Why I'm Not Mad at Colin Kaepernick

There is a modern form of religious fervor known as nationalism.  It is a doctrine which holds that the place of one's birth deserves one's ultimate loyalty and devotion.  The cardinal virtue called forth by nationalism is patriotism, displayed through emotionally charged commitment to love nation and its symbols.  The liturgical practice of nationalism involves postures of reverence and obeisance to symbols such as the national flag, enthusiastic singing of hymns and anthems to the nation, and recitation of creeds such as the pledge of allegiance.

While standard Americanized Christian theology has found it easy to merge devotion to God and Country, my own understanding of following Jesus can't help finding contrasting and conflicting visions of the proper loyalties and loves required by nationalism and Christian faith.  The assumption that the modern fiction of borders should create divisions of ontological hostility--meaning that it is right for me to love and support people on my side of a border and wrong of me to equally love and support people on the other side of a border--contradicts most of what the New Testament teaches.  Moreover, adopting a stance of suspicion, fear, and animosity toward those across the border, which much nationalistic religion seems to affirm, requires a Christian to disavow the very virtues that the Lord exhibited and taught.

While Jesus observed among his closest followers a kind of ethnocentrism that is akin to nationalism, he took numerous opportunities to challenge their prejudices.  When they would have preferred to walk around the territory of Samaria, Jesus walked straight through it.  While they would have avoided talking with a Samaritan woman, he was direct and friendly in acknowledging the common humanity they shared.  While they would have denied sharing the good news of Jesus' transformative ministry among neighboring peoples, Jesus lampooned their views by first refusing the request of the Syro-Phoenecian woman, then granting it with compassion and respect for her faith.  There are other examples from Jesus' life and words, but let these suffice to point toward a refusal on Jesus' part to let human-constructed ethnic and national boundaries determine who we should and should not love.

In the New Testament Epistle to the Ephesians, a crucial text further addresses the ways that human beings divide themselves into antagonistic groups.  Ephesians 2:11-22 draws the focus upon the divisions that exist between Jews and Gentiles.  The writer asserts that in the work of Christ, those "who were once far off have been brought near."  The made-up and hyped-up reasons that would keep groups apart have become nothing.  Jesus "is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."  Whatever sorts of ethnic, linguistic, nationalistic barriers that human beings want to erect have been made irrelevant by the love of God in Jesus Christ.

The book of Ephesians is talking about ecclesiology, that is, about what the church is supposed to be.  When people become part of God's family, when they become part of one body, when they are joined together into the household of God, the other kinds of divisions take on a very different meaning.  They are no longer excuses for domination of some by others.  They cannot justify violent behavior; on the contrary, in Jesus' dying, he is, "putting to death that hostility."  They exist as the beautiful mosaic of divine blessing in the world:  not as reasons to resent and reject one another.

Thus, the church should not know boundaries.  If you are a brother or sister of mine, regardless of what political power wants to claim you within its borders, we are in the same church.  If you are my sister or brother, my duty is to care for you and seek your good.  Jesus has set out to "create in himself one humanity in place of the two, thus making peace."  A Christian church should know no nationalisms, no ethnocentrisms, no jingoisms.  When two modern nation-states enter into conflict and war, a faithful church would refuse to join that cause.  The loyalty of the church and its members should be transnational, because we are "no longer strangers and aliens," but one family.

A key difference between the demands of the calling of Christ and the demands of the calling to patriotic nationalism can be found in Jesus' own words in the Gospel of John 15:13.  "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."  Jesus' understanding of love, demonstrated in his own resistance to the empire and its oppression toward the poor and outcast, was to continue his resistance until he was arrested, tried, tortured, and executed as an enemy of the state.  He laid down his life.  Along the way, people suggested he should take up the sword, but he refused.

Here is the difference.  Nationalism asks me to be willing to lay down my life, but first it asks me to be willing to kill other people.  Being willing to die for one's friends is not the same as being willing to kill for national interest.  The religion of nationalism calls for a full sacrifice of one's life and of one's conscience and character.  As a follower of the Prince of Peace, I must not submit to a wholly contradictory vision of the world in which I am expected to be a killer. 

