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Sunday, August 30, 2015 at Advent Lutheran Church in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. 14th. Sunday after Pentecost. Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.
QUESTION: 33 years ago, while serving at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Wauwatosa and in my first confirmation class, I believe we had some 18 to20 9th. Graders, one of the youth refused to be confirmed. His mother called me distraught because she thought that there was something deeply disturbing about this refusal.
I read her son’s Faith Statement and during the confirmation service I announced that all of the youth had written excellent faith statements but in my judgment the person who wrote the best paper will not be confirmed. He was sitting in the balcony during the service because he was also an accomplished musician, and I named him, and thanked him for his honesty and wisdom.
I recently found that paper written 33 years ago, and through the miracle of the Internet and Facebook re-connected with the author of this paper. At the end of my message I will tell you the rest of the story.
There is a lot of talk mostly within the fundamentalist evangelical community about how the Christian faith is being attacked by those murderous Muslims all around the world. That bothered me, and I began to do a little research on the subject.
Especially in light of recent events like the Oak Creek mass shooting in the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek. That was a Christian shooter who erroneously assumed that the Sikh’s were the same as Muslims.
On April 19, 1995 a self professed Bible believing Christian terrorist named Timothy McVey parked a truck filled with explosives in front of the Murrah Building that exploded killing 168 people including 19 children in the day care center housed there and leaving 684 others injured and 300 buildings in the area damaged.
I don’t recall anyone blaming the Christian faith for his actions. Timothy McVey never expressed remorse, in fact this is what he said during his trial:
“You can’t handle the truth. Because the truth is, I blew up the Murrah Building and isn’t it kind of scary that one man can wreak this kind of hell?”
The seeds of this so-called oppression of Christians most likely were sown during the Biblical period all the way back to the days of Jesus. Indeed he was wrongly convicted of sedition, a crime against Rome, and executed for it.
In part because of this it has been taught that the Romans were particularly brutal to Christians torturing them and throwing them to the lions. It appears the truth is that Romans, who were polytheists, that is believing in many gods, were actually quite tolerant of all religions.
What they could not allow was the Christian refusal to respect the proclaimed divinity of the emperor. Early Christians thought that it would be in conflict with their allegiance to the one holy God of the Bible. But in essence this was less a religious conflict than a political one.
Even Jesus understood this when he said;
“Render unto Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is God’s.”
But of course his followers just like us today did not understand what he meant. That one phrase by Jesus is for me one of the many reasons I so strongly believe in and support the complete separation of church and state.
During the last several weeks of this summer I have been talking about the tension that is between traditional Jewish religious teaching and Jesus’ interpretation of it. Jesus makes it abundantly clear that faith is not something that you believe, but rather something that you are.
How you live your life. How you treat other people. What you do with the material wealth God has given you. How you practice the Golden Rule and treat everyone with respect and kindness.
Instead of that for many religion became something that you simply believe and church something that you “join” like a club. Immediately you are set up for trouble because now you have them and us. The insiders and the outsiders. The accepted and the rejected.
It turns out that the Christians who ridiculously complain that they are oppressed, even here in America, perhaps should look at our own behavior before pointing fingers at others.
Polytheists like the Egyptians, the Romans and the Aztecs, even when they conquered huge empires did not try to convert their subjects. They did not send missionaries to foreign lands to spread the worship of Osiris, Jupiter or their Aztec god, and they certainly did not dispatch military power for that purpose.
The polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians in a period of 300 years. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
Here is just one example as recorded by Harari titled, A Brief History of Humankind:
“On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than 24 hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that the organized festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors). More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.”
I recently read a post by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong about hisown faith journey that helped me understand what the problem behind what I am talking about today might be. This is his faith statement as he says in four sentences:
1) God is not an external being, supernatural in power, but is the ‘Ground of Being.’ (The sum total of all reality)
2) The divinity of Christ can no longer be understood as God coming down from above, but as Jesus transcending all human boundaries and bringing the human into the experience of the divine. (Christ taught that God’s Spirit indwells all people)
3) Any church, which continues to violate the humanity of women, racial or ethnic minorities or gay and lesbian people does not understand the essence of the gospel. (All children of God are children of God, no exceptions)
4) Biblical literalism is a form of idolatry and is itself heresy. (Literalism worships the text of the Bible rather than the God the words are trying to describe)
This is what Max Day wrote to me when I contacted him on Facebook:
August 13th, 10:50am
Hello Pastor Kinens, What a pleasant surprise it is to hear from you. Of course I remember that. Well I guess I don't remember what I wrote exactly but that was one of the most significant events of my formative years. It cemented my commitment to integrity as a core value which I've strived to live by ever since. And of course, I've had to recount that moment many times when called upon to explain my religious identity. I also remember how you encouraged me to go out and explore different faith and spiritual traditions in my search for the answer of "what my faith means to me." I took that charge seriously and have spent countless hours exploring, studying, and meditating on the issue in the intervening years. I've often thought it would be nice to reconnect with you and revisit that conversation to report on my journey. Obviously that's not a discussion for a Facebook message, but perhaps someday we can pick it up again.. I have to say I'm surprised that you remembered that paper and kept it all these years. And I'm amazed that you thought so much of it that you would actually change your practice. That's certainly not something I would have hoped for or imagined possible. I am humbled, and grateful to you for sharing that. Thanks for reaching out. And all the best to you too! – Max Day
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