A New Spirit: 5 June 2022

You would have thought that America had enough on its mind in January of 1964. People were still grieving for JFK, white supremacists were ramping up their violence to combat the continuing Civil Rights movement, and the war in Vietnam was growing by the day. But culture warriors being what they are, what was on the mind of Indiana governor Matthew E. Welsh was the lyrics to Louie Louie. 

They made his ears tingle he said, and he determined that they were obscene. It didn’t help that the version climbing the pop charts featured the incomprehensible mumblings of Jack Ely fronting The Kingsmen.

Even the FBI got involved. In reality, the lyrics to the song were innocuous. Written in 1955 by Richard Berry, they told of a sailor returning home to his love in Jamaica. No obscenity.

It is not the worst case of a text being misunderstood, even of a song being misunderstood. Take, as another example, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” a 1986 hit by Timbuk 3. It became a prom theme, a graduation anthem, when it is actually about the risk, especially high back then, of nuclear annihilation, the bright future being an atom bomb. 

While that was the band’s biggest hit, they also recorded a song about marriage equality, “Legalize Our Love,” and a prescient takedown of white Christian nationalism, 1989’s “Standard White Jesus.”

And that is the Jesus I knew as a kid, the white guy with shampoo commercial hair and the creepy eyes that were looking at you no matter where you went in the room. If we’d done Mary in the Southern Baptist church, she’d have been pretty standard and white too, but we only acknowledged Mary at Christmas. Anything more was practically papist. 

God, of course, was also a white male, not only in appearance as rendered by Michelangelo, but also in attitude. In fact, and I’m sure this is just pure coincidence, but in that church where older white men had absolute power, God acted like an older white man with absolute power, an older white man with absolute power and a shocking fragility, for despite God’s supposed omnipotence, he was constantly offended that humans were not properly stroking his ego or following the rules he had implemented to micro-manage our lives. The culmination of his rage was the ultimate act of domestic violence, conspiracy to murder his only child.

Talk about misunderstanding a text. Geez.

Now if that version works for you, that god that small men created in their own image, great. Though if that version does work for you, I’m probably not the right pastor for you, for I find that God, angry and violent, disgusting and unworthy of my adoration and praise. That God is a monster, one that I abandoned long ago. No one should feel trapped in a relationship of violence and co-dependence.

It turns out, I am not alone. That God, who is somehow a product of an Ancient Near Eastern patriarchy and at the very same time a gun-toting white American capitalist, just doesn’t seem to be getting the ratings these days he used to get. And the version of Jesus that goes with that version of God ain’t doing so swell either.

The Jesus who came to pull off a few magic tricks then die on a cross doesn’t really interest me, but then again, I don’t have that much interest in playing the victim. Nor am I particularly interested in a Holy Spirit that is going to make me fall to the ground in spasms and mumble incomprehensible things like a latter-day Jack Ely singing Louie Louie.

As more and more wealth has accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, as the free market economy sought efficiency, which is code for the transfer of wealth to the super-rich, the rest of us found that we were working longer hours for more years and buying more stuff and still losing ground. Our declining situations and increasingly unattainable aspirations meant all social spaces began collapsing well before the turn of the century, from the Friday night bowling league to Sunday morning church, even before American Christians started looking like a Western Hemisphere Taliban. But the last few years have been especially devastating. 

The naked hypocrisy of embracing a leader with a history of sexual and financial misconduct, a racist who was lying if his lips were moving or fingers were tweeting, destroyed any remaining credibility of white evangelicals. They preached a suicidal anti-science message during the worst of the pandemic, preached insurrection from their pulpits, and are completely and absolutely obsessed with the LGBTQ+ community, convinced we are grooming their kids. 

If reading a book or watching a television program could change your sexuality or gender identity, I’d be straight, for that is all there was when I was a kid! 