So for decades I have not offered anthemic devotion to country by singing "The Star Spangled Banner."  Nor have I made an idolatrous pledge of allegiance to affirm my ultimate loyalty to the god of nation and war.  A song which glorifies the technology of war and the steadily operating machinery of death asks me to turn from the way of Jesus.

Colin Kaepernick's reasoning is not the same as what I have offered so far.  He is not addressing a conflicting pair of faiths as I have described and advocating what I am--conscientious objection to war.  He is not directly questioning devotion to country as a high ideal.  Kaepernick is protesting for the sake of the high ideals of country--he is expressing a longing for the ideals to become reality.  He is asking for a nation of high ideals, such as equal justice before the law, equal opportunity, and due process of law, to live up to those ideals.  On these matters, I agree with him.  To refuse ultimate loyalty to the nation and to reject the religion of nationalism does not mean that I also reject any good that might rise from the political community of humanity here in the United States.  The ideals of justice, of equality, and of fairness are ideals I also hold.  I appreciate the good that I receive from being a citizen of this nation, and I long for the goodness to overcome the many ways this nation has fallen short of its ideals.  

This particular song upheld as the national anthem was originally written with multiple stanzas.  In public events, people sing only the first stanza.  There is a third stanza which has stirred significant controversy as historians have studied it.  It speaks of vengeance against the enemies, particularly those who as "hirelings and slaves" have spread their "foul footstep's pollution" on the "land of the free and the home of the brave."  Frances Scott Key was a slaveholder, and while fighting in a previous battle at Bladenburg, his troops faced and were defeated by the British who were employing escaped slaves to join in the war with the promise of emancipation.  Some historians argue that Key held a special resentment and hatred toward these slaves fighting for their freedom, which he expresses in this stanza.  Other historians dispute that conclusion, and Key recorded no commentary on the meaning or context of these particular words.  It seems to me to be a compelling argument, and it adds another reason to question the practice of singing such a song with patriotic fervor.

Political dissent is at the core of what it takes for human beings to do better toward one another.  People must be able to articulate and challenge the failures of society to live up to its ideals.  The often unspoken, yet original sin of racism and white supremacy continues to bear fruit of bitterness in the United States.  Challenging the ways that social behaviors fall short of moral aspirations is the duty of those who have eyes to see and a voice to speak.  There was a time in our family's life when my beloved Everly asked me the question that must not be so different from the one Colin Kapernick heard echoing in his own conscience:  "How will we explain our inaction to our children when they ask us why these things have happened in our community?"  The only answer we could have given would be that we had failed our morality, failed our conscience, failed our God.  So we did what we knew we had to do.

I am pretty sure Colin does not think his kneeling is going to suddenly make injustice go away.  But if no one asks the hard questions, demands a hearing, and ultimately enacts resistance in public, there will be no chance of seeing change come.  No doubt, he realizes as other who risk to take a stand against the dominant ways that more people will misunderstand and be hurt than will be awakened and inspired.  There really isn't any easy way to confront systemic injustice.  People will get angry.  They will accuse you of the opposite of what you are trying to do.  But in the words of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan,

You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk.
You may be the head of some big TV network.
You may be rich or poor; you may be blind or lame.
You may be living in another country under another name.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes you are.
You're gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

I pray for all of us that we can get clear on who it is we are going to serve.  As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.  Let me invite you to do the same.  I ain't mad with Colin Kaepernick. 
 

Not What You Show, But What You Sow

(Preached at Mount Level Missionary Baptist Church on July 4, 2010)

Galatians 6:7-16

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.  If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. 

So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.  So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

(See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!)

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised--only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.  Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh.

May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!

As for those who will follow this rule--peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

   

         When the Apostle Paul wrote to the churches in the Galatian region, he did not bother with many of the usual formalities and politeness.  It was not a model of careful diplomatic language geared to avoid insult or hurt feelings.  He starts out calling them deserters; then, he moves on to call down a curse from God.  He accuses them of being people pleasers.  After reminding them that he is not afraid to get all up on someone’s face, no matter what kind of big shot that person may be, the he calls them a bunch of fools who are acting like someone has cast a spell on them and turned them stupid.  And he does all of that by the first verse of the third chapter, in what we might call his introduction.  If a preacher had come and said that kind of stuff in her church, my momma would likely have said that she couldn’t believe he had the “gall” to talk that way.  I can hear the whispering as people leave the service, “Of all the nerve!”

