Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
There is this one version of Christian history where Jesus comes to establish a new religion, replacing the covenant with the Jews with a New Testament with the Gentiles, is executed as a divine plan to pay off a debt of honor to God the Father, and leaves Peter in charge after he, Jesus, is resurrected and bodily ascends into heaven, which is up. Well, at least up from Jerusalem.
In that story, Peter ends up in Rome, and ultimate earthly authority in matters of the only true faith has been passed down to Peter’s successors generation after generation for almost two thousand years.
In reality, papal infallibility was not the dogma of the Roman communion until the First Vatican Council issued “Pastor aeternus” in 1870. Yet, even in that tradition of authority, the work of an ecumenical council takes precedence over the declarations of a pope, as made clear by the fact that it was an ecumenical council that decided on papal infallibility.
There has only been one Catholic ecumenical council since 1870, the last century’s Vatican II, which was considered to have been the 21st such gathering. The breakaway Society of St. Pius X, which rejects the results of Vatican II, has once again faced a wave of excommunications in recent weeks, apostates in the eyes of Rome.
In most expressions of our Protestant faith, there has been no direct revelation, no direct infallible word from God, since John of Patmos recorded his fever-dream apocalypse on Patmos in the late First Century, and many of us find even that rather suspect.
Protestants do generally accept the work of pre-Reformation ecumenical councils, theological battles royale which gave us the orthodox definitions of things like the Trinity and the nature of Christ.
Papal infallibility may not work for Protestants, but deliberative bodies are okay. In fact, Protestantism is a product of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment leaned into the newly rediscovered ancient Greek practice of democracy.
One of the most radical expressions of faithful democracy, faithful direct democracy, is Congregationalism, and as I shared two weeks ago, many of our nation’s founders were Congregationalists.
The church often takes on the forms of the world, the monarchical church in the Middle Ages, the democratic church in the Enlightenment, and the corporate church today. But if we take the Acts of the Apostles seriously, early Christians did not, in fact, defer exclusively to Peter. They made decisions together.
We see, in the 15th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that Paul and Barnabas appeal to the elders and apostles in Jerusalem over requirements for the conversion of the Gentiles, and while Peter as well as James, the brother of Jesus, lead the discussion, the decision to authorize the missionary work was made democratically by the whole body. In fact, in the Christian testament description of those first communities, it is clear that they operated as mini-social democracies, in their decision making and in their economic practice.
Which is all a very long-winded way to say that democracy isn’t just a core value in our own peculiar Congregationalist trajectory. We believe it is historic and central to Christian practice itself. It centers humility and community. It is how we operate this church and how all churches should operate, not only the best way to make decisions but also a safeguard against the abuse of power.
The thing is, democracy depends on well-informed people who can articulate what they believe and why they believe it, can be open to hearing what others believe and why they believe it, and can keep covenant with one another, even when they disagree with the final decision. And that can feel a bit utopian at times because, well… people.
The church still suffers those who threaten to take their marbles and go home when they do not get their way, still deals with church bullies and cliques and parking lot gossip.
We aspire to a way of living together in a changing world that requires education, the reason the oligarchs have worked so hard since the start of this century to de-fund and deny education at every level, to suck public funds into private enterprise. “No child left behind” has left all but the elite behind, along with the civic education neglected by standardized testing. Never mind the shift from higher education grants to backbreaking loans, and now, artificial intelligence and algorithms making everyone dumber by the hour.
Of course, education should not end with the completion of formal schooling. The world constantly changes. Evolution, through both competition and cooperation, is hard-wired into the system, and that does not just mean biology and reproduction. Creation is change. Adapt or die, physically, socially, intellectually..
Sadly, many do stop learning altogether when they leave school, and even those of us who still love to learn can barely find the time anymore as we try to live through the enshittification of society in the 21st century, an endless queue of “Press 1,” “We’ve sent you an authentication code,” and “Did you know you can complete this transaction online?”
Which brings me to the alternative saint we celebrate today and the prophetic role of those who report the truth, from the documentarians who make the Meaningful Movies we show here at The Park Church to the local reporters who try to keep the public informed. At least what is left of them in the carnage left by the Internet, Rupert Murdoch, and social media.
About a century ago, post-modernism arrived as an eager passenger on the train of quantum physics. It informed us, like Einstein, that your position relative to an object matters.
Post-modernism opened the door for a number of other social and intellectual developments, post-colonialism, first and second wave feminism, and even the honest re-framing of our American story, an openness to the truths of others.