As the popular meme goes, progressives aren’t trying to turn straight cis-gendered kids into LGBTQ+ kids. We’re just trying to keep them from turning LGBTQ+ kids into dead kids.

Of course, they seem pretty good at producing dead kids. Thank you Vladimir Putin and the NRA.

There might be room for dialogue and nuance on some of these issues, but you can’t have dialogue when the other side is screaming, and nuance goes out the window when you are being punched in the face.

As the conservative newspaper The Economist reports this week, the Southern Baptist movement, my childhood church and the largest white Christian nationalist denomination in the United States, reached a peak membership in 2006, and has been declining ever since, losing over a million members in just the last three years. And that was before the report that just came out detailing how the old white men in that church systematically covered up sexual abuse in their congregations, often by attacking the credibility of the victims.

Just as there have always been queers, has always been diversity in gender expression and affectional orientation, so there has always been diversity within Christianity. There was no such thing as one single way of being a good follower of the ancient Hebrew religion, no one way of being a good Rabbinic Jew, no one way of being a good Buddhist, no one way of being a patriotic American, and never, absolutely never, has there been one single way of following Jesus. Anybody who tells you that there is only one “right way” is telling you a lie, because we are all just making it up as we go along.

A thousand years ago, while Anselm of Canterbury was pushing a violent and vengeful god and Jesus as a slaughtered lamb blood sacrifice, Peter Abelard was offering an alternative, a Christianity defined not by the horror of the Cross but instead by the victory of Easter morning. 

While popes were building empires of gold, a military veteran named Francis, struggling with PTSD, was serving the most vulnerable. 

When kings and bishops were still doing combat over competing understandings of God, our ancestors were admitting that we had a lot to learn, that God was still speaking, and that our job was to keep listening.

Congregationalists were the first to ordain a formerly enslaved African-American. Southern Baptists still won’t let a woman lead. We’ve been ordaining women since 1853. While Evangelicals and the Roman Church are still preaching “love the sinner, hate the sin,” we’ve been ordaining openly LGBTQ+ folks since 1972, though of course, they’ve been ordaining gay men for centuries. 

We offer an extravagant welcome to the LGBTQ+ community, not tolerance but celebration. 

Most of us have found that not being racist is not enough when we live and benefit from centuries of systemic racism, that we must be actively anti-racist, that as the ancient formula goes, our sin is not just in what we have done but also in what we have failed to do, and we are determined to sin no more.

There is a new spirit blowing in Christianity. Another reformation is under way, the doors opened, and what was dark and dusty and smelled of death is being renewed, not by rejecting the world, not by turning our back on the diversity and beauty around us, the artistry and magic of that Divine Mystery we name as God, not by pouring our fear into the world, but by embracing diversity, embracing beauty, embracing God as we experience God in one another. It is a reformation of love and imagination and creativity.

It is the Spirit that brought Christians with open hearts and open minds to the table in Phoenix where they tried to articulate a shared experience of a Christianity that is alive and faithful, a series of affirmations that took the name of that city, and that are included in your Order of Service. 

While they are not binding, for we are not handcuffed by creeds, they are a beautiful articulation of who we might be. If you’d like to learn more about the affirmations, The Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes, a United Church of Christ colleague serving our sister church in Portland, Oregon, has written a helpful book sharing the title “The Phoenix Affirmations.”

The church that is in the pocket of rich and powerful men has never been the only church, and quite frankly, has never been worth saving, despite the power of its music and its art. For God’s Spirit has always been outside of institutional control, has erupted like a Pentecostal fire in the hearts and hands of the meek and those at the margins. It is the Spirit that acts up, the Spirit that resists.

Let us pray and act, that our bright future that requires shades might not be an atomic fireball or a planet on fire from human-caused climate catastrophe, but that our bright future might instead by an explosion of love and creativity in a billion colors, the powerful hum of a miracle planet, of all that is unique and creative and queer, of you, and of me, this day, fickle and finite flickers. This is us, in tears and fury and pride. Amen.