         Apparently the Apostle Paul thought there was something seriously at stake in the problems the Galatian churches were struggling with.  Something was going on that could doom their whole existence as a church of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Somehow they had gotten off track so dangerously that they might end up on the wrong road.

         The symbolic issue at the center of the argument was circumcision. For Israel, the people of the covenant, circumcision was a central mark of their identity and faithfulness.  Paul, an heir of the covenant both by birth and by training, was among the circumcised.  Yet he had learned from the gospel of Jesus Christ that he was a chief among sinners, that his righteousness symbolized in his circumcision was as filthy rags when compared to the surpassing greatness of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.  He was struck down by the power of the gospel, shaken and awakened to the new creation revealed in the government-sanctioned murder of Jesus Christ.  The most pious of the circumcised plotted and shared the ugly deed of putting that kind and loving man to death, and this apostle had previously approved of their agenda one hundred percent.

         In chapter two he wrote of this new creation in words dear to many of us.  “For through works of the law, I died to the law, so that I might live to God.  I have been crucified (I have been executed) with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  (I in him, and he in me.)  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faithfulness to the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  In a new creation, all of us creatures take on a new identity.  Uniting with Jesus relocates our origin, our purpose, and our destiny in the story of God’s redeeming love.

In the new creation, our messed-up order and structures get replaced by a way we did not envision.  It is a way that does not legislate according to bloodline or property or skin color or language or pants or dresses or what is inside them.  Because of our baptism into Jesus, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female.”  In so many ways we try to make it seem that some are better than others, some more deserving, some more beautiful, some more inherently good, some more dignified, some more valuable.  We want to believe that something about us makes us superior and others inferior.  If we don’t feel comfortable just coming out and saying it, we figure out a way to say it in code.

In Galatia, the church people had let circumcision become a code for superiority.  In that kind of thinking, men who had obeyed the law to be circumcised had reached a higher level of being God’s people.  This focus on circumcision encoded all kinds of political structures into a distorted and perverted gospel.  Since it was primarily those born into Jewish families who would have been circumcised, the Galatian church politics divided them by nationality.  Greeks, who were unlikely to have been circumcised, could be seen as residing at a lower level of the faith. 

From Paul’s description, the fascination with circumcision as a sign of faithfulness in Galatian churches clearly was linked to status.  A group who had a reputation as “pillars of the church” were known as sticklers for the legalism when it came to the law.  When others were envious or overly impressed by these pillars, they aspired to be like them in order to share their rank or status.  If they could get the approval of the pillars, get accepted into the in-group, join the popular crowd, then people would look up to them, too.  The confusion brought on by such political thinking is that getting into the popular crowd means for some people that God ranks them above someone else.  They encoded status and rank onto circumcision.

Finally, because the law prescribed circumcision for males only, the politics of gender relations got mixed up in these churches.  As an aside, let me note that these cultures did not practice female genital mutilation, a tradition wrongly labeled as circumcision with very different effects on health and the quality of life.  The circumcision of which Paul is writing about was a mark on the flesh of a man.  Since they had encoded it with bloodline and rank, by implication women could not achieve the higher rank of the circumcised. 

I think Paul was right to see how the controversy over circumcision had become a ticking time bomb, ready to destroy the churches in Galatia, and perhaps elsewhere.  In the new creation, Paul had come to see that things like circumcision and its political meanings had been unmasked as mere showiness, smoke and mirrors, false pretenses of superiority or blessedness.  He wrote, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faithfulness working through love.”

That is why in this closing section of the letter, Paul has tried to sum it up by saying that it is not what you show, but what you sow.  Showing off your skin color, your language, your gender power, your conspicuous consumption, or even your pretentious piosity amounts to nothing.  Actually it is worse than nothing because it is a false gospel leading us to ruin and degradation.  Putting on a show of faith leads to a dead end.  As Jesus said, “Everyone who cries ‘Lord!  Lord!’ will not enter the Kingdom of God.”  The pretentious Pharisee did not leave his loud and self-important prayer justified.  By contrast, he widow who quietly deposited her two pennies gave the greatest offering, drawing forth praise from our Lord.  Paul was suspicious of people in the church “who were reputed to be pillars.”  He suspected that they went about their lives promoting the idea of their own piety and importance rather than giving the glory to God.

