered as the Evangelical Church Confederation, had watched as the role of institutional church in society slowly declined. Under the Weimar Republic, they had lost much of their power and official support. Budgets were stretched to the point of breaking.
There were plenty of people who claimed to be Christian and yet were completely aligned with the antisemitism, racism, and “leader principle,” or Führerprinzip of the rising National Socialist movement, ironic, since Nazi leaders were only interested in Christianity when it could be useful.
While Nazi Christian might seem an oxymoron to us, and the titled they actually used for themselves was “German Christian,” they were real. They were a loud and bullying minority within the church, and as is so often the case, the majority caved. They didn’t want to fight. The German Church willingly marched off into Nazi captivity, Bishop Ludwig Müller at Hitler’s side until the Führer had consolidated power and the church was no longer particularly useful.
It was only a small minority of Christians who resisted, who placed their lives at risk, who dared to say that God’s law was greater than any human law. While their colleagues allowed themselves to be co-opted, they actively resisted. Among that number were the theologians Karl Barth, Swiss but teaching in Germany, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A year after the church capitulated to a loud and racist minority, they issued a statement from the city of Barmen. Now known as the Barmen Declaration and primarily authored by Barth, it laid out the theological case against both the German Christians and the ease with which Germans accepted the Nazi totalitarian state.
Organized as six truths, it includes these statements:
“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”
“We reject the false doctrine that with human vainglory the Church could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of self-chosen desires, purposes and plans.”
The Barmen Declaration is still taught as a warning, can be found, among other places, on the website of the United Church of Christ, but apparently, some skipped that class in seminary. They are marching today’s church off into captivity.
The Barmen Declaration is a 20th century re-statement of that ancient radical Hebrew innovation. God is God. The king is not God. Caesar is not God. God will not be conformed to human agendas, will not be taken into captivity, no matter the errancy of religious leaders. Caligula could declare himself divine until the end of time, that depraved and cruel ruler, but that would not make it so anymore than declaring yourself the greatest artist God ever created makes you the greatest artist God ever created. Caligula and Kanye. They make quite a pair.
When it was all over, when the nation was rubble, when Bishop Müller and the Führer were among the suicides and the crematoria at Auschwitz had grown cold, people stood and wrung their hands and asked how it could have happened.
They were tired. They didn’t want to fight. Easier to keep their heads down and just get along. It wasn’t their problem.
That’s how it happened.
A domesticated Aryan Jesus is how it happened.
“Woe, negligent shepherds, who scatter the sheep of My flock,” says the Lord through the prophet. The Lord. The king. The one to whom we owe ultimate obedience, experienced by us in the improbable story of a rabbi who the state could not silence, despite torture and public execution.
We are tired. We don’t want to fight. Easier to keep our heads down and just get along. It isn’t our problem here in Sturgeon Bay.
And yet, God is God.
And so the Spirit moved, and faith leaders gathered, not in Barmen across the sea, but here, in the U.S. Twenty three of them, all well-known, the best known The Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church, whose sermon about love was heard around the world as he preached a high profile wedding. Our modern Barth is Jim Wallis, a longtime Christian leader who founded Sojourners in 1971. Like Curry, Wallis has an English connection, for his wife was one of the first women ordained in the Church of England, partly inspiring the comedy the “Vicar of Dibley.”
But there is nothing comedic about the work of Wallis, Curry, and the others. “Reclaiming Jesus,” as their declaration is known, is a declaration of resistance. It puts a target on their backs in these dangerous times, just as those faithful and brave Christians took up their cross in Germany in 1934.
Jesus is being held hostage by greed, hatred, racism. It is up to us to carry out the rescue mission. And for this gay boy from the South, even stripped of all the complicated theology of later centuries, restored to his rightful place in Palestine, one broken brown body among many broken brown bodies, it is a rescue mission I am willing to risk.
No private jet, no arena, yet he is still a better king than any I have every known.
Amen.