Lenten Sermon: Mark 8:31-38 in 2018

Mark 8:31-38

Three little gospel nuggets.

1.       You can talk yourself into defeat, or you can talk yourself into victory. When you speak to yourself the right way, strength, courage, vision and healing come.

2.       We have authority as believers in Christ to bring heaven’s will to earth by acting in partnership with God…What He allows or disallows—is all that we can allow or disallow here in the earth.

3.       You will only increase when you stop being stingy and release - There is a blessing in the release. Stop keeping your gifts to yourself! He gifted you so that you could provoke somebody else!

Joel Osteen.

Joyce Meyer.

T. D. Jakes.

Snapshots in messianic dreaming, Twitter style. American style.

Messianic dreaming. The idea that God will break into human affairs and make things right. Pain and wickedness will pass away. God will exercise authority over all things. It will work out.

Mix in a little American consumerism, and messianic dreaming turns out well for us. By us, I mean me. Our you (individual name). Or you (individual name). Or you (individual name). You can talk yourself into victory. You have authority to bring heaven on earth. You will increase. God can break in and make it all work out – with a little pinch of consumerist positivity – for you.

Thank you, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and T. D. Jakes, for making this all so clear. Messianic dreaming.

                So Peter calls Jesus aside. It’s what you do when you don’t want to embarrass somebody. You don’t correct them in front of everyone. You take a quiet minute, and you set them straight. It’s what David Mellott would do.

                For if ever there were a time for messianic dreaming, it would be right now. Pick your threat. Just pick one. It’s always the right time for messianic dreaming. You could be in a Syrian city, huddling cold and hungry with your children, and wondering why God doesn’t stop the shelling. You could be a student from Parkland, Florida, wondering why powerful men and women – who have never looked at a loaded gun from the wrong end – wondering how long they can evade your questions. You could live at low altitude, wondering what will happen to your livelihood when the rising salt water makes farming impossible – knowing people who matter don’t care, and wondering what kind of life your kids will have if you migrate. You could be the parent of a black or brown or Jewish child, seeing the rise in racial harassment in our public schools, and wonder why God won’t turn this country around. You could be pretty much anywhere, pick your threat, and wonder why God’s healing has not arrived.

                You could pull Jesus aside, couldn’t you, and maybe correct him? If you let your emotions out, come on now, you might just scold Jesus. Because as a messiah, as a messiah… let’s just hope Jesus has some time before the messianic evaluation forms are due. It’s only compassionate to tell him now. Because he seems to have misread the job description.

                Maybe Peter could go nicer on Jesus, but Peter tries to be kind. At least he pulls Jesus aside.

                Jesus does not save us by jumping in on our behalf. He will not save us by taking our place, even on the cross. He saves us by coming in alongside us. By becoming one of us, entering the fullness of human reality, by becoming vulnerable to growing, to grieving, to wondering – not instead of us, but right alongside of us.

                This is how Jesus answers Peter’s messianic fantasy. We may share in Jesus’ journey. We may walk the road with him. We will face opposition alongside him. We will learn the way of the cross. We hand over our deeds to our own lives.

                This gospel does not dominate the airwaves. It won’t sell many books. Those who proclaim it probably won’t need insurance for their private jets. Messianic dreaming sells. Christ-like living might not. Jesus’ gospel is poor marketing.

                Let’s face it… we’d rather not buy it, either. Or have to sell it.

               

These days, there’s no need for heroes. The kids from Parkland, Florida, like Emma González and David Hogg, staring down the emissaries of hate with clarity and truth, those young people are true heroes. Thank God for them. But we do not need them to take our place in the work of grace and justice. We need Jesus to walk alongside us, as we walk with one another.

                We don’t need another moment, another crisis either. We don’t have to look back to Fanny Lou Hamer, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Daniel Berrigan – as if the days of dangerous witness have passed. Bishops and pastors are calling in. Right now, if we are fully engaged in ministry. Right now, if we speak of Syrian children as fellow human beings in need of shelter; right now, if we cry out for the need to invest in the health and education of poor children; right now, if we confront religious bigotry and dismissive racism, believe me (WINK), right now we won’t have to look for another moment. People will push us, “Pastor, just preach the gospel.” They will demand our silence. They will threaten our jobs.  