Paul was addressing a problem in his time in which circumcision had become a code word for claiming superiority in the eyes of God.  In our day, circumcision is not a very comfortable subject for polite conversation since it brings our attention to private matters concerning genital organs and painful surgery.  Frankly, circumcision is not something churches in our time and place get in big arguments about.  Maybe that means we can just put the Letter to the Galatians aside and not mess with it anymore.  In that case, I guess I must be finished.

Just kidding!  Although we may not be arguing about circumcision does not mean that we are not still finding coded ways of trying to prove ourselves superior to one another and create a false gospel.  What better day than July 4^th to talk about a false gospel?  Frederick Douglass famously called out the white folks in Rochester, NY, in 1852 when they invited him to be their Independence Day speaker.  He pointed out to them the way that the idea of independence and liberty had become empty code for white supremacy.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Douglass could see the idolatry that permeated the celebration of the 4^th.  The idea of the United States as the beacon of liberty and the hope for all the nations was an empty idol.  Salvation built on violent domination is a false gospel.

The Apostle Paul claimed that circumcision had become an idol.  Making a “good showing in the flesh” did not amount to anything else than a big show, just like an idol is nothing but a dressed-up piece of wood, metal, or clay.  Nowadays we make our own kinds of idols.  The flag can become an idol.  I first began to recognize this a twenty years ago when there was a public controversy about burning the flag.  Men who were usually stoically unemotional in church became agitated and passionate to the point of weeping over the flag.  More recently, a citizen questioned a presidential candidate’s loyalty to the nation based on whether the candidate made it a habit to wear a flag-shaped lapel pin.  Making a good showing of loyalty to the flag can easily come to substitute for true love of God.

But making a show will not cut it.  Paul says it is like sowing to your own flesh.  It will be good to remind ourselves what Paul means when he compares flesh and spirit.  “Flesh” here does not mean the body.  In this case, flesh means turning away from what God would have us do, as opposed to Spirit which means turning toward what God would have us do.  Sowing to the flesh is devoting ourselves to something less than God’s purposes for us. 

No national emblem, no nation-state and its pretensions as the means of human salvation, deserves our highest loyalty.  The United States of America cannot save us, nor can the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Liberia, or any other throne, dominion, principality or power.  No pumped up image of a nation can give us what we long for. 

Sowing to the Spirit, on the other hand, devoting our whole selves and highest loyalties to God and God’s purposes, will save us.  When we try to rise above others by claiming superiority over them, it is just an empty show.  When we sow to the Spirit we follow in the way of Jesus by bearing one another’s burdens, by not growing weary in doing what is right, by living in faithfulness that works itself out in love.  Instead of greed, licentiousness, hatred, dissension, jealousy, and factions, sowing to the Spirit replaces these vices with the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Trying to hide our unrighteousness and vice behind a code of self-importance will not make it anything else but filthy rags.  In our day, image has become everything.  Trademarks and brands sell an image as much as they sell a product.  People choose clothing that advertises a brand, announcing to the world, “I’m a Coca-Cola person.” Or I’m an Old Navy, or Abercrombee, or Hollister person.  I’m a Chevy or Ford or Honda person.  I’m an Eagle or an Aggie.  I’m for Duke or Carolina.  We secretly hope that by identifying with a brand we will prove ourselves better than others.  We hold contempt for those who will not come and try to be like us. 

So to be unamerican becomes a grave sin in the eyes of those who sow to the flesh.  Those who speak another language are looked upon with disdain.  Any other nation which would claim for itself a measure of autonomy and dignity that might raise the price of a gallon of gas becomes an enemy.  But “do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.”  Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.  Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  Violence begets violence in a never-ending chain of destruction.  Eventually, the chickens come home to roost.