Unfortunately, that openness has gone so far that some have decided all truth is relative, the “truthiness” mocked by Stephen Colbert.
Quantum relativity, quantum uncertainty, might work for an imaginary cat in an imaginary box, might work at the subatomic level. Some things are simply not quantum, not relative, just true. Or just false.
Vaccines do not cause autism. Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. We are not drowning in Thetans released when Xenu the Intergalactic Dictator blew them all up with atomic bombs on an ancient planet we now call Earth. We are not going to run out of wind if we use wind energy.
Truth matters, the truths of science, the truths of history, the truths of good journalism.
The truth of a courageous woman born into slavery who learned and worked and became a publisher, an investigative journalist, and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, though she was left of the founders list, not surprisingly.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is best remembered today for her work documenting lynching, the extrajudicial murder of Black Americans, mostly men, often on false charges, the mob lynching not only about what the victims may or may not have actually done, but meant to make clear that white people could do almost anything to black people with impunity.
The lynching tree was simply one more iteration of the crosses that once stood throughout the Roman empire, a warning to slaves and insurrectionists.
Lynchings were all too often fueled by the lie that black men were primitive, little more than beasts, and particularly attracted to white women, the same lie that would kill 14 year-old Emmett Till in 1955.
It was this lie that Wells countered with the truth in 1892 when she wrote an editorial in the newspaper she co-owned in Memphis, The Free Speech and Headlight. She wrote of a wrongful conviction in Ohio, including the line “If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”
The white-owned morning newspaper, the Daily Commercial, wrote an editorial in response that inflamed passions. Also white-owned, the Evening Scimitar went further, editorializing:
“If the Negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Streets, brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”
A white mob destroyed the offices of the paper and brutalized Wells’ co-owners and investors. Wells, who was in Manhattan at the time, never returned, and the paper was never restored, Black journalism in Memphis was lynched as surely as “Strange Fruit” hung from trees throughout the South, as the Jewish teacher Abel Meeropol would write in the bitter anti-lynching anthem, as Billie Holiday would make famous a few years later.
It was an elderly Frederick Douglass who wrote to Wells in praise of her work, published in her second major volume documenting lynching, The Red Record. Her reporting produced no major reforms in the South, where lynching often served an economic purpose, choking off Black enterprise, but she gained a powerful reputation in the North, and especially in Britain.
Not surprisingly, the emerging generation of Black male leaders, men like W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, considered this influential woman too radical. She was a prominent Black suffragist, which brought her into conflict with white suffragists as was all too often the case. She continued to pursue social justice both as a journalist and as an advocate through the 1920’s, with involvement in the single-tax movement and organized labor.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett died of natural causes in 1931. It would take forty years before her autobiography was published, reminding a later generation of the power of journalism, the power of documentation.
As we are reminded in this time when democracy is under daily assault, a free press is the greatest threat to those who would brutalize and oppress, from the lynch mob to the masked murderers of ICE. Truth matters.
The truth matters, in our lifetimes from Watergate to #MeToo. It matters in scripture, the word appearing hundreds of times, depending on how you translate ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek words and concepts into contemporary English.
Scripture tells us that grace and truth come through Jesus, and the Devil is called the “Father of Lies.” The prophet Nathan confronts King David with the truth. The prophet Elijah confronts King Ahab with the truth. The reporter’s job is the truth, even when that truth is unsettling.
Learning, reporting, knowledge are the keys to good decision making, for yourself, for this democratic faith we choose. As the followers of Jesus would say, as the Mandalorians would say, “This is the Way.” Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
A footnote to today’s sermon. Abel Meeropol, the songwriter for the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit,” along with his wife Anne, raised Michael and Robby Rosenberg after their parents, Ethel and Julius, were executed on espionage charges during the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950’s.
Let us pray.
God of Truth and Light,
we pray for the family and colleagues of Shireen Abu Akleh,
a veteran reporter murdered by Israeli Defense Forces in 2022
for covering the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank,
for all reporters targeted and tortured
by war criminals
and by small town sheriffs
in America’s midwest,
by our own despot
as he intimidates corporate media,
forces truth-tellers off the air.
We pray for public television
and public radio
that they might survive until democracy is restored.
We pray for ourselves,
that we might remember our role,
to be just skeptical enough
to check sources,
curious enough to know that we don’t know.
Jesus spoke of truth and light,
calling his followers a light for the world,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father