                Someone might say, “That’s easy for you to say, Greg. You’re a professor. You have tenure. You actually benefit from speaking out.” I hope you say that. Because there is no more demanding call right now than to serve as a pastor, or as a chaplain, or as a religious educator, as an agent of change – there is no more demanding call than to be out there doing the work of justice and grace. You would be absolutely right.

                We all want heroes. But Jesus call disciples. He demands our lives.

                And the challenge – for Peter, for me, for all of us – the challenge is to believe Jesus. To trust that Jesus, and Jesus alone, will provide a life so much richer, much more vital, and far more abundant than the life we hand over.

                This is grace, this life. We cannot create it for ourselves. We cannot even choose it. But from time to time we do receive a brush-by, a glimpse, a taste of this life. I see how you look after one another. I see you driving one another to the doctor, bearing one another’s burdens.

                Teaching in an outlaw seminary, banned by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remarked: “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.”

                May I share an extended quote from Bonhoeffer, his last circular letter from the underground seminary?

A sort of joy exists that knows nothing at all of the heart’s pain, anguish, and dread; it does not last; it can only numb a person for the moment. The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye, but it finds life precisely within it.

                We live at a moment of intense corporate pain. Our society, once declaring itself a haven for displaced persons, now seeks out black and brown people to deport. It tells our children they need teachers carrying heat. More obviously than we could have imagined, it takes from the poor and gives to the rich. It tells us all to be bitter, fearful, materialistic, shallow, anything but free, anything but joyful. And in the face of this some preachers, SOME PREACHERS, preach the shallow joy that does not know pain.

                But we know a Savior who plumbs the depths of human anguish. We know a Savior who will walk alongside us in our pursuit of grace and justice. We know a Savior who agonized on the cross yet lives in resurrection glory. We know a Savior who, when we hand ourselves over to him, walks with us in joy. Amen.

White Evangelicals, Authoritarianism, and Trump

No man exercised greater influence on me than my grandfather. He died when I was twelve, several years before I came to a Christian confession of my own. Papa was a country Missionary Baptist, member of a church that had an outdoor pool in order to facilitate baptism in “living water.” I remember the quiet intensity of his praying and his faithful preparation every weekend to lead adult Sunday School.

Papa read a great deal despite his eighth grade education. Only recently did I come to understand why his education ended so early: just fourteen, he set out on his own after his mother suffered a mental health collapse that would leave her institutionalized for the rest of her life. I had all the information but never put it all together until my Mom shared the whole story. Compassion for my grandfather, dead over 50 years, moved me to weep for him.

Somehow Papa’s Bible fell to me after his death. Inside I found some study notes, along with a typewritten page of fundamentalist apologetics. You can find the story, marked “false” at Snopes.com, the internet fact-checker. As the story goes, NASA scientists once found themselves stumped by a missing day in their astronomical calculations. A Christian scientist resolved the problem by pointing them to Joshua 10:12-13. There God stops the movement of the sun and the moon – “about a whole day,” as the King James Version renders it – to allow the Israelites extra time to exterminate their enemies.

I suppose my grandfather treasured that story.

Our media teems with analyses of why white evangelicals support Donald Trump. Evangelicals have long touted “family values.” But in the 2016 election they favored a serial adulterer who has no firm connection to an actual congregation over a lifelong United Methodist, and they did so by an 80-16 margin. Some attribute white evangelical support for Trump to the racist disposition of many white voters, which indeed had a measurable impact on the election. Others point to policy issues, abortion and church-state relations, which surely influenced evangelical voters.

By no means am I competent to rank the reasons for white evangelical loyalty to Trump. Messiah College historian John Fea is indeed qualified, and his book on the question will show up this summer. I’m eager to read the book, but I’m also impatient. For now, we might ask what distinctive factors in evangelicals’ DNA might lead them to support an authoritarian candidate like Trump. And Trump was an authoritarian candidate. Saying “I alone can fix it,” and “I know more than the generals,” candidate Trump accused the news media of “fake news” encouraged his supporters to beat up protestors at his rallies, compared US intelligence agencies to Nazis, and attacked the credibility of a judge who happened to be Mexican-American. I would like to highlight a few dimensions of evangelical identity that surely predispose Christian conservatives to tolerate this kind of authoritarianism.

