Luke 12:49-56
Humans move.
This basic concept, the reason our species spread beyond Africa and eventually mated with other species to create what we are today, a hybrid species, seems to escape many of our fellow Americans, every one themselves the result of migration.
While migration is a biological fact, the form of migration known as colonialism is a particular evil. It relies on the notion that some ethnic groups are superior and entitled, or worse still, that some individuals are superior and entitled, something that goes against the core values of multiple religious traditions, including Buddhism, Islam, and of course, Christianity, where we are taught that everyone is our neighbor.
Imperial Rome had a colonial system that in some ways foreshadowed what would develop in the 17th century, though the colonial enterprise in its racist form reached its zenith in the decades before the Second World War, when Britain and France led the world in the exploitation of overseas colonies and peoples, and the United States was managing its first significant overseas colonies in places like the Philippines.
Even at their worst, which was pretty bad, the crimes of the British and French overseas paled in comparison to Belgian King Leopold’s personal colony in the Congo, which he ruled as an absentee dictator from 1885 to 1908. The atrocities there prompted the Rev. George Washington Williams, a distinguished American of African descent, to use the term “crimes against humanity” in an 1890 letter to the U.S. Secretary of State. That term had first been used in December of the previous year by President Benjamin Harrison in speaking about the ongoing slave trade in Africa.
Though the international order after the Second World War, especially the formation of the United Nations, was intended to prevent future crimes against humanity, that system failed, and we see reports of atrocities and genocide daily, especially in places like Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan.
The Book of Joshua in the Jewish Scripture recounts and endorses crimes against humanity, specifically genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the Promised Land of the Exodus people and the location of today’s Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Scripture tells a tale of ethnic purity that is a complete fabrication, a lie exposed not only by archeology, but by the text itself. Today’s reading, from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, hints at the reality.
Ancient Israel was not a massive tribe that exclusively worshipped Yahweh, fleeing Egypt and replacing all prior residents of Canaan. That is a constructed identity, and like all ethnic identity stories, it contains a smattering of truth and a whole lot of not truth, a mix of crass propaganda and wishful thinking.
Jeremiah condemns prophets who seek to lure people away from the exclusive worship of Yahweh, comparing them to ancestors who worshipped Baal, an umbrella term that translates as “Lord,” and likely referred in this case to Hadad, the Canaanite storm god. It is worth noting that Hadad was not the chief of the Canaanite pantheon. That was El, whose name would be repurposed and commingled with Yahweh, the reason we have given names like Michael and Rachel today.
The truth is, things like child sacrifice and Baal worship never really went away. There were always people worshipping the wrong thing, at least the wrong thing from the perspective of the ethical monotheism we have inherited.
The Rev. Dr. King was a modern day prophet though not quite as pessimistic as Jeremiah. In his Epistle from the Birmingham Jail, he addresses white clergy and the white church, accusing them of worshipping the wrong thing, the status quo and the power structure of the local community. He compares this to the early church, which he identifies not as a thermometer which simply reads the current temperature, but as a thermostat that initiates a change in the current temperature.
That is still a helpful image six decades later. Let the church be a thermostat, not a thermometer, when it comes to morals, culture, and politics.
Which brings us, by winding paths, to today’s gospel reading. As folks who’ve been in these pews know, I despise wimpy Jesus. You know exactly the character, blue eyes and salon shampoo hair in a white robe right out of a Clorax ad surrounded by lambs and children.
It is not that Jesus was never around lambs and children, though this is the only image America’s oligarchs can tolerate. Neither the cleanliness nor the whiteness are realistic, for the robe or the person. Jesus would be deemed a person of color today, rounded up by the jackboots of ICE, our modern-day Gestapo.
Stephen Prothero, author of the 1994 book “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became an American Icon,” said in an interview that same year that “The flexibility of our Jesus is unprecedented. There’s a Gumbylike quality to Jesus in the United States.”
Prothero is right about the ways Jesus has been reconstructed by the American church as an embodiment of its own value system rather than the church being conformed to Christ, as it should be. American Jesus is a Capitalist and a Social Darwinist, perfectly willing to allow the poor to die as unfit for living. Prothero errs in thinking that the grotesque of Jesus worshipped in America is somehow unique. Those with power have been enlisting Jesus in their crusades since the Edict of Milan in 313 C.E.
Wimpy Jesus is not historically accurate, for Rome had no need to crucify wimps in public displays of brutality. Jesus, Capitalist and Social Darwinist is not right, the latter being especially offensive and the opposite of everything recorded in the gospel. Needless to say, the Jesus preached by Paula White and other sycophants in the Trump cult is an abomination.
The real Jesus, the one that threatened the privilege of the elite on Jerusalem’s Jewish Council, that was a potential inconvenience to Rome, was demanding and damning, expecting more from his sisters and brothers in faith, not just checking the boxes, but living the life.
He demanded that followers be born again into a new way of being in the world, what they would simply call The Way, for it was about how to live love into the world, love for God, love for your neighbor, love for the least among us, love for the sinners, the ones out there and the ones in here.
And while he was at it, Jesus expected more from God than the transactional deity sometimes found in the Tanakh. He leaned into the trajectory we have been exploring in the prophets in recent weeks, not divine violence, but the power of holy non-violence.
Let us not cast God or Jesus back into the category of the irrelevant and passive, as so many vocal Christians do. Disrupting the stone carry mob was active resistance. Healing on the sabbath was active resistance. Flipping over the tables of those who would exploit was active resistance. Even telling people to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s was subversive and resistant, for what exactly is not God’s?
It is a powerful and scary thing, this way of Jesus, this dabbling in holiness. We have been dulled and made comfortable, so many of us, by our privilege. We have lost our edge, and allowed the mantle of Christ to be claimed by the mis-guided and sin-sick wrapped in a flag that they turned into an idol long before they fell under the sway of a charismatic psychopath.
Annie Dillard famously wrote:
“Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”
This is the sort of power in the message, a message that breaks open our hearts made hard by transferred trauma, made hard by our own suffering as self-aware and finite beings.
Breaking open our hearts, like splitting the atom, unleashes unimaginable power, the holy already in you, that flows through the world as Spirit.
It is a power that confronts, that gets you nailed to a cross, for as long as we who follow Jesus, resist injustice, and name the sin and evil in the world, those who anesthetize themselves with privilege will seek to protect it, with their perversion of the gospel and their attempts to sanctify their violence.
In today’s reading from the gospel portion of Luke-Acts, Jesus makes clear that his message will be divisive. Sadly, it is our own humility that puts us on the losing side again and again, not because love is weak and losing, but because arrogance is loud.
We must be willing to speak truth, the truth that most of America’s so-called Christians worship an idol of their own construction, are deep in sin, that Paula White and Franklin Graham are not only wrong, they are false prophets leading others astray, worthy of condemnation by modern day Jeremiahs.
Let us be hammer and fire. Let us make love loud. We are on a rescue mission. We dare not tarry, for lives are being lost. Amen.