On this day we may appropriately honor the good done by our foremothers and forefathers.  We may honor ideals of a people without putting our trust in nations and empires.  But more importantly, we may love one another, live in peace with one another, share the joy of human fellowship, be patient with one another’s shortcomings, show kindness rather than claiming superiority, continue doing good to one another without demanding a reward, be faithful to God when the going gets tough, be gentle rather than pushing and shoving our way around, and always keep from elevating ourselves into the place of God.  If we can continue in well-doing, in doing what is right, we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.

May our prayer today be the prayer of the Apostle Paul as he closed out his letter in his own handwriting.  “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”  In praying this prayer, we turn away from the enclosures of race, of nation, of language, of gender domination, and we open ourselves to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.  Following this rule, we promote the peace of God’s people and we allow ourselves to be united to, yea to be grafted into, the Israel of God, beyond all national borders and boundaries, the true humanity.  “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!”  It is the pearl of great price, worth all that we have.  May we sow our lives to the Spirit.  May the fruit of God’s Spirit grow in us.  Not what we show, but what we sow.

        

Can Anyone Listen to Jeremiah Wright?

I was listening to a reading of Acts 6:8-7:8, the story of the arrest of Stephen. It struck me that certain elements of this story are echoed in the recent public ridicule of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I am not saying it is an allegory with one-to-one correspondence of events. Certainly Wright has not been arrested, and he has not been executed. I'm not one to apply the term "crucifixion" to any kind of attack on a preacher--that is poor biblical interpretation, the wrong way to apply the identification of the disciple with Jesus.

Yet it still strikes me that there are similarities in the stories.

First, it was a concerted effort to discredit him. They took the opportunity to attack him by instigating people to distort what he had said. By doing this, they stirred up the people and various leaders to challenge him for claims that he did not make. I have for some time considered that the "high priests" of the religion of American consumer culture are the news anchors. They are the public face of the production of culture, of the propaganda machine of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. In the preaching of Jeremiah Wright, they saw an opportunity to stir people up. They knew they had a commodity that would sell, so they strategically used their resources to make the attack.

Second, they distorted his message. They said he spoke blasphemy against Moses and God. The attack on Jeremiah Wright, with modern technological sophistication, used video clips to make Wright's preaching into something it was not. No more nefarious example is the clip from a sermon in which he contrasted the blessing and the curse which God spoke through the prophets. It is a biblical message. It is applicable to all earthly principalities, thrones, dominions, and authorities that depart from the divinely ordered path. But they claim Wright is too harsh on America, that he is spouting hate toward America.

Third, they accused him of attacking the national icons, God, the law, and the house of worship. Wright's words of judgment on the U. S. imperial habits of violence and exploitation were taken as offense toward the god of national exceptionalism. The U. S., as the chosen people of god, is supposed by many chauvinists to be the true bearer of god's purposes in the world. Even many of those who would balk at such a claim, would still hold the U. S., its flag, its president, and its mythology of goodness in high esteem and despise those who would criticize their nation. These people do not understand biblical faith, so they refuse to accept that Wright was proclaiming a biblical message. Instead, they distort it to be an attack on all that is good about America.

Fourth, as Stephen begins to answer the charges, he goes back in history to talk about key events of the past in which God's work has been evident. But they don't like his account of history. Wright's critics say that he is still angry about events hundreds of years in the past. They say he should leave the past in the past and look at the present. They cry that the evils of the past are not our fault and irrelevant to today. But Wright insists that in looking at the past we understand the present better. Slavery has been outlawed, but its legacy remains. Saying it's over does not make that legacy disappear automatically.

Fifth, the story Stephen tells begins by talking about Abraham sojourning away from his home to a land where he has no possession. Then he goes on to talk about a people who become enslaved and mistreated for centuries. And he reminds them that God promised judgment on the nation who enslaved them. Now it is not the same story as that of Africans kidnapped, transported, and enslaved on a continent expropriated by Europeans. But there are similarities, and the recognition of God's judgment on a nation is very clear.

If there were to be an honest, listening conversation about the value of Jeremiah Wright's message to the contemporary U. S. society, then reflection on the Stephen story might offer a few insights into how an outspoken prophet from a minority group can be manipulated and ostracized.