              
First, suspicion of expert opinion thrives among Christian conservatives. The fundamentalist movement emerged as a response to the twin threats of Darwin’s theory of evolution and critical biblical scholarship. Not only did fundamentalists lose the battle to control mainline Protestant denominations, they also lost public respectability. The Scopes Monkey Trial symbolizes their loss of esteem, leading to a broad cultural prejudice against religious conservatives as backwater rubes who oppose science and reason. For these reasons Christian conservatives crave public legitimacy. Alienated from higher education and other conventional sources of knowledge, fundamentalists have been quick to believe what their leaders tell them. Back in 1995 evangelical historian Mark Noll addressed this problem in his classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

                
Second, fundamentalists compensated for their cultural losses by creating alternative institutions, a world of their own. Christian schools, colleges, universities, seminaries, and publishing houses allowed fundamentalists to credential their own experts. Meanwhile, “evangelicals” emerged from the fringes of fundamentalism, establishing their own institutions. We might explain the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists in terms’ of evangelicals’ desire for greater integration into the broader society. But that boundary is remarkably porous.* If the Creation Museum may provoke general ridicule, the far more hip Museum of the Bible garners major media attention – but hardly of the flattering variety. Evangelicals and fundamentalists both tie themselves to the notion of biblical inerrancy – a commitment that inevitably leads to cultural conflict. Their institutions may look and feel different, but both groups find it necessary to guard their own sources of truth.

                
My grandfather’s NASA story shows how easily the combination of cultural marginalization and institutional protectionism render Christian conservatives especially susceptible to false narratives, whether actual “fake news” or authoritarian lies. Nine women may accuse senatorial candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, but true believers will believe neither them nor the media sources that report their stories. On a grander scale, most evangelicals reject contemporary climate science, perhaps in numbers large enough to tip the scale on US policy.

                
My grandfather died in 1978, just as the Moral Majority was gaining national prominence. Keen observers noted a shift in the fundamentalist ethos at that point. Christian conservatives began an effort to return from the cultural margins and exercise influence over the larger culture. Imitating pop culture, Christian music and film industries sprang up. Indeed, Christian filmmaking may be at its high point right now. Christian political influence ushered Ronald Reagan to the White House.

                
Few have paid it serious attention until recently, but within the Religious Right a new theological sensitivity emerged – dominionist theology. Dominionists teach that Christians should “take dominion” over culture, electing leaders and enacting laws according to their understanding of God’s will. In short, dominionism is thoroughly authoritarian. Most dominionists are not so extreme, but some preachers will call for the execution of gays and lesbians on biblical grounds. Dominionism represents an extreme form of evangelical authoritarianism, but its influence is growing.

                
Christian fundamentalism emerged as a response to cultural movements that undermined cherished Christian assumptions, especially those tied to the Bible’s literal and scientific accuracy. By rejecting widely accepted sources of knowledge, such as academia and the media, then by building their own sources of authority, Christian conservatives have grown more and more insular – more and more authoritarian. The ultimate expression of evangelical authoritarianism may lie in the home schooling movement. By removing children from the public schools, evangelicals can indoctrinate them in creationist science and theological dominionism. Indeed, Frank Schaeffer, one of the early and most influential home schooling advocates, has said as much. Now an atheist, Schaeffer writes that the home school movement was explicitly designed to “undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.”

                
If we take the long view, we should not be surprised that white evangelicals came to support Donald Trump in such large numbers. Trump favored their cherished policies, winning their sympathy despite his, um, complicated personal life. His authoritarian rhetoric troubled few religious conservatives, who are long accustomed to such discourse. And because they do not trust conventional experts and popular news media, evangelicals were ready to believe Trump suffered unfair attacks from the media. “Fake news,” indeed.

*Some readers will take exception to the ways in which I am blurring the categories of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. We may indeed distinguish between the two groups. Fundamentalists tend to hold narrower views concerning what might count for legitimate differences of opinion among Christians, and they generally voice a more negative view of the larger culture. Evangelicalism emerged as a moderating response to both tendencies. But if we pay close attention to how evangelicals and fundamentalists actually use these categories, the distinction all but vanishes. Conservative Christians call themselves evangelical when it favors them. This applies even when they believe women should submit to the leadership of men, oppose equal rights for LGBTQ persons, and believe that persons who do not confess Christ in the way they do are bound for hell. For these reasons I choose not to distinguish between the two groups. After all, 80 percent of “evangelicals” voted for Trump.