Misogyny is a word that means exactly what you would expect given the root words, hatred of women. Anti-semite comes close, even though the root word, Semite, really covers a larger ethnographic group and includes Arabs. Islamophobia, fear of Islam and Muslims, parses well. Homophobia, not so much, because, those who hate and engage in violence against the LGBT community aren’t exactly afraid. Then there is racist, at one point the term was racialist, which kind of means nothing, but has come to mean the hatred of other humans based on physical and ethnic traits. Never mind that genetic research has proven that race itself is a human construct with no basis in science, for constructed or not, it is powerful and pernicious.
If you happen to be a racist or an anti-Semite, you might find yourself on a list put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an highly effective civil rights organization founded in 1971. The SPLC has won large judgments against groups like the White Aryan Resistance and the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and maintain a Hatewatch list, cataloging hate groups in our nation, a number that has surged since we elected our first African-American president. In recent years, the SPLC has expanded its focus to include those who, in their speech and teaching, promote discrimination and violence against the LGBT community.
There must be some threshold, some line in the eyes of the folks at SPLC, that one must cross to go from expressing deeply held religious belief to being a hate group, but whatever it is, the Family Research Council, and its leader, Tony Perkins, have crossed it.
You may not know Perkins, but you know his theology, one shared with the likes of the Falwells, the belief that God inflicts natural disasters on the sinful, which mostly these days means those who treat the LGBT community as beloved children of a living God. This isn’t our theology. Even if we accepted the selective literalism of fundamentalism, the puppet-master God inflicting disaster on guilty and innocent alike doesn’t jibe with our experience of beauty and love. Then there is that myth of Noah and the flood, the rainbow as a promise that God would never use a flood to punish the wicked again. But Perkins continues to preach this tired old theology, to see every disaster as an opportunity to scapegoat the LGBT community, a group Jesus would certainly call “the least of these.â€
I do not take pleasure, but do note the irony, when I tell you that during the recent flooding in Louisiana, Perkins’ home was underwater, he and his family rescued by boat. No doubt, I am partially to blame.
Perkins can find scriptural support for his position, for there was a time, a school of thought, in the evolving Hebrew faith that claimed our relationship with God was economic, an exchange. We pay God with obedience and honor, God gives us blessing in return.
The Hebrew people first began constructing their theology as refugees fleeing Egypt, borrowing a Midianite god and seeing that god as an agent of liberation. This Exodus journey is when they encountered snakes and creates the bronze snake on a pole. Eventually, under pressure from neighboring peoples, they consolidated under a warlord, and grew, for one brief century, into a powerful nation-state. Yahweh was no longer just a god of liberation, but also a nationalist god, one that promised them that their nation would last forever. This was the newly constructed theology of that age, one that went well with the royalist propaganda that God had selected the monarchs as well, and their house, too, would go on forever. Right up until it didn’t.
If they were God’s people and this was God’s nation-state, then how to explain the split into two nations, the collapse of first the northern kingdom and later, the southern kingdom, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple?
So they created a new theology. Since God could not fail or lie, then they must be the reason why things fell apart. Some prophets blamed it on the failure to remember God’s liberation, on the failure to do justice, to care for the vulnerable, to welcome the immigrant. Others blamed disaster on the failure to perform the proper rituals, on the worship of other gods. But the idea that the nation’s fate was God’s will took hold. When the Persian king, Cyrus, conquered the Babylonians and freed the Hebrew elite, some saw this too as God’s will, saw Cyrus as God’s agent, called him the messiah.
But there were already subversives arguing against collective guilt and collective punishment. The prophet-priest Ezekiel, writing from the Exile, tells them that God says this:
What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge� As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die.
Still economic, but not collective. Here we catch the prophet in the act, see the refurbishment of an old tired theology that no longer works. The old economic theology is weakening, and would be completely destroyed by Jesus, who is a prophet of grace, of divine forgiveness, of radical love, a prophet that shows that the most righteous can be brutally murdered and can defeat death itself, a prophet who sanctifies the instrument of torture, turning a symbol of brutality into a sign of hope.
This is the Judeo-Christian story, the story of a living faith in a living God, adapting and evolving. What makes people think that after a thousand years of adaptation, God would suddenly declare that nothing could ever change again, that God’s revelation to humankind stopped in 30 CE, or 400 CE, or with the Protestant Reformation, now 499 years old, or with the publication of the “Fundamentals,†a series of 90 essays beginning in 1910 that gave name to a growing Protestant conservatism, to a rigid and frozen faith?
The two movements that gave birth to Congregationalism, that form an important part of our United Church of Christ heritage, knew that God had not gone silent. They were radicals trying to figure out how to change society so that it was ordered on God’s Word. They did not believe in a privatized faith stuck in a box, walled off from daily life. The Puritans cut off the king’s head! Not a shining moment, I’ll grant you. But before that, the Pilgrims, first going to Holland to try to create a Christian society, then deciding to get on a boat and head to the fearsome wilderness of the New World. Those that departed received this Good News on the dock from John Robinson, who stayed behind to care for the flock at Leiden:
I charge you before God…that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveals anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth by my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.
Old language, yes, but a thought that is modern, is as true today as it was then, as it was for Jesus, for Ezekiel. More truth yet to break forth. Truth that chattel slavery was not God’s will, that people with origins in Africa were also God’s children. Truth that women were as capable as men of hearing God’s truth and speaking it into the world. Truth that God loves people no matter who they love or how they express their gender. Truth that a God who liberates and a Savior who cares about the least of these probably meant it, meant that we should feed the hungry, welcome the immigrant, do justice.
But we forgot. Once again, as happened in the past, the church started to focus less on God, less on the world, and more on the institution. We forgot that we are supposed to be changing the world, and attendance started to fall. In the midst of this decline, the United Church of Christ decided marketing was the answer, we just needed branding, a good pitch. They fell upon a simple campaign, God is Still Speaking, a campaign that was derided by some. But it turns out, that is exactly what John Robinson said 397 years ago. This is what puts the fire in the belly of a Pilgrim, of a Congregationalist, of a member of the United Church of Christ. This is why we walked with King and Chavez, why UCC churches march in Pride Parades, why we call out misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, nationalism, racism.
When I am sick, I want the latest medical thinking, not a snake on a pole. I want to benefit from the latest discoveries. Leeches and bleeding are not going to cure my hiatal hernia! I want my cell phone and Wikipedia, and to take a call from my kid sister when she is on her way to pick up my Lacrosse thug niece from practice. I want what is new in my life. And I want what is new in my theology.
That doesn’t mean throwing off everything ancient. Beer has been around for a very long time, and I still like that. Jesus told us that God will forgive our sins two thousand years ago, and I’m banking on the fact that he was right. But if we are to be faithful, we must change. Our beliefs must change, must evolve.
Struggling to find a way to capture our commitment to uncovering more truth and light, our assertion that God is still speaking, the United Church of Christ chose the term “Continuing Testament,†what we today regard as one of the three marks of our UCC faith. It is the belief that God didn’t fall silent the moment the last period was placed at the end of the final word in the New Testament, that our life together is a continuing testament. It is the belief that God is still speaking. And we, we beautiful, frustrating, amazing and fearful creatures that we are, we try, oh we try, to still be listening.
My prayer for you is that tomorrow you will not believe exactly what you believe today. That you will not believe exactly what I believe. That would will hear God in the wind, in the waves, in the laughter of a child and strumming of a guitar. That you will see God’s word turning on the potter’s wheel, and springing up in your garden. And that it will change you, forever.