Friday marked a year as pastor and teacher here at the Park Church. It has been a good year, but then again, I have a pretty low bar. I mean, no one has stood up during “joys and concerns” to deliver a full length rebuttal to the sermon, and no council member has threatened to punch me, both things that have actually happened.
Still, there is no course in Divinity School on preaching into catastrophe. And make no mistake, we are in the middle of catastrophe, a plague that has killed millions, a war between nations in Europe, and the collapse of our democracy.
But let’s start with the text, an Aramean general sent to the northern kingdom of Israel for a cure. Those pastors who actually preach the text this morning, those preachers who do not opt for the idolatry of religious nationalism, will likely approach this text as a lesson in the power of faith, even when such faith seems unreasonable. But, you know, that’s just not me.
You will notice that the text includes abduction and slavery. There is nothing negative about abduction of slavery in the text. They are givens in the ancient world. Yes, the Exodus story is one of liberation for the Hebrew slaves, but we are to read that as liberation for the Hebrews specifically, for a people that convinced themselves that they were specially chosen by either the only God, if you lean into monotheism, or the chief God, if you accept the widespread belief of the time. We are not meant to read this as a condemnation of slavery generally, for it continued to be practiced throughout the entire biblical age. There are rules about how to treat slaves in scripture. Paul accepts slavery as a given, and his letter to Philemon was read well into the 19th century as endorsing the practice. Of course, tradition tells us Paul also thought his Roman citizenship would protect him, and if we are to believe tradition, that didn’t work out the way he expected.
Few openly seek biblical-style slavery in today’s world. Most of us understand that this was a practice of our barbarous ancestors. Yet there are those who seek to enforce other primitive beliefs and regimes in our world. Not only has the Supreme Court stripped women of control over their own bodies, retracting a civil liberty for the first time in American history, but Clarence Thomas opened the door and Texas Republicans are moving ahead with efforts not only to overthrow marriage equality, but also to reintroduce the barbaric sodomy laws that were used to terrorize the LGBTQ+ community for generations. And one of the chief funders of this evil is a gay billionaire, because billionaires are only loyal to other billionaires and their own money, never to God, never to country. But Peter Thiel is not alone in his evil. In fact, the petro-trafficking Koch brothers have been working to undermine our American democracy for decades, using a radicalized minority of Evangelicals as their instrument.
And that group made clear with the Gingrich revolution of 1994 that they were willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way, to force their theocracy on the American people. When I warned friends in 2016 that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, people snickered. When I warned that he could win the general election, people told me I was wrong. When I warned what might happen when he took office, people told me that the office would temper him. When the office did not temper him, and I warned of a threat to our democracy itself, I was told the institution was strong. Yet here we are, with a radical minority imposing its hate-filled will on a tolerant majority and a Supreme Court that has promised in the next term to overthrow our republic.
In 2018, a student at the local high school where I was serving in Maine swapped the Trump flag on his pick-up truck for a white supremacy symbol, which was proudly displayed in the school parking lot. When I called this out, to the school administration, to my congregation, and to the small community, I was chastised. How dare I victimize that poor teenage racist! Those gaslighting me were not ethno-nationalists. They were white progressives and moderates. And while this was before a teenage racist shot up the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, it was after a teenage racist had shot up Mother Emmanuel in Charleston.
What happens when you play by a set of rules the other side ignores? You lose. And while you might be able to sleep at night, I can’t, because there is a family trying to do their best for their transgender kid in Texas that are getting a knock on the door, and there is a young woman in Missouri who deleted her period tracker on her iPhone but still can’t sleep worrying that her data will reveal that she had an abortion across the state line in Illinois, worry that she will get a knock on the door.
A knock like the one that happened at Prinsengracht 263 on the morning of August 4, 1944, a raid that led to the arrest of Anne Frank and others hidden in the secret annex there.
That raid has been in the news again lately. Rosemary Sullivan has released a book based on the work of a recent investigation to determine who betrayed the Jews hiding in the secret annex. The investigation included a Dutch filmmaker and a retired FBI agent. Their conclusion has ignited a firestorm, for they believe the traitor was none other than Arnold van den Bergh, a wealthy leader of the Jewish Council. Some historians question that conclusion, some Jews are furious that anyone would dare suggest one Jew would sell out another, and of course, with so many documents still missing and so many participants long dead, we may never know for sure who the informant was.
But we know this: Amsterdam’s Jewish Council decided they could minimize the damage by cooperating with the Nazis. They handled the distribution of the yellow stars. They helped manage the list of those being sent by train to the Nazi slave labor camps, though they would be accused of favoritism in this process after the war. Eventually, those trains would lead to the extermination camps.
The result? Of 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands at the start of the war, 101,000 would died in the concentration camps, the highest death rate in Western Europe.
When does cooperation become collusion?
During the life and ministry of Jesus, Palestine was an occupied country, ground down under the heel of Rome. The super rich, those serving on the Sanhedrin, chose to cooperate with the occupation. They played by the rules, for they were safe. So there were thousands starving, losing their land, rotting on a cross in public view. But they were safe, and after all, you can’t save everyone.
When does cooperation become collusion?
When does following rules that no longer apply become collusion?
When does denial become collusion?
I am not angry at the radicalized extremists in America’s Evangelical Taliban. They told us who they were and what they were willing to do long ago and, thanks to companies like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, they have the money to do it.
I am not angry at the billionaires who seek to bend our governance to their greed. They’ve always done this.
I am angry at those who in their comfort have refused to see what was absolutely plain. I am angry at those who have been gaslighting me and others who have been expressing our concern for years. Sometimes, the Wolf is real.
Our democracy cannot bear the weight of billionaires. Corporations are not people. This was never the land of the free, for at no point in our history have all of the people been free.
It wasn’t following the rules and cooperating when young black folk sat down at whites-only lunch counters. It wasn’t following the rules and cooperating when drag queens and trans folk refused to cooperate with the Public Morals Squad raid on the Stonewall Inn. It wasn’t following the rules and cooperating when good folks ran an underground railroad, to help African abductees escape slavery, to help American women receive reproductive care.
We all know the famous translated poem:
“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”
These were not the words of a lefty, a Jew, a member of the Roma people, some homo wearing a pink triangle. They are the words of a conservative Lutheran pastor who supported Hitler.
Will we honor our history here at the Park Church, the history of abolitionism? Will we work both to help those who are suffering in other states escape to freedom and to change the conditions that cause them to suffer?
Are we willing to break the law to do what is right, just as our ancestors violated the Fugitive Slave Act?
Are we ready to care about results? We may not be able to rescue Ukraine or overthrow the Texas Taliban, but we can certainly effect change in Elmira, not band-aids on a cancerous system but real change that looks like justice.
Are we ready for revolution?
What will we become together in my second year as your pastor and teacher?
